Assertion and its Social Significance

This special issue of RIFL investigates the speech act of assertion, with a focus on its role(s) and effects in our discursive practices and social relationships. Assertion is arguably the most studied speech act in philosophy of language and linguistics. It is the standard linguistic tool to share information and make claims about how things are. It is thus unsurprising that philosophers of language, together with epistemologists and scholars from other fields of research, put so much emphasis on it. To date, there is still much controversy about the nature of assertion (including its normative status, and how it differs from other illocutionary acts). Furthermore, scholars are becoming increasingly interested in the various ways in which assertions can convey truth-conditional content, such as implicatures and presuppositions, as well as evaluative and expressive meaning. In what follows, we will offer a brief introduction to some philosophical issues concerning assertion, presenting each contribution to the special issue within the context of the contemporary debate in which it intervenes. The present discussion is organised into three thematic sections. The first one focuses on the nature of assertion and the distinctive responsibilities it engenders. The second section considers the epistemic significance of assertion, exploring the role that assertion plays in the transmission of knowledge, the epistemic constraints that regulate it, and its relation with truth. The third section deals with communicative content that goes beyond what is literally asserted: implicatures, metaphors and expressive meaning.