Assertion is a speech act of an agent, a speaker. This topic belongs to pragmatics. But one can also speak of the assertoric force of a sentence, considered apart from a context of use. So considered, assertoric force is presumably an aspect of a sentence's semantics along with the sentence's content. That is what I want to think about in this entry. The assertoric force of a sentence is, as it were, a semantic correlate of the speech act of assertion. I cannot assert a sentence unless it is of the right grammatical form. I can assert 'Dan is drunk' but not 'Dan, be drunk!' or 'Is Dan drunk?' or 'Would that Dan were drunk.'
Suppose I assert that Dan is drunk. I do this by tokening the sentence type 'Dan is drunk.' The assertoric force of the tokened sentence type is indicated by 'is' which signals the indicative mood among other things. Now here is my question: Are indicative mood and assertoric force the same, or different? When I refer to the assertoric force of a sentence, am I referring to its indicativity, and vice versa? Or must we distinguish between indicativity and assertoric force? I will argue that they are the same property.
Consider this exchange between speakers A and B:
A: Peter is innocent.
B: (Ironically) Yeah, right. Peter is innocent.
Although both A and B are tokening 'Peter is innocent,' only A is asserting that Peter is innocent. Now the sentence type considered by itself is in the indicative mood. So I am tempted to say that assertoric force, as a semantic component, is identical to indicativity. Both tokens have assertoric force despite the fact that only one is asserted. Now consider this example:
1. If Peter is innocent, then his conviction is unjust.
To assert a conditional is not to assert its antecedent. (Or its consequent for that matter.) The antecedent, 'Peter is innocent,' is in the indicative mood. I want to say that it has assertoric force despite the fact that it is not being asserted.
What is assertoric force? I suggest that it is that property of a sentence that renders it capable of being used by an agent to say something either true or false. As far as I can see, it is the same as the property of indicativity. Sentences with assertoric force can be used without being asserted, but no sentence lacking assertoric force can be asserted. To say that a sentence is assertoric, or has assertoric force, is to say that it is of the appropriate form for the making of assertions.
Since assertoric force either is or is equivalent to the property of being either true or false, a sentence's being assertoric does not entail its being true. Nor, of course, does a sentence's being asserted by someone entail its being true. To assert a sentence is to assert it as being true, but that is not to say that an asserted sentence is true. Whatever truth is, it involves a relation to something external to sentences or propositions.
>>When I make an assertion, I do at least two things: I commit myself to the truth of what I assert, and I communicate the content of my assertion to a hearer.<<
We have discussed this a few times before. Your view, as I understand, is that the content is independent of the assertion, i.e. the content of the statement ‘grass is green’ and the question ‘is grass green?’ is the same. However in the first I ‘I commit myself to the truth of what I assert’, in the second I don’t.
Actually that’s not quite right. Clearly if you assert something, you ‘commit yourself to the truth of what you assert’, by having asserted it. You can’t assert it without asserting it as true. Of course you can utter a sentence without asserting it. For example, in ‘is it the case that grass is green?’ you have uttered the words ‘grass is green’. Is that what you meant?
Perhaps I haven’t understood. In any case, my view is different to yours: the assertion is always signified in some way. If I write ‘grass is pink??’, I am not asserting that grass is pink, I am questioning whether it is, and this is signified by the double question marks. If I utter this, I will intone the words in a way that is equivalent to the question marks. If (your example) I utter ‘Yeah, right. Peter is innocent’, the words ‘yeah right’ are the irony marks. It’s essentially no different from ‘it is not the case that Peter is innocent’, where the clause ‘Peter is innocent’ is attached to the negation sign ‘it is not the case that’.
So it's all to do with signs of various sorts. I utter a sentence and wink. The eye movement cancels the assertion. A stage is a sign that signifies that the people on it are actors.
I didn’t follow the part from ‘What is assertoric force?’ onwards.
Posted by: Ed from London | Tuesday, March 01, 2016 at 03:36 AM
Same also for "If Peter is innocent, then his conviction is unjust."
Assume this is equivalent to "it is not the case that Peter is innocent and his conviction is just."
Then the words 'it is not the case that' signify negation of the conjunction. Hence the conjunction is not asserted, nor are either of the conjuncts.
Posted by: London Ed | Tuesday, March 01, 2016 at 11:32 AM
New post here.
Posted by: Londiniensis | Thursday, March 03, 2016 at 02:50 AM