Literal Force: A Defence of Conventional Assertion

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to motivate and defend a conventional approach to assertion and other illocutionary acts.¹ Such an approach takes assertions, questions and orders to be moves within an essentially rule-governed activity similar to a game. The most controversial aspect of a conventional account of assertion is that according to it, for classifying an utterance as an assertion, question or command, ‘it is irrelevant what intentions the person speaking may have had’ (Dummett 1973, p. 302). I understand this to mean that it is irrelevant for the issue of whether an utterance is an assertion whether the utterer has certain communicative intentions, such as the intention to utter something true, the intention to get one’s audience to believe (that one believes) what one has asserted etc. Just as one can commit a foul in football without meaning to do so, one can make an assertion, issue a command or ask a question without meaning to do so. The rules of football specify that a certain form of conduct (tackling an opponent in a certain way), carried out under certain general conditions (being a member of a team engaged in a game of football) counts as committing a foul. Similarly, I claim, the rules of language specify that a certain form of conduct (uttering an assertoric sentence), carried out under certain general conditions (being a member of a speech community engaged in a conversation) counts as making an assertion.

But literal meaning may not (and in my view does not) go beyond truth conditions.

Donald Davidson (‘Communication and Convention’, p. 269)

Our difficulty arises from the fact that we have tried to characterize the activity of assertion without taking into account its being a conventional activity: the fact that a sentence expresses an act of assertion is as much a matter of linguistic convention as is its having the sense it has.

Michael Dummett (Frege: Philosophy of Language, p. 300.)