Can fictions lie? According to a classic conception, works of fiction can never contain lies, since their content is not presented as true, nor is it meant to deceive us. But this classic view can be challenged. Sometimes fictions appear to make claims about the actual world, and these claims can be designed to convey falsehoods, historical misconceptions, and even pernicious stereotypes. Should we conclude that some fictional statements are lies? This article introduces two views that support a positive answer, (...) and two that support a negative one. After examining various ways in which fictions can deceive, it concludes in favour of the view that fictional statements can mislead, but never lie. (shrink)

Stipulation gives us a degree of control over meaning. By stipulating how I will use a term I am able to determine the meaning it will receive on future occasions of use. My stipulation will affect the truth conditional content of my future utterances. But the mechanisms of stipulation are mysterious. As Cappelen (2018) argues, meaning is typically determined in an inscrutable way by a myriad of external factors beyond our control. How does stipulation override these factors? And the powers (...) of stipulation are limited. Firstly, the power of stipulation is typically short-lived. Sec-ondly, some stipulations simply don’t get off the ground. What explains the limits of stipulation? I consider two related approaches to stipulation and argue that they are unable to capture stipulation’s metasemantic effects. I then provide an explanation of the metasemantic effects of stipulation: Stipulation determines meaning by determining the word use it is fitting to hold the speaker to. This account is able to capture the mechanisms and limits of stipulation, whilst also explaining why we should care about stip-ulative success. I close by briefly drawing out some lessons for conceptual engineering. -/- . (shrink)

According to an influential view, asserting a proposition involves undertaking some “commitment” to the truth of that proposition. But accounts of what it is for someone to be committed to the truth of a proposition are often vague or imprecise, and are rarely put to work to define assertion. This article aims to fill this gap. It offers a precise characterisation of assertoric commitment, and applies it to define assertion. On the proposed view, acquiring commitment is not sufficient for asserting: (...) To assert, commitment must be acquired by explicitly presenting a proposition as true. (shrink)

Asserting is the act of claiming that something is the case—for instance, that oranges are citruses, or that there is a traffic congestion on Brooklyn Bridge (at some time). We make assertions to share information, coordinate our actions, defend arguments, and communicate our beliefs and desires. Because of its central role in communication, assertion has been investigated in several disciplines. Linguists, philosophers of language, and logicians rely heavily on the notion of assertion in theorizing about meaning, truth and inference. -/- (...) The nature of assertion and its relation to other speech acts and linguistic phenomena (implicatures, presuppositions, etc.) have been subject to much controversy. This entry will situate assertion within speech act theory and pragmatics more generally, and then go on to present the current main accounts of assertion. (shrink)

An assertion is a speech act in which something is claimed to hold, e.g. that there are infinitely many prime numbers, or, with respect to some time t, that there is a traffic congestion on Brooklyn Bridge at t, or, of some person x with respect to some time t, that x has a tooth ache at t. The concept of assertion has often occupied a central place in the philosophy of language, since it is often thought that making assertions (...) is the use of language most crucial to linguistic meaning, and since assertions are the natural expressions of cognitive attitudes, and hence of importance for theories of knowledge and belief. (shrink)