A criticism is offered of the chief argument employed by Davidson to debunk the notion of “metaphorical meaning”, which exploits the static nature of standard truth-conditional semantics. We argue, first, that Davidson's argument fails, and go on to suggest, secondly, that truth-conditional semantics would profit if the static feature were abandoned and were replaced by a processual, dynamic conception of meaning. We try to show that this processual aspect can be captured without making the ensuing semantic theory open to the (...) charge of psychologism. (shrink)

Systematic theology regards revelation as a divine discourse between God and us. However, it seems that it does not fully explain how God’s divine discourse transforms our life and what implications it has. Therefore, this article suggests investigating ‘revelation as a discourse of language’ in the light of speech act theory. If we illuminate revelation as a discourse of language as a SAT, the following three hermeneutical contributions to revelation are expected: firstly, revelation is a ‘communicative act’ between God and (...) believer as a ‘discourse of language’ of God; secondly, it shows how the language of revelation bridges the gap between ‘divine language’ and ‘human language’ in terms of revelation as a discourse of language, and thirdly, it confirms how God’s Word is real in the lives of believers.Contribution: While this article engages the traditional theological notion of revelation as a discourse of language between God and humans, it argues that reconsidering this notion in the light of speech act theory. It can explain God’s language discourse transforms the lives of believers and the Word is fulfilled in their lives. (shrink)

This article aims to investigate the reasons that push an author to rewrite a great classic, if the motivation of marketing is not pertinent. In the rewriting practice there are works that arise from deeper expressive needs and it would be completely wrong to explain them through purely opportunistic reasons; in fact, it is possible that the author uses the mask of the well-known character to express, by rethinking it, some complex, unexpressed, uncomfortable or difficult aspects of himself or society. (...) We will try to show the plausibility of this hypothesis through the analysis of one of the most successful rewritings of the Liaisons Dangereuses by Laclos, Le Mauvais genre by Laurent de Graeve, trying at the same time to highlight one of the implications related to the connection between fiction and truth. (shrink)

I modify Grice's theory of conversational implicature so as to accommodate acts of implicating propositions by asking questions, acts of implicating questions by asserting propositions, and acts of implicating questions by asking questions. I describe the relations between a declarative sentence's semantic content (the proposition it semantically expresses), on the one hand, and the propositions that a speaker locutes, asserts, and implicates by uttering that sentence, on the other. I discuss analogous relations between an interrogative sentence's semantic content (the question (...) it semantically expresses), and the questions that a speaker locutes, asks, and implicates by uttering that sentence. (shrink)

Wedding vows seem to be promises. So they go: I promise to love, honour, and cherish .... But this poses a problem. Divorce is not widely seen as a serious moral wrong, but breaking a promise is. I first consider, and defend against preliminary objections, a ‘hard-line’ response: divorce is indeed prima facie impermissible promise-breaking. I next consider the ‘hardship’ response—the hardship of failed marriages overrides the prima facie duty to keep promises. However, this would release promisors in far too (...) many cases. I resolve the triad by considering the content of the vows. Vows concerning love are not promises at all. We cannot promise to do acts the performance of which is outside our control, and love involves states of mind outside our control. Vows concerning spousal roles are complicated by diverse social understandings of marriage and the centrality of emotion to the roles. (shrink)

Volume 6, Issue 3, September 2015, Page 246-264.

What individuates the speech act of prediction? The standard view is that prediction is individuated by the fact that it is the unique speech act that requires future-directed content. We argue against this view and two successor views. We then lay out several other potential strategies for individuating prediction, including the sort of view we favor. We suggest that prediction is individuated normatively and has a special connection to the epistemic standards of expectation. In the process, we advocate some constraints (...) that we think a good theory of prediction should respect. (shrink)

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

: In this paper I argue that there is a very important, though often neglected, dissimilarity between the two Gricean conceptions of ‘what is said’: the one presented in his William James Lectures and the one sketched in the ‘Retrospective Epilogue’ to his book Studies in the Way of Words. The main problem lies with the idea of speakers' commitment to what they say and how this is to be related to the conventional, or standard, meaning of the sentences uttered (...) in the act of saying. Since the later notion of ‘what is said’, or ‘dictiveness’, is claimed to be logically independent from ‘formality’ (roughly, conventional meaning), Grice seems to maintain that there are cases in which content that is not expressed by a sentence in a context may nevertheless count as what is said. I propose an account of what is said that brings together the two apparently irreconcilable approaches. The price to be paid for a Gricean, however, is to accept a duality of behaviour between (natural language counterparts of) logical constants and logical variables. (shrink)

This essay is a sustained attempt to bring new light to some of the perennial problems in philosophy of mind surrounding phenomenal consciousness and introspection through developing an account of sensory and phenomenal concepts. Building on the information-theoretic framework of Dretske (1981), we present an informational psychosemantics as it applies to what we call sensory concepts, concepts that apply, roughly, to so-called secondary qualities of objects. We show that these concepts have a special informational character and semantic structure that closely (...) tie them to the brain states realizing conscious qualitative experiences. We then develop an account of introspection which exploits this special nature of sensory concepts. The result is a new class of concepts, which, following recent terminology, we call phenomenal concepts: these concepts refer to phenomenal experience itself and are the vehicles used in introspection. On our account, the connection between sensory and phenomenal concepts is very tight: it consists in different semantic uses of the same cognitive structures underlying the sensory concepts, such as the concept of red. Contrary to widespread opinion, we show that information theory contains all the resources to satisfy internalist intuitions about phenomenal consciousness, while not offending externalist ones. A consequence of this account is that it explains and predicts the so-called conceivability arguments against physicalism on the basis of the special nature of sensory and phenomenal concepts. Thus we not only show why physicalism is not threatened by such arguments, but also demonstrate its strength in virtue of its ability to predict and explain away such arguments in a principled way. However, we take the main contribution of this work to be what it provides in addition to a response to those conceivability arguments, namely, a substantive account of the interface between sensory and conceptual systems and the mechanisms of introspection as based on the special nature of the information flow between them. (shrink)

In this article we present the bases for a computational theory of the cognitive processes underlying human communication. The core of the article is devoted to the analysis of the phases in which the process of comprehension of a communicative act can be logically divided: (1) literal meaning, where the reconstruction of the mental states literally expressed by the actor takes place: (2) speaker's meaning, where the partner reconstructs the communicative intentions of the actor; (3) communicative effect, where the partner (...) possibly modifies his own beliefs and intentions; (4) reaction, where the intentions for the generation of the response are produced; and (5) response, where an overt response is constructed. The model appears to be compatible with relevant facts about human behavior. Our hypothesis is that, through communication, an actor tries to exploit the motivational structures of a partner so that the desired goal is generated. A second point is that social behavior requires that cooperation be maintained at some level. In the case of communication, cooperation is, in general, pursued even when the partner does not adhere to the actor's goals, and therefore no cooperation occurs at the behavioral level. This important distinction is reflected in the two kinds of game we introduce to account for communication. The main concept implied in communication is that two agents overtly reach a situation of shared mental states. Our model deals with sharedness through two primitives: shared beliefs and communicative intentions. (shrink)

In this paper, I provide a descriptive definition of art that is able to accommodate the existence of bad art, while illuminating the value of good art. This, I argue, is something that existing definitions of art fail to do. I approach this task by providing an account according to which what makes something an artwork is the institutional process by which it is made. I argue that Searle’s account of institutions and institutional facts shows that the existence of all (...) institutions is due to their being perceived by their participants to perform some humanly valuable function. I then identify the functions to which the existence of art institutions is due. I then use these functions to provide a reductive institutional definition of art. Finally, in section seven, I examine the account’s consequences for the value of good art. (shrink)

Recent third person approaches to thought experiments and conceptual analysis through the method of surveys are motivated by and motivate skepticism about the traditional first person method. I argue that such surveys give no good ground for skepticism, that they have some utility, but that they do not represent a fundamentally new way of doing philosophy, that they are liable to considerable methodological difficulties, and that they cannot be substituted for the first person method, since the a priori knowledge which (...) is our object in conceptual analysis can be acquired only from the first person standpoint. (shrink)

John MacFarlane explores how we might make sense of the idea that truth is relative. He provides new, satisfying accounts of parts of our thought and talk that have resisted traditional methods of analysis, including what we mean when we talk about what is tasty, what we know, what will happen, what might be the case, and what we ought to do.

Surprisingly little has been written about hedged assertion. Linguists often focus on semantic or syntactic theorizing about, for example, grammatical evidentials or epistemic modals, but pay far less attention to what hedging does at the level of action. By contrast, philosophers have focused extensively on normative issues regarding what epistemic position is required for proper assertion, yet they have almost exclusively considered unqualified declaratives. This essay considers the linguistic and normative issues side-by-side. We aim to bring some order and clarity (...) to thinking about hedging, so as to illuminate aspects of interest to both linguists and philosophers. In particular, we consider three broad questions. 1) The structural question: when one hedges, what is the speaker’s commitment weakened from? 2) The functional question: what is the best way to understand how a hedge weakens? And 3) the taxonomic question: are hedged assertions genuine assertions, another speech act, or what? (shrink)

Esta enciclopédia abrange, de uma forma introdutória mas desejavelmente rigorosa, uma diversidade de conceitos, temas, problemas, argumentos e teorias localizados numa área relativamente recente de estudos, os quais tem sido habitual qualificar como «estudos lógico-filosóficos». De uma forma apropriadamente genérica, e apesar de o território teórico abrangido ser extenso e de contornos por vezes difusos, podemos dizer que na área se investiga um conjunto de questões fundamentais acerca da natureza da linguagem, da mente, da cognição e do raciocínio humanos, bem (...) como questões acerca das conexões destes com a realidade não mental e extralinguística. A razão daquela qualificação é a seguinte: por um lado, a investigação em questão é qualificada como filosófica em virtude do elevado grau de generalidade e abstracção das questões examinadas (entre outras coisas); por outro, a investigação é qualificada como lógica em virtude de ser uma investigação logicamente disciplinada, no sentido de nela se fazer um uso intenso de conceitos, técnicas e métodos provenientes da disciplina de lógica. O agregado de tópicos que constitui a área de estudos lógico-filosóficos é já visível, pelo menos em parte, no Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus de Ludwig Wittgenstein, uma obra publicada em 1921. E uma boa maneira de ter uma ideia sinóptica do território disciplinar abrangido por esta enciclopédia, ou pelo menos de uma porção substancial dele, é extrair do Tractatus uma lista dos tópicos mais salientes aí discutidos; a lista incluirá certamente tópicos do seguinte género, muitos dos quais se podem encontrar ao longo desta enciclopédia: factos e estados de coisas; objectos; representação; crenças e estados mentais; pensamentos; a proposição; nomes próprios; valores de verdade e bivalência; quantificação; funções de verdade; verdade lógica; identidade; tautologia; o raciocínio matemático; a natureza da inferência; o cepticismo e o solipsismo; a indução; as constantes lógicas; a negação; a forma lógica; as leis da ciência; o número. (shrink)

Christian Kock’s essays show the essential interconnectedness of practical reasoning, rhetoric and deliberative democracy. They constitute a unique contribution to argumentation theory that draws on – and criticizes – the work of philosophers, rhetoricians, political scientists and other argumentation theorists. It puts rhetoric in the service of modern democracies by drawing attention to the obligations of politicians to articulate arguments and objections that citizens can weigh against each other in their deliberations about possible courses of action.

Sometimes we speak of behaviours and actions as reactions, just as we speak of physical conditions and mental states as reactions. But what do we mean when we say that emotions are reactions? I answer this question by developing an account of emotions as psychological reactions to presentations or representations of states of affairs. I show that this account may provide a novel conceptual framework for explaining aspects of the intentionality, phenomenology and behavioural manifestation of emotions. I conclude by showing (...) that this account is compatible with the view that emotions can be assessed on grounds of justification and correctness. (shrink)

In this paper, illocutionary acts of commanding will be differentiated from perlocutionary acts that affect preferences of addressees in a new dynamic logic which combines the preference upgrade introduced in DEUL (dynamic epistemic upgrade logic) by van Benthem and Liu with the deontic update introduced in ECL II (eliminative command logic II) by Yamada. The resulting logic will incorporate J. L. Austin’s distinction between illocutionary acts as acts having mere conventional effects and perlocutionary acts as acts having real effects upon (...) attitudes and actions of agents, and help us understand why saying so can make it so in explicit performative utterances. We will also discuss how acts of commanding give rise to so-called “deontic dilemmas” and how we can accommodate most deontic dilemmas without triggering so-called “deontic explosion”. (shrink)

Grice (1957) drew a distinction between natural(N) and non–natural(NN) meaning, and showed how the latter might be characterised in terms of intentions and the recognition of intentions. Focussing on the role of natural signs and natural behaviours in communication, this paper makes two main points. First, verbal communication often involves a mixture of natural and non–natural meaning and there is a continuum of cases between showing and meaningNN. This suggests that pragmatics is best seen as a theory of intentional verbal (...) communication rather than a theory of meaningNN. Second, some natural behaviours have a signalling function: they are, in effect, natural codes. Such behaviours do not fit easily into Grice's distinction between natural and non–natural meaning, which suggests it is not exhaustive. (shrink)

In standard decision theory, the probability function ought to be updated in light of evidence, but the utility function generally stays fixed. However, there is nothing in the formal theory that prevents one from instead updating the utility function, while keeping the probability function fixed. Moreover, there are good arguments for updating the utilities and not just the probabilities. Hence, the first puzzle is whether there is anything that justifies updating beliefs, but not desires, in light of evidence. The paper (...) argues that there is not, but that this raises a second puzzle. (shrink)

Some critical reactions hardly give clues to the arguer as to how to respond to them convinc-ingly. Other critical reactions convey some or even all of the considerations that make the critic critical of the arguer’s position and direct the arguer to defuse or to at least contend with them. First, an explication of the notion of a critical reaction will be provided, zooming in on the degree of ‘directiveness’ that a critical reaction displays. Second, it will be examined whether (...) and to what extent there is a normative requirement to strive after criticism that is more than minimally directive. In this paper, it is hypothesized that the com-petitiveness inherent in critical discussion must be mitigated by making the opponent responsible for providing her counterconsiderations, if available, thus assisting the proponent in developing an argumenta-tive strategy that defuses them. (shrink)

Some critical reactions hardly give clues to the arguer as to how to respond to them convincingly. Other critical reactions convey some or even all of the considerations that make the critic critical of the arguer’s position and direct the arguer to defuse or to at least contend with them. First, an explication of the notion of a critical reaction will be provided, zooming in on the degree of “directiveness” that a critical reaction displays. Second, it will be examined whether (...) there are normative requirements that enhance the directiveness of criticism. Does the opponent have in circumstances a dialectical obligation to provide clarifications, explanations, or even arguments? In this paper, it is hypothesized that the competitiveness inherent in critical discussion must be mitigated by making the opponent responsible for providing her counterconsiderations, if available, thus assisting the proponent in developing an argumentative strategy that defuses them. (shrink)

It furthers the dialectic when the opponent is clear about what motivates and underlies her critical stance, even if she does not adopt an opposite standpoint, but merely doubts the proponent’s opinion. Thus, there is some kind of burden of criticism. In some situations, there should an obligation for the opponent to offer explanatory counterconsiderations, if requested, whereas in others, there is no real dialectical obligation, but a mere responsibility for the opponent to cooperate by providing her motivations for being (...) critical. In this paper, it will be shown how a set of dialogue rules may encourage an opponent, in this latter type of situation, to provide her counterconsiderations, and to do so at an appropriate level of specificity. Special attention will be paid to the desired level of specificity. For example, the critic may challenge a thesis by saying “Why? Says who?,” without conveying whether she could be convinced by an argument from expert opinion, or from position to know, or from popular opinion. What are fair dialogue rules for dealing with less than fully specific criticism? (shrink)

Taking Per Martin-Löf’s constructive type theory as a starting-point a theory of assertion is developed, which is able to account for the epistemic aspects of the speech act of assertion, and in which it is shown that assertion is not a wide genus. From a constructivist point of view, one is entitled to assert, for example, that a proposition A is true, only if one has constructed a proof object a for A in an act of demonstration. One thereby has (...) grounded the assertion by an act of demonstration, and a grounding account of assertion therefore suits constructive type theory. Because the act of demonstration in which such a proof object is constructed results in knowledge that A is true, the constructivist account of assertion has to ward off some of the criticism directed against knowledge accounts of assertion. It is especially the internal relation between a judgement being grounded and its being known that makes it possible to do so. The grounding account of assertion can be considered as a justification account of assertion, but it also differs from justification accounts recently proposed, namely in the treatment of selfless assertions, that is, assertions which are grounded, but are not accompanied by belief. (shrink)

Humpty-Dumpty affirmait que les mots signifiaient exactement ce qu'il lui plaisait qu'ils signifient, «ni plus, ni moins». Il a parfois des défenseurs chez les chercheurs qui se sont penchés sur le problème de la non-littéralité. On peut cependant affirmer qu'ur locuteur, s'il utilise non littéralement des expressions qui ont ure signification conventionnelle, ne peut en changer à volonté la signification pour leur faire signifier exactement ce qu'il a l'intention de signifier. Par exemple, quelqu'un qui fait une métaphore ne peut changer (...) la signification des expressions qu'il utilise. C'est la thèse que je défendrai au cours des prochaines pages. On verra aussi quelles intentions devrait avoir un locuteur qui signifierait non littéralement quelque chose. (shrink)

Seizing the opportunity to apply what they had learned, the students declared a cheating competition. Outspoken participants (future lawyers, politicians, and captains of industry) bragged about their ruses. But to their chagrin, an ethics student prevailed.

Assertion is fundamental to our lives as social and cognitive beings. Philosophers have recently built an impressive case that the norm of assertion is factive. That is, you should make an assertion only if it is true. Thus far the case for a factive norm of assertion been based on observational data. This paper adds experimental evidence in favor of a factive norm from six studies. In these studies, an assertion’s truth value dramatically affects whether people think it should be (...) made. Whereas nearly everyone agreed that a true assertion supported by good evidence should be made, most people judged that a false assertion supported by good evidence should not be made. The studies also suggest that people are consciously aware of criteria that guide their evaluation of assertions. Evidence is also presented that some intuitive support for a non-factive norm of assertion comes from a surprising tendency people have to misdescribe cases of blameless rule-breaking as cases where no rule is broken. (shrink)

What is the relationship between saying ‘I know that Q’ and guaranteeing that Q? John Austin, Roderick Chisholm and Wilfrid Sellars all agreed that there is some important connection, but disagreed over what exactly it was. In this paper I discuss each of their accounts and present a new one of my own. Drawing on speech-act theory and recent research on the epistemic norms of speech acts, I suggest that the relationship is this: by saying ‘I know that Q’, you (...) represent yourself as having the authority to guarantee that Q. (shrink)

Can judging that an agent blamelessly broke a rule lead us to claim, paradoxically, that no rule was broken at all? Surprisingly, it can. Across seven experiments, we document and explain the phenomenon of excuse validation. We found when an agent blamelessly breaks a rule, it significantly distorts people’s description of the agent’s conduct. Roughly half of people deny that a rule was broken. The results suggest that people engage in excuse validation in order to avoid indirectly blaming others for (...) blameless transgressions. Excuse validation has implications for recent debates in normative ethics, epistemology and the philosophy of language. These debates have featured thought experiments perfectly designed to trigger excuse validation, inhibiting progress in these areas. (shrink)

According to factive accounts of the norm of belief and decision-making, you should not believe or base decisions on a falsehood. Even when the evidence misleadingly suggests that a false proposition is true, you should not believe it or base decisions on it. Critics claim that factive accounts are counterintuitive and badly mischaracterize our ordinary practice of evaluating beliefs and decisions. This paper reports four experiments that rigorously test the critic’s accusations and the viability of factive accounts. The results undermine (...) the accusations and provide the best evidence yet of factive norms of belief and decision-making. The results also help discriminate between two leading candidates for a factive norm: truth and knowledge. Knowledge is the superior candidate. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to restore the interdependent or complementary relationship between self and others against the universalistic one (as I call it) that Kant, for example, once insisted on, by reexamining the concept of so-called private language. I shall consider some views in speech act theory and pragmatics, since there has often been discussion about such a private occurrence as the speaker's sincerity. For example, Jürgen Habermas situates it in the speaker's internal nature as will be seen (...) later. In my opinion, alter ego is an ego because we can empathize (einfühlen) with it, and yet it is alter ego because it has some private experiences which we cannot perfectly comprehend. (shrink)

This paper will explore some of the implications of attending to the performative aspects of language for the sociological understanding of issues of risk and trust among lay communities. Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens have alerted us to the way that in late or reflexive modernity trust in authority cannot be taken for granted, but increasingly has to be actively earned and actively invested. For his part, Brian Wynne has pointed out that lay judgements are relational and hermeneutic, including as (...) they do judgements about the behaviour of relevant expert institutions, and about the risk to one's self-identity incurred by being caught up in relationships of dependency. Wynne has also argued that public avowals of trust can often mask deep private distrust, and thus be expressions more of fatalistic acceptance than of genuine trust. However, all of these analyses work from a basic model of ' trust ' as being the result of a cognitive process – as a judgement as to the trustworthiness of others. Yet trust is frequently 'active' in an even stronger sense than this. To take a posture of trust towards another can often be best understood not just as a cognitive judgement but as an attempt to bind the 'trusted' into a relationship and attitude of responsibility – and thus perhaps to alter their behaviour – through the taking up of a position in a social ritual. Speech act theory can help us be sensitive to this sort of use of the language of ' trust ', by reminding us that language can perform a number of different functions – not just that of describing the world, or of acting out ascribed roles and identities, but also that of trying to change the world. The analysis of public discourse about risk, trust and mistrust must thus be sensitive to the range of things that people might be attempting to do when they are saying things if it is to avoid drawing misleading conclusions about public attitudes to risk. (shrink)

Contextualists offer "high-low standards" practical cases to show that a variety of knowledge standards are in play in different ordinary contexts. These cases show nothing of the sort, I maintain. However Keith DeRose gives an ingenious argument that standards for knowledge do go up in high-stakes cases. According to the knowledge account of assertion (Kn), only knowledge warrants assertion. Kn combined with the context sensitivity of assertability yields contextualism about knowledge. But is Kn correct? I offer a rival account of (...) warranted assertion and argue that it beats Kn as a response to the "knowledge" version of Moore's Paradox. (shrink)

For me, personally, Wittgenstein’s philosophy poses the greatest challenge: if he is right, the sort of philosophy I am attempting to do is impossible. Wittgenstein argued powerfully that there can be no such thing as a general philosophical theory of language, mind, consciousness, society, and so on. I wanted and still do want to do precisely that: to present a general philosophical theory of language, mind, consciousness, society, and so on.

Volume 98, Issue 4, December 2020, Page 718-731.

The recent exchange between Robert Brandom and Jürgen Habermas provides an opportunity to compare and contrast some aspects of their systems. Both present broadly inferential accounts of meaning, according to which the content of an expression is determined by its role in an inferential network. Several problems confront such theories of meaning - one of which threatens the possibility of communication because content is relative to an individual's set of beliefs. Brandom acknowledges this problem and provides a solution to it. (...) The point of this paper is to argue that it arises for Habermas's theory as well. I then present several solutions Habermas could adopt and evaluate their feasibility. The result is that Habermas must alter his theory of communicative action by contextualizing the standards for successful communication. (shrink)

Todd (2016) proposes an analysis of future-directed sentences, in particular sentences of the form 'will(φ)', that is based on the classic Russellian analysis of definite descriptions. Todd's analysis is supposed to vindicate the claim that the future is metaphysically open while retaining a simple Ockhamist semantics of future contingents and the principles of classical logic, i.e. bivalence and the law of excluded middle. Consequently, an open futurist can straightforwardly retain classical logic without appeal to supervaluations, determinacy operators, or any further (...) controversial semantical or metaphysical complication. In this paper, we will show that this quasi-Russellian analysis of 'will' both lacks linguistic motivation and faces a variety of significant problems. In particular, we show that the standard arguments for Russell's treatment of definite descriptions fail to apply to statements of the form 'will(φ)'. (shrink)

Taking Per Martin-Löf’s constructive type theory as a starting-point a theory of assertion is developed, which is able to account for the epistemic aspects of the speech act of assertion, and in which it is shown that assertion is not a wide genus. From a constructivist point of view, one is entitled to assert, for example, that a proposition A is true, only if one has constructed a proof object a for A in an act of demonstration. One thereby has (...) grounded the assertion by an act of demonstration, and a grounding account of assertion therefore suits constructive type theory. Because the act of demonstration in which such a proof object is constructed results in knowledge that A is true, the constructivist account of assertion has to ward off some of the criticism directed against knowledge accounts of assertion. It is especially the internal relation between a judgement being grounded and its being known that makes it possible to do so. The grounding account of assertion can be considered as a justification account of assertion, but it also differs from justification accounts recently proposed, namely in the treatment of selfless assertions, that is, assertions which are grounded, but are not accompanied by belief. (shrink)

My primary goal in this paper is to defend the plausibility of Kripke’s thesis that there are contingent a priori truths, and to fill out some gaps in Kripke’s own account of these truths. But the strategy here adopted is, to the best of my knowledge, still unexplored and different from the one adopted both by Kripke himself and by his critics. I first argue that Kripke’s examples of such truths can only be legitimate if seen as introduced by performative (...) utterances sense). And, if this is so, we can apply the machinery of illocutionary act theory to these utterances to explain how one can have a priori knowledge of some contingent facts generated by the utterances themselves. I shall argue that the overall strategy can fill out two gaps in Kripke’s original account: first, we can explain the nature of the truth-makers of contingent a priori truths sense, broadly conceived) and, second, we can explain how contingent a priori knowledge can be transmitted from one speaker to another. (shrink)