Mini-Course: 4 Lectures on Assertion

Manuel Garcia-Carpintero
Universidade de Barcelona, LOGOS Group

 

28 October, 18 and 25 November, 2 December 2011
Sala Mattos Romão,
Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon

 

The course will explore the nature of assertion from the perspective of different contemporary debates about that central speech act. In
the first session we will distinguish descriptive and normative accounts, and we will examine the debate around Williamson’s proposal that assertion is defined by a constitutive norm requiring knowledge of the asserted proposition by its performers. In the second session we will explore the possibility of providing a normative account, along Williamson’s lines, of the act of presupposing, thereby accounting for facts such as the accommodation of presuppositions and informative presuppositions, and we will explore the consequences for the appraisal of Williamson’s account of assertion. In the third we will investigate what it is for a speech act to be conventional, and whether accounts of speech acts in terms of constitutive norms are compatible with their being conventional. In the final session we will explore the relation between assertion and truth, by discussing on the one hand deflationary theories of truth, and on the other recent proposals for the relativization of truth.