This essay ties together some main strands of the author’s research spanning the last quarter-century. Because of its broad scope and space limitations, he prescinds from detailed arguments and instead intuitively motivates the general points which are supported more fully in other publications to which he provides references. After an initial delineation of several distinct notions of meaning (Section 1), the author considers (Section 2) such a notion deriving from the evolutionary biology of communication that he terms ‘organic meaning’, and places it in the context of evolutionary game theory. That provides a framework for a special type of organic meaning found in the phenomenon of expression (3), of which the author here offers an updated characterization while highlighting its wide philosophical interest. Expression in turn generalizes to a paradigmatic form of human communication—conversation—and section 4 provides a taxonomy of conversation-types while arguing that attention to such types helps to sharpen predictions of what speakers say rather than conversationally implicate. We close (5) with a view of fictional discourse on which authors of fictional works are engaged in conversation with their readers, and can provide them with knowledge in spite of the fictional character of their conversation. Such knowledge includes knowledge of how an emotion feels and is thus a route to empathy.
In light of a view of assertion as a product of cultural evolution, we disentangle a number of distinct questions that might be raised concerning the relation of assertion to convention and lay down eight benchmarks that any viable theory of assertion should respect. We next consider two well-known forms of conventionalism about speech acts, that of Millikan and that associated with Austin and Searle, showing why neither approach is viable. We go on to develop two positive accounts of assertion, one in terms of belief expression, the other in terms of commitment, neither of which requires what we shall term “extra-semantic conventions.” From there we consider two recent defenses of a form of conventionalism offered by Stainton (2016) and Jary (this volume), showing that neither succeeds in its aim. The lesson that we may draw from the failure of these arguments is that assertion is facilitated by, but does not crucially rely on, extra-semantic conventions.
This article investigates some ethical dimensions of the norm of stating only what one believes to be the truth, including the value that a society gains in operating under such a norm, as well as the conditions that might justify suspending that norm.
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