Communicative commitments

The other aspect of the social character of assertion concerns what the speaker does by means ofmaking an assertion. The idea is often stated in terms of making a commitment/undertaking, ortaking responsibility. This was emphasized by C.S. Peirce:

اقتباس :: What is the nature of assertion? We have no magnifying-glass that can enlarge its features, and render them more discernible; but in default of such an instrument we can select for examination a very formal assertion, the features of which have purposely been rendered very prominent, in order to emphasize its solemnity. […] This ingredient, the assuming of responsibility, which is so prominent in solemn assertion, must be present in every genuine assertion. For clearly, every assertion involves an effort to make the intended interpreter believe what is asserted, to which end a reason for believing it must be furnished. But if a lie would not endanger the esteem in which the utterer was held, nor otherwise be apt to entail such real effects as he would avoid, the interpreter would have no reason to believe the assertion. (Peirce 1934: 547)

We can distinguish three ideas in the quote from Peirce, and add a fourth that has been proposed by later authors. Firstly, as a matter of socio-linguistic observation, speakers in fact in some sense take responsibility for, or commit themselves to, being right in what they say. The speaker puts her cognitive authority behind it, so to speak, and has to suffer some measure of social humiliation if what she says turns out false. This idea of commitment can also serve to distinguish between assertion proper and weaker constative forms, such as guesses and conjectures, since these differ from assertion with respect to commitment.
Secondly, there is the further idea that the commitment is made to the addressee or the hearers in general. The speaker who makes an incorrect assertion opens himself to criticism by his addressee, perhaps for misleading him, in a way similar to a subject who fails to live up to a promise. In this respect, the social relation between speaker and addressee has changed because of the assertion. Typically, the addressee will hold the speaker accountable for the correctness of the assertion, and the speaker accept to be held so accountable. This is again a socio-linguistic observation: it does not follow that the speaker actually is accountable.
Thirdly, Peirce has the idea that it is the responsibility-taking that gives the addressee the reasonto believe what is asserted. It is unclear whether Peirce speaks of reasons in the descriptive sense (a person's actual reason, good or bad) or in the normative sense (a good reason, actual or not). It is again probably socio-linguistically true that hearers are more prone to believe the speaker when they perceive him as sincere, thereby as taking responsibility. However, a speaker may be sincere but unreliable (prone to error) and also reliable but insincere (for instance, conveying messages without caring about their accuracy). As regards having a good reason, it seems that the reliability of the speaker is the crucial factor, not sincerity (but see Moran 2005 for the opposite view).
Fourthly, we might take the commitment idea to be what essentially characterizes assertion: on this idea, asserting that [ltr]p[/ltr] consists in committing oneself to the truth of [ltr]p[/ltr]. This is the leading idea of commitment accounts of assertion.[7]
Commitment-making is a central idea in Searle's (1969) account. In Searle's view, there are five rules for the use of force indicating devices, that is, devices that exhibit the utterance as having a particular force. In the case of assertion, they are as follows. Here S is the speaker and H the hearer:

(Srl-A)1.The propositional content rule: what is to be expressed is any proposition p.
2.First preparatory rule: S has evidence (reasons etc.) for the truth of p.
3.Second preparatory rule: It is not obvious to both S and H that H knows (does not need to be reminded of, etc.) p.
4.Sincerity rule: S believes p.
5.Constitutive rule: Counts as an undertaking to the effect that p represents an actual state of affairs.

The fifth rule is the crucial one, and it is held to be constitutive of assertion. Constitutive rules are contrasted with regulative rules rules (the terminology is taken from Kant). Roughly, whereas regulative rules regulate a pre-existing activity, such as traffic regulations regulate traffic, constitutive rules in a sense create a new activity. Paradigm examples are rules of games, taken as defining the games, and thus making it possible to play them. The distinction was introduced by Rawls (1955), and also suggested by C.G.B. Midgley (1959), in the same terms and format as later by Searle (1969: 33–42; cf. Glüer & Pagin 1999).
That is, according to Searle, without rule 5, the practice of assertion would not exist. Once the rule is in force, an utterance with the relevant assertion-indicating device creates the undertaking, and thereby also the assertion itself. According to Searle (1969: 65), the speaker expresses the state required by the sincerity rule, i.e., in the case of assertion, expresses a belief. Also, the speaker implies that the preparatory conditions are met.
The analysis is completed by first requiring that normal input and output conditions obtain, second that the conditions of Rules 1–4 are met, and finally that the semantical rules of the dialect spoken by S and H are such that T is correctly and sincerely uttered if and only if the the aforementioned conditions are met. Searle's account is thus a complicated combination of appeals to linguistic conventions, social relations, and reflexive communicative intentions (see previous subsection).
Later social accounts have tended to focus either on the conventional/institutional or on the intentional features. An example is Kotatko (1998: 236–9), who like Searle stresses the importance of social conventions about what counts as making a commitment or undertaking. Another example is Alston (2000: 120):

(Als-A)U asserted that p in uttering S iff
1.U R'd that p
2.S explicitly presents the proposition that p, or S is uttered as elliptical for a sentence that explicitly presents the proposition that p.

Here the locution “[ltr]R[/ltr]'d that [ltr]p[/ltr]” is short for “[ltr]U[/ltr] took responsibility for its being the case that [ltr]p[/ltr]” (2000: 7).
There is in such accounts a question of what it exactly consists in to make a commitment or undertaking to the truth of a proposition. One elaboration of this idea is provided by Brandom (1994). According to Brandom (1994: 173–5), the nature of assertion consists in the fact that in asserting, the speaker achieves two different social results at the same time: on the one hand sheauthorizes the hearer to claim anything that follows from what is asserted and on the other she undertakes the responsibility of justifying it.
Another suggestion is given in MacFarlane (2005):

(MF1-A)(W*) In asserting that p at [ltr]C1[/ltr], one commits oneself to withdrawing the assertion (in any future context [ltr]C2[/ltr]) if p is shown to be untrue relative to context of use [ltr]C1[/ltr] and context of assessment [ltr]C2[/ltr].

This is the idea that assertion is partly characterized by a commitment to take back, withdraw, or (in later writings) retract, the assertion in later adverse contexts. MacFarlane's framework isrelativist, with the idea that the truth of a sentence, as well as the evaluation of an assertion, for some particular kinds of sentences (e.g., concerning future contingents) must be judged with respect to both the original context of use, and a separate independent context of assessment (e.g., by an assessor at a future time). As we shall see, later MacFarlane restates the idea in terms of norms of assertion, but then too, the idea of retraction of an assertion is central.
It may be noted here that Dummett in passing expresses a related idea in saying that “an assertion is a kind of gamble that the speaker will not be proved wrong” (Dummett 1976: 84). Should it turn out that the speaker was wrong, he “may subsequently be compelled to withdraw it as incorrect” (Dummett 1991: 165).
Both Searle and Brandom took an analysis of promising as the role model for analysing assertion. There are clear similarities. For instance, by means of a sincere utterance of

(20)I promise to call the repair shop

the speaker has committed herself, in relation to the addressee, to do something. Both speaker and hearer will regard the speaker as having incurred an obligation to the addressee. The relation between asserting and promising is discussed in detail in Watson 2004. Watson elaborates on the similarities in commitments made with assertions and with promises: both involve a secondary commitment of what to do in case things go wrong (2004: 67). But he also emphasizes the basic difference: that in the case of assertion, but not in the case of promises, the commitment is to something that is independent of the speaker. According to Watson, this is not the truth of what is asserted, but its defensibility (2004: 68). A consequence of this is that the speaker is obliged to to defend the assertion if challenged (2004: 70).
Sandy Goldberg (2013) has recently drawn attention to the phenomenon of anonymous assertion, which is exemplified in particular in anonymous posts in comment threads or discussion forums on the Internet. He remarks that in such circumstances, hearers cannot hold speakers responsible for their utterances, and have no means of assessing the epistemic credentials of the speakers, which leaves them without warrant to trust the speakers, and speakers know this. As a result,

اقتباس :: when it is mutually known by all parties that a claim was made under conditions of anonymity, this has a diminishing affect on the sort of (assertion-generated) expectations that speakers and hearers are entitled to have of one another. (2013: 135)

The question is how much of the commitment remains. If utterances in these circumstances are still recognizably assertions, there seem to be assertions without, or with hardly any, speaker commitments. Although this is not an issue raised by Goldberg, it seems hard for a commitment account to accommodate.
Suppose, nonetheless, that it is true that in general (or perhaps even always), that speakers do make commitments when asserting. Suppose, similarly, that in general, or perhaps always, speakers do have communicative intentions of some kind when asserting. Would either assumption directly provide an account of assertion in these terms? The answer is no, for the assumptions are only that committing oneself, or having certain communicative intentions, is anecessary condition for making an assertion. It is a further step to infer that the respective conditions are sufficient as well, that is, that there are no other ways of expressing the relevant commitments or communicative intentions that are not assertions.
Are there other ways? It is argued in Pagin (2004) that there are, since one can use the very statement of a social character account itself to construct an utterance type that isn't assertoric, but that would be assertoric by the account in question. A simple example is given by

(21)I hereby commit myself to the truth of the proposition that there are black swans.

Intuitively, a sincere utterance of (21) would not be an assertion that there are black swans. What is said does not entail that there are black swans. It seems to be no more than a declaration of the speaker's stand on the issue, and that declaration may be accurate even if there are no black swans. Still, it does incur a commitment to the truth of the proposition that there are black swans. If this is right, then incurring a commitment to truth is not sufficient for asserting. Similar constructions can be made out of other accounts, for instance by letting the speaker declare herself to have certain complex intentions.
Pagin's arguments have been criticized. For instance, Pegan (2009) argues, among other things, that the proposed counterexamples can be blocked by carefully amending the theory (cf. Pagin (2009) for a reply). Both MacFarlane (2011) and García-Carpintero (2013) argue that we should distinguish between what is said and what is asserted, and that this allows us to maintain that anindirect assertion that swans are black are made by means of directly saying that the speaker commits himself. According to both, Pagin's attempt to block the indirect assertion route fails.

Communicative commitments

Communicative commitments :: تعاليق

Communicative commitments