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تاريخ التسجيل : 26/10/2009
وســــــــــام النشــــــــــــــاط : 6
 | |  Self-representation | |
According to Frege (1918a: 22), an assertion is an outward sign of a judgment (Urteil). The term ‘judgment’ has been used in several ways. If it is used to mean either belief, or act by which a belief is formed or reinforced, then Frege's view is pretty close to the view that assertion is the expression of belief.How should one understand the idea of expressing here? It is natural to think of a belief state, that is, a mental state of the speaker, as causally co-responsible for the making of the assertion. The speaker has a belief and wants to communicate it, which motivates an assertoric utterance. But what about the cases when the speaker does not believe what he asserts? Can we still say, even of insincere assertions, that they express belief? If so, in what sense?Within the communicative intentions tradition, Bach and Harnish have emphasized that an assertion gives the hearer evidence for the corresponding belief, and that what is common to the sincere and insincere case is the intention of providing such evidence: - اقتباس :
- For S to express an attitude is for S to R-intend the hearer to take S's utterance as reason to think S has that attitude. (Bach & Harnish 1979: 15), italics in the original)
(‘R-intend’ is, as above, short for ‘reflexively intend’). On this view, expressing is wholly a matter of hearer-directed intentions.This proposal has the advantage of covering both the sincere and the insincere case, but has the drawback of requiring a high level of sophistication. By contrast, Bernard Williams (2002: 74) has claimed that a sincere assertion is simply the direct expression of belief, in a more primitive way. Insincere assertions are different. According to Williams (2002: 74), in an assertion, the speaker either gives a direct expression of belief, or he intends the addressee to “take it” that he has the belief (cf. Owens 2006).Presumably, the intention mentioned is an intention about what the addressee is to believe about the speaker. In this case the objection that too much sophistication is required is less pressing, since it only concerns insincere assertions. However, Williams's idea (as in Grice 1969) has the opposite defect of not taking more sophistication into account. The idea that the alternative to sincerity is the intention to make the addressee believe that the speaker believes what he asserts, is not general enough. An insincere speaker [ltr]S[/ltr] who asserts that [ltr]p[/ltr] may know that the addressee [ltr]A[/ltr]knows that [ltr]S[/ltr] does not believe that [ltr]p[/ltr], but may still intend to make [ltr]A[/ltr] believe that [ltr]S[/ltr] does not know about [ltr]A[/ltr]'s knowledge, precisely by making the assertion that [ltr]p[/ltr]. There is no definitive upper limit to the sophistication of the deceiving speaker's calculations (cf. Pagin 2011: Section 7). In addition, the speaker may simply be stonewalling, reiterating an assertion without any hope of convincing the addressee of anything.A more neutral way of trying to capture the relation between assertion and believing was suggested both by Max Black (1952) and by Davidson (1984a: 268): in asserting that p the speaker represents herself as believing that p. This suggestion appears to avoid the difficulties with the appeal to hearer-directed intentions.A somewhat related approach is taken by Mitchell Green (2007), who appeals to “expressive conventions”. Grammatical moods can have such conventions (2007: 150). According to Green (2007: 160), an assertion that [ltr]p[/ltr] invokes a set of conventions according to which the speaker “can be represented as bearing the belief-relation to [ltr]p[/ltr]”.As one represent oneself as believing, one can also represent oneself as knowing. Inspired by Davidson's proposal, Peter Unger (1975: 253–70) and Michael Slote (1979: 185) made the stronger claim that in asserting that p the speaker represents herself as knowing that p. To a small extent this idea had been anticipated by G.E. Moore when claiming that the speaker impliesthat she knows that p (1966: 63).However, it is not so clear what representing oneself amounts to. It must be a sense different from that in which one represents the world as having certain features. The speaker who asserts
- (22)There are black swans.
does not also claim that she believes that there are black swans. It must apparently be some weaker sense of ‘represent’, since it is not just a matter of being, as opposed to not being, fully explicit. By means of answering the question what I believe with an utterance of (22) I do represent myself as believing that there are black swans, equivalently with asserting it. What I assert then is wrong if I don't have the belief, despite the existence of black swans.On the other hand, it must also be stronger than the sense of ‘represent’ by which an actor can be said to represent himself as believing something on stage. The actor says
- (23)I’m in the biology department.
thereby representing himself as asserting that he is in the biology department, since he represents himself as being a man who honestly asserts that he is in the biology department. By means of that, he in one sense represents himself as believing that he is in the biology department. But the audience is no way invited to believe that the speaker, that is, the actor, has that belief.Apparently, the relevant sense of ‘represent’ is not easy to specify. That it nevertheless tracks a real phenomenon is often claimed to be shown by Moore's Paradox. This is the paradox that assertoric utterances of sentences such as
- (24)It is raining but I don’t believe that it is raining.
(the omissive type of Moorean sentences) are distinctly odd, and even prima facie self-defeating, despite the fact that they may well be true. Among the different types of account of Moore's Paradox, Moore's own emphasizes the connection between asserting and believing. Moore's idea (1944: 175–6; 1966: 63) was that the speaker in some sense implies that she believes what she asserts. So by asserting (24) the speaker induces a contradiction between what she asserts and what she implies. This contradiction is then supposed to explain the oddity.An analogous move has been made as regards knowledge-varieties of Moorean sentences, such as
- (25)It is raining, but I don't know that it is raining.
Clearly, utterances of sentences like (25) are bad, and some think that they are as bad as the paradigmatic Moorean sentences like (24). It is then argued that their badness show that a speaker who asserts that [ltr]p[/ltr] also represents himself as knowing that [ltr]p[/ltr] (cf. Unger 1975: 256–60; Slote 1979: 179, and Williamson 2000: 253–5 with application to the knowledge norm).Linguistic arguments of this kind in general, explicitly or implicitly, have the form of an inference to the best explanation. As such, they are problematic, since there are competing explanations of the badness of Moorean utterances. We return to this topic at end of subsection 6.2.A definition proposed by Dummett (1981: 300) may be seen as a way of cashing in the talk of self-representation:
- (D-A)A man makes an assertion if he says something in such a manner as deliberately to convey the impression of saying it with the overriding intention of saying something true.
Dummett's proposal is presumably intended to give necessary as well as sufficient conditions, but there are problems with both. With the necessary conditions because of the possibility of direct expressions of belief, as urged by Williams, and with sufficiency for reasons of the same kind as discussed at the end of the previous section: a speaker may try to convey the Dummett-type impression in deviant ways. | |
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