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تاريخ التسجيل : 26/10/2009
وســــــــــام النشــــــــــــــاط : 6
 | |  Cognition | |
Communicative intentions accounts, commitment accounts, and self-representation accounts are all descriptive: they say nothing about what ought to be done, about the existence of norms, or about the propriety/correctness of assertions. However, except for the idea that a sincere assertion is the expression of a belief that a speaker actually has, none of these types of account focuses on the cognitive features of representing the world and judging the representation to be true as a main characteristic. A few more cognitively oriented accounts do that. 5.1 Relation to truthAs noted above, Frege held (1918a: 22) that an assertion is an outward sign of a judgment(Urteil). A judgment in turn, in Frege's view, is a step from a Thought, that is, a representational content, to the acknowledgment of its truth (Frege 1892: 34; translation in Frege 1960: 64, with‘admission’ instead of ‘acknowledgment’ for ‘Anerkennung’). Since for Frege, the truth value is the Reference (Bedeutung) of a sentence, a judgment is an advance from Sense to Reference. In case the subject makes a mistake, it is not the actual Reference, but anyway the Reference the subject takes it to have.We can transform Frege's view slightly, in the following way: in judging that [ltr]p[/ltr], the subject advances from the content that [ltr]p[/ltr] to the relevant point of evaluation, with respect to which this content is either true or false. Frege countenanced exactly one point of evaluation: the World. In a sense, judging is applying a content to the World.In this form, the idea generalizes. If contents are possible-worlds propositions, the points of evaluation are possible worlds. All actual judgments are then applications of propositions to theactual world. If contents are temporal propositions, true or false with respect to world-time pairs, then all actual judgments are applications to the ordered pair of the actual world and a relevant time, usually the time at which the judgment is made. This is the point with respect to which a sentence, used in a context of utterance, has its truth value (cf. Kaplan 1989: 522). Again, the relation is general: if the content of a judgment is a function from indices of some type to truth values, then a judgment is the very step of applying that content to the relevantly actual index.On this picture, what holds for judgment carries over to assertion. It is in the force of an utterance that the step is taken from the content to the actual point of evaluation. This view has been stated by Recanati with respect to the actual world: - اقتباس :
- a content is not enough; we need to connect that content with the actual world, via the assertive force of the utterance, in virtue of which the content is presented as characterizing that world. (Recanati 2007: 37)
Essentially, this is Frege's view: the speaker gives an outer sign of taking the proposition to be true. The question is whether this view can be given a non-metaphorical rendering that improves on the idea of expressing a belief.One phrase that is often used in this context that of “presenting a proposition as true” (cf. Wright 1992: 34). Prima facie, it characterizes assertion well. However, there are two problems with the idea. The first is that it should generalize to other speech act types, but does not seem to do so. For instance, presenting the proposition that Elsa is at home as a proposition that the speaker would like to know the truth value of, leaves it open whether the utterance is interrogative, optative, or imperative:
- (26)a.Is Elsa at home?
- b.I would like to know whether Elsa is at home.
- c.Inform me whether Elsa is at home!
Secondly, it is unclear what “presenting” amounts to. It must be a sense of the word different from that in which the word ‘heterological’ is presented as long in
- (27)‘Heterological’ is a long word.
For if the word is presented as long in the sentence (27), then also the proposition that snow is white is presented as true in the sentence
- (28)The proposition that snow is white is true.
even if the sentence is not uttered assertorically. There is therefore a weak sense of ‘present’, which does not require that the presentation itself is made with assertoric force (like an obsolete label on a bottle), and that sense is too weak. It would be instantiated by conjectures, assumptions, and perhaps also by forceless utterances. There is clearly also a stronger sense of ‘present’ whichdoes require assertoric force (for cases when the label is taken to apply), but that is just what we want to have (non-circularly) explained. Simply using the phrase “present as true” does not by itself help.Another idea for characterizing assertion in terms of truth-related attitudes is that assertion aimsat truth. This is stated, for instance, both by Bernard Williams (1966) and by Michael Dummett (1981). It can be understood in two rather different ways, the one intended by Williams and the other by Dummett (for some ways of understanding what it could be for belief to aim at truth, seeEngel (2004), Glüer & Wikforss (2013).On Williams's view, the property of aiming at truth is what characterizes fact-stating discourse, as opposed to, e.g., evaluative or directive discourse. It is natural to think of
- (29)The moon is about 384.000 km from the Earth
as stating a fact, and ofas expressing an evaluation, not corresponding to any fact of the matter. On Williams's view, to regard a sincere utterance ofas a moral assertion, is to take a realistic attitude to moral discourse: there are moral facts, making moral statements objectively true or false. This view again comes in two versions. On the first alternative, the existence of moral facts renders the discourse fact-stating, whether the speaker thinks so or not, and the non-existence renders it evaluative, again whether the speaker thinks so or not. On the second alternative, an utterance of (31) is an assertion if the speaker has a realistic attitude towards moral discourse and otherwise not.On these views, it is assumed that truth is a substantial property (Williams 1966: 202), not a concept that can be characterized in some deflationary way. As a consequence, the sentence
- (32)‘Bardot is good’ is true.
is to be regarded as false, since (30) is objectively neither true nor false; there is no fact of the matter.Pointing to the difference between fact-stating and evaluative discourse may help to distinguish assertions from evaluations, but does not, again, help to distinguish assertion from other acts within the fact-stating family, such as conjectures and assumptions. In fact, unless we read a lot into “stating”, it is not enough even to distinguish assertion from other acts that concern facts, or states of affairs, such expressing a wish that a fact obtains.In addition, recent years have seen a broadening of the use of the terms ‘truth’ and ‘assertion’ that runs counter to characterizing assertion by means of the fact-value dichotomy. In various forms of relativism, expressions of judgments of personal taste, such asare characterized as assertions, and the semantic treatments use truth as the basic sentence property. Common to varieties of relativism with respect to predicates of personal taste is the idea that there is an extra parameter of evaluation, a standard of taste, over and above, say, possible world and time. Despite the lack of objectivity in a more ordinary sense, such a semantics is typically coupled with treating utterances of sentences such as as assertions (cf.Kölbel 2004: 71; Lasersohn 2005; Egan 2012; MacFarlane 2014: Chpt. 7). There is, of course, a further question whether such a treatment is appropriate. | |
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