Amphithéâtre Maurice Halbwachs, Site Marcelin Berthelot
Open to all
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Abstract

Recent literature has seen a quickening of interest in ways of domesticating illocutionary force in semantic terms. One line of thought takes inspiration from Chierchia and McConnell Ginet (Meaning and Grammar, 2000) who influentially distinguished between sentential force and utterance force. Recently Murray and Starr ("The Structure of Communicative Acts", Linguistics & Philosophy, 2020) have argued on empirical and methodological grounds for a treatment of the former as a phenomenon amenable to analysis in terms of compositional dynamic semantics. If successful, Murray and Starr will have strengthened the case for treating (one aspect of force) in semantic terms. Another strategy conceives of force as represented semantically within declarative sentences. Van Elswyck ("Representing Knowledge", Philosophical Review, 2021) for instance argues that declaratives host a covert parenthetical, "I know", and uses this hypothesis to explain why assertions represent the speaker as knowing the proposition asserted. In this talk I will set forth both Murray and Starr's and Van Elswyck's approaches, and argue that neither is successful.

Mitchell Green

Mitch Green is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut, having taught previously at the University of Virginia. His research centers on philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and aesthetics. He currently focuses on philosophical implications of the evolutionary biology of communication, speech act theory, the force/content distinction, the nature of expression, and types of conversation. Recent publications include The Philosophy of Language (Oxford, 2020), Know Thyself: The Value and Limits of Self-Knowledge (Routledge, 2018), "Context and Conversation" (Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Semantics, 2021), "Assertion and Convention" (Oxford Handbook of Assertion, 2020), "Assertion: A Partly Social Account" (with N. Marsili, J. Pragmatics, forth.), and "Force, Content, and Translucent Self-Ascriptions" (forth. in G. Mras and M. Schmitz (Eds.) Force, Content & the Unity of the Proposition). A recent special issue of the journal Grazer Philosophische Studien (vol. 96, 2019) contained articles responding to Green's research from over the last 25 years.

Speaker(s)

Mitchell Green

University of Connecticut