Amphithéâtre Maurice Halbwachs, Site Marcelin Berthelot
Open to all
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Abstract

In previous work I have suggested two distinct notions of assertoric force. The first concept is cognitive, and divides into two sub-concepts: being assertoric (or having assertoric force) for the speaker and being assertoric for the hearer. The common idea between these two sub-concepts is that of being *prima facie informative*. An utterance is informative for the speaker iff the speaker makes the utterance at least in part because of believing the proposition expressed. An utterance is informative for the hearer iff the hearer believes the proposition expressed at least in part because of observing the utterance.

The second concept is functional: the force of the utterance *applies* the proposition asserted to the relevant index. Typically, the relevant index is the actual world. For a centered-world theorist it is typically the triple of the actual world, the current time, and the speaker. The force thus connects the content to the index. The speaker asserts the proposition *about* the index.

The question arises: What is the connection between these two concepts? More precisely, if the functional concept is adequate, does the cognitive concept implement it? And if so, how? In this talk I shall try to answer these questions.

Peter Pagin

Peter Pagin is professor of philosophy at Stockholm University, where he also got his PhD in 1987. He has worked in the philosophy of language and philosophy of logic and in formal semantics. Two of his main topics are semantic compositionality, in formal semantics, and assertion, in speech act theory. Pagin's most recent publications are "The force of assumptions and self-attributions", in Justin Vlastos and Katja Vogt (eds.), Epistemology after Sextus Empiricus, OUP 2020; "When does communication succeed? The case of general terms", in Teresa Marques and Åsa Wikforss (eds.), Shifting Concepts, OUP 2020; "Compositionality, computability, and complexity", published 2020 as accepted manuscript in Review of Symbolic Logic. Co-authored with Kathrin Glüer, there is an almost complete book manuscript on the semantic framework of Switcher Semantics, under contract with OUP.

Speaker(s)

Peter Pagin

Stockholm University