The Content of Force

Basic force indicators such as intonation contour, word order and grammatical mood do not express a concept of this position, but only a sense of it. Their content is thus non-conceptual rather than conceptual. I will argue that the position they present is one of theoretical or practical knowledge. By asserting or directing something a subject presents itself as knowing what is the case or what to do. I believe that this proposal is intuitively plausible and also theoretically advantageous in numerous respects. It harmonizes well with knowledge accounts of assertion and opens the door to a satifactory account of practical deductive inference. It allows for a straightforward response to Moore’s paradox and, most importantly in the present context, to the ‘Frege point’: if the bearers of truth and other satisfaction value bearers are essentially forceful, how can they occur as clauses of conditionals and in other non-committal contexts?

The argument so far has been that ordinary, genuine force indicators complete truth or other satisfaction value bearers by indicating the position from which the subject is directed at the relevant SOA. They are thus different from the Fregean assertion sign which is supposed to operate on a truth value bearer, conceived of as a forceless proposition. I will argue that the Fregean assertion sign and the ‘Frege point’ that motivates it are based on a conflation of illocutionary force proper with several other distinctions such as those between a free-standing occurrence and an occurrence in a logical context, and an occurrence in a serious vs. a non-serious context. Such contexts are created by what I propose to call “higher-level acts” such as conditionalizing, negating, playacting or joking, but also questioning. These acts operate on forceful acts such as assertions and directions themselves rather than on something forceless. They create higher-level unities such as conditionals, jokes or questions, which present assertions or directions, but may suspend commitment to them.

The representationalist account makes intelligible how this is possible: we can present a position we have not yet taken, but that we anticipate, or, as François Recanati puts it, simulate. For example, in a conditional we may simulate the eventuality that it is raining in order to decide what else will be the case then or what to do. But we still consider this SOA from a theoretical position. We simulate a possible fact. (Contrast this with a practical conditional such as “To make it rain, dump silver iodide into a cloud!”, where rain is considered as a goal!) We do not only simulate the SOA, but also the position we might take. We therefore still need to use a force indicator to represent it, and this is something we actually do and not merely simulate.

The higher-level act therefore does not cancel or remove the force of what it operates on, but rather shifts or transfers it into the new dimension it creates. It now indicates a position the subject has not yet taken, but anticipates or otherwise simulates. Another example of this are interrogative acts, which I will argue are higher-level illocutionary acts operating on either assertions or directions to yield theoretical questions such as “Is the door closed?” or practical questions such as “Close the door?”. The interrogative force indicator indicates a position of wondering, of seeking knowledge; the assertoric or directive force indicator indicates whether the knowledge sought is theoretical or practical.

We therefore neither need a Fregean assertion sign nor a cancellation sign, but only ordinary force indicators and the various markers of higher-level acts such as interrogative, logical and fictional markers. And we can turn the received view of propositions on its head: a proposition is not something forceless, but a forceful act in its role of being put forward for consideration by a higher-level act. By ascribing content to force indicators, we can leave behind the Frege point and the force-content dualism.