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1. The article only concerns assertion with respect to its speech actproperties. The topic of thecontent of assertions is toolarge to be covered here. A few other more general topics have alsobeen left out. However, an earlier version of this entry was organizedaround the relations of assertion to other topics, including truth andlogic, and contained, e.g., discussions of conditional andhypothetical assertions. The earlier version is available athttps://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2007/entries/assertion/.

2. For a discussion of Peirce’s account of force, see Brock (1981)and Bellucci (2019). Anticipations of a theory of force can also befound in the phenomenological tradition. For a historical overview,see B. Smith (1990). The development of systematic speech act theory,in the 1950s, connected mainly back to Frege.

3. The recent literature onsilencing explores the varieties ofways in which the lack of appropriate uptake can be seen assilencing the speaker. On this view, a speaker who is ignoredhas failed to make an assertion or give an order. This can happenbecause the would-be hearers don’t pay attention, or because thehearers misunderstand the speaker’s intention, or even when thehearers do understand the speaker but refuse to take them seriously.For a central contribution, see Hornsby & Langton 1998. For anoverview and a discussion of which theories of assertion can dojustice to the phenomenon, see Tanesini 2020.

4. An example is

France is hexagonal.

The right thing to say, according to Austin, is that this statement“is just a rough description, it is not true or false”(1962: 143).

After Lewis (1979) it is common to treatstandards ofprecision as a factor for determining truth or falsity relativeto a context, rather than as separate dimension of evaluation.

5. In Bach and Harnish’s scheme, there are four top categories:constatives,directives (including questions andprohibitives),commissives (promises, offers) andacknowledgments (apologies, condolences, congratulations)(1979: 41). The category of constatives includes the subtypes, in Bachand Harnish’s terms, ofassertives,predictives,retrodictives,descriptives,ascriptives,informatives,confirmatives,concessives,retractives,assentives,dissentives,disputatives,responsives,suggestives andsuppositives (1979: 41).

In this list, predictives are distinguished by concerning the futureand retrodictives by concerning the past, dissentives by the fact thatthe speaker is disagreeing with what was earlier said by the hearer,and so on. Assertives, according to this taxonomy, are notdistinguished from other constatives by any such feature. As Bach andHarnish point out (1979: 46), most of the specialized types ofconstatives satisfy the definition of assertives (seesection 4.2). This type then stands out as a higher category, including most butnot all of the constatives; not for instance suggestives (suggestions,conjectures) and suppositives (assumptions, stipulations).

A leading idea in the taxonomies of Searle (1975a) and Recanati (1987)is to distinguish between types according todirection offit. Constative utterances have a word-world direction of fit(what is said is supposed to conform to what the world is like), whileperformative utterances have world-word direction of fit (the world issupposed to be changed to fit what is said). Again, assertion is theparadigmatic constative type, if not the constative type itself. Foroverview and discussion, see Sbisà 2020.

6. In either case, presupposing should be kept distinct from asserting.One further reason is that the presupposition occurs in otherillocutionary types as well. For instance, in asking

Did John [didn’t John] manage to stop in time?

the speaker normally assumes that John tried and is only asking aboutthe success. Still, it is not easy to distinguish assertion frompresupposition in pure speech act terms. Typically, the distinction isbased either on the meaning properties of the sentence used, or onproperties of the conversational setting, that is, on what is takenfor granted (cf.section 3.2, regarding Stalnaker’s account).

For instance, by

(i)

We regret that the pool will be closed today.

a concierge may inform a group checking in to a hotel about the stateof the pool. Formally, in(i) it is presupposed rather than asserted that the pool will be closed,but the information is conveyed equally well by means of thepresupposition as by means of a more direct assertion with

(ii)

The pool will be closed today.

given that the guests did not alreadyknow that the poolwould be closed, and given that the guests were able tocompute the presupposition (both taken for granted by theconcierge). By contrast, assuming that the concierge believes that aguestdoes know that the pool will be closed,(i) will not be used to convey information about the pool, only about theattitude of the staff, while a sincere utterance of(ii) is an assertion that the pool will be closed, whatever is assumedabout the hearer’s prior knowledge. The contrast between(i) and(ii) highlights a common intuition about a central feature of assertion:explicitness. Seesection 2.4.

7. The picture is more complex because of the distinction betweenparticularized and generalized conversational implicatures. One ofGrice’s own examples of the latter is,

X is meeting a woman this evening. (1975: 37)

carrying the generalized implicature that the woman is not“X’s wife, mother, sister or perhaps even closeplatonic friend”.

In some later developments of the theory of generalized conversationalimplicatures, especially in Levinson (2000), some generalizedimplicatures are not really indirectly conveyed, but contribute towhat issaid, for instance (directly) asserted. Thereby itcompetes withRelevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson 1986[1995]), the theory ofimplicitures (Bach 1994), and thetheory ofmodulations (Recanati 2004), especially as regardsso-calledenrichments.

8. Irony does, however, qualify as indirect assertion on the definitiongiven by Recanati (1987: 125). According to Recanati, an indirectspeech act is a special kind of conversational implicature, where thespeaker not only implicates some propositionp, but alsointends to convey thatp. In the case of(16), there is an apparent flagrant violation of the Quality principle tosay only what is true. On the assumption that the speaker iscooperative, together with background knowledge of her politicalawareness, the hearer can infer that she does not mean what sheliterally says, but rather the opposite, that is, that what shewants to communicate is the negation of what she says. ForRecanati, the communicative intention is what brings this act underthe category of assertion proper (seesection 4.2).

Although Searle’s definition of indirect speech acts isdifferent, Searle too thinks that indirect speech acts work by meansof an inferential mechanism, including that of conventionalimplicature. The hearer is supposed to understand that the speakercannot merely be performing the primary act, since that would violateconversational principles, and then again conclude by conversationalreasoning which other act has been performed.

9. Pagin (2004: 851) suggested a so-calledinferential integrationtest, in which a sentence proposed as being used for indirectlyasserting thatp (e.g., by irony) replaces the correspondingexplicit sentence in an inference. The idea is that if the intuitivevalidity of the inference is preserved, the proposed sentence can beaccepted as being used for an indirect assertion.

10. Fricker is most directly concerned with what she calls“tellings” (2012: 62), assertions used to providetestimony, aimed at letting the hearer know what the speaker alreadyknows. According to Fricker, such speech acts are

1. subject to theknowledge norm (the content must be knownby the speaker to be true, cf.section 5.1)
2. acts in which the speaker undertakesresponsibility tothe hearer for the truth of the content (cf.section 6.1)
3. acts in which the speakerrepresents herself as knowingthat the content is true (cf.section 4.1).

On Fricker’s view, (1-3) is what gives tellings their“epistemic force”. This is what motivates the hearer tobelieve that what the speaker says is true. And, according toFricker, only utterances that are linguistically explicit can havethese properties: only such utterances are subject to the knowledgenorm, and only by means of such utterance can the speaker assume therequired responsibility. Successful hinting or indirect conveying donot qualify. What Fricker callsOne-off Gricean communicationdoes not qualify. These are cases when the speaker manages to get amessage across by means of “an utterance that lacks anyconventional symbolic features to constrain the intendedmessage” (2012: 71).

Fricker’s main reason is that when the content is not fixed bylinguistic conventions (together with salient contextual factors), thespeaker is free todeny having asserted, or stated, thecontent she conveyed. That the content is fixed by linguisticconvention and context, and hence recoverable by the hearer, is whatincurs responsibility and makes the knowledge norm apply (2012:76).

However, very many linguistic “explicit” assertions retainimplicit features and ambiguities. There are lexical and syntacticambiguities, implicit quantifier domain restrictions, and many othersources of underdetermination of utterance content by syntax and(standing/conventional) meaning. Because of this, the hearer is oftennot in a position toknow what the content is, even when sheis able to make a correct educated guess (Hawthorne 2012, cf. Rysiew2007, Peet 2015). The message is then not strictly speakingrecoverable by the hearer. By Fricker’s standards, assertoricquality of the utterance would be lost. The demands therefore seem toohigh.

Manuel García-Carpintero (2016, cf. 2019b) takes thediametrically opposite view to Fricker’s. He follows authorslike Hawthorne, Rysiew and Peet in stressing normal underdeterminationof content by standing meaning and context. He also criticizesFricker’s appeal to deniability. Taken empirically, it does notdistinguish between explicit tellings and indirect communication;oftentimes, speakers shamelessly deny what they have obviouslyasserted (2016: 40). Taken normatively, it doesn’t either, fordenying indirectly conveyed messages can be equally incorrect (2016:41). García-Carpintero concludes that given Fricker’sconditions, “almost nothing is an assertion” (2016: 42).García-Carpintero rejects Fricker’s conditionsaltogether, to the point of insisting that just about any type ofindirect, Gricean communicationcan count as atelling in Fricker’s sense, if it is successful, and heillustrates this with an incredible story from Borges (2016: 37).

Unlike García-Carpintero, Borg (2019) believes that “theextent to which a speaker is held responsible for a linguisticallyconveyed content” (2019: 20) varies depending on how explicitlyshe conveys that content. Borg introduces a distinction betweenstrict linguistic liability (which tracks “minimalcontent”, as defined in Borg (2012), andconversationallinguistic liability (which tracks “explicature content”,as defined in Sperber & Wilson (1995: 182). Her view maintains astrict distinction between assertion and implicatures (i.e.,implicatures can never be asserted), but allows that speakers canassert both minimal and explicature contents, depending “on thekind of linguistic exchange taking place” (Borg 2019: 20). Thehypothesis that attributions of liability and responsibility may trackdistinctions between asserted content and (different varieties of)implicit content has since been subject to experimental investigation(Mazzarella, Reinecke, Noveck, & Mercier 2018; Bonalumi,Scott-Phillips, Tacha, & Heintz 2020). For a systematic discussionof these issues in relation to assertoric commitment and deniability,see Peet (2015, 2021).

Is there a basic conflict between assertion and the underdeterminationof content? There is a strong intuition that in an assertion, thespeakerrelies on being understood. And in case the hearerreacts by believing what she takes to have been said, sheassumes she has understood. Too much uncertainty aboutcommunicative success alters the nature of the exchange. The partiesto the current debate appear to agree on that point. What is at stakeis primarily whether linguistic explicitness is sufficient forachievingjustified certainty, and whether it is necessary.Secondarily, there is also a question what explains the phenomenon. Isit because of responsibility, or because of something else? Proponentsof different accounts of assertion will answer this questiondifferently.

11. Translation in TPW: 64; we have used ‘acknowledgment’instead of ‘admission’ for Frege’s‘Anerkennung’.

12. Marsili (2018: 644) takes assertion’s truth-aim to establish asuccess condition for the action performed by the speaker. Anassertion is (prima facie) successful if it is true, in thesame way in which shooting a penalty in football is (primafacie) successful if one scores a goal. The idea here is thattruth is thepurported goal of asserting a proposition: youmake an assertion only if youpurport to try to say somethingtrue. This echoes Dummett’s point that:

A man makes an assertion if he says something in such a manner asdeliberately to convey the impression of saying it with the overridingintention of saying something true. (Dummett 1973 [1981: 356])

The claim made by these authors is not that asserting requires thatyou actuallytry to tell the truth: on this picture, actuallytrying to tell the truth is only required forcooperativeassertion. Note, further, that this characterization of assertioncannot be defended as a definition, but at most as a necessarycondition, since there are other assertives (conjectures, hypotheses,objections) that “aim at truth” in this sense.

13. Pointing to the difference between fact-stating and evaluativediscourse may help to distinguish assertions from evaluations, butdoes not, again, help to distinguish assertion from other acts withinthe fact-stating family, such as conjectures and assumptions. In fact,unless we read a lot into “stating”, it is not enough evento distinguish assertion from other acts that concern facts, suchexpressing awish that a fact obtains.

In addition, recent years have seen a broadening of the use of theterms “truth” and “assertion” that runscounter to characterizing assertion by means of the fact-valuedichotomy. In various forms ofrelativism, expressions ofjudgments of personal taste, such as

(i)

Licorice is tasty.

are characterized as assertions, and the semantic treatments use truthas the basic sentence property. Common to varieties of relativism withrespect to predicates of personal taste is the idea that there is anextra parameter of evaluation, astandard of taste, over andabove, say, possible world and time. Despite the lack of objectivityin a more ordinary sense, such a semantics is typically coupled withtreating utterances of sentences such as(i) as assertions (for discussion, see Kölbel 2004: 71; Lasersohn2005; Egan 2012; MacFarlane 2014: ch. 7; Baghramian & Carter2020).

There is, of course, a further question whether such a treatment isappropriate.

14. As was already pointed out by Stalnaker (1974: 55), and laterstressed in Lewis (1979), an assertion that intuitively presupposesthe truth of another proposition need not fail, but can instead havethe effect of adjusting the common ground. In so-calledaccommodation, the hearer adds the background assumptionsthat would be required for interpretation. For instance, upon hearingLewis utter

(i)

The cat has gone upstairs.

the hearer who didn’t know may accommodate by adding theassumption that there is a unique, contextually salient cat.Accommodation is further discussed in Stalnaker (2002), where it isstressed, among other things, that it works, when it works, because ofwhat is already presupposed. For example, in(i) it is presupposed that the speaker knows whether or not he has acat.

Whatever the truth about presupposition accommodation, Stalnakeroffers a model of the cognitive features of communication and the roleof assertion therein.

15. Schaffer proposes to add a topic-sensitive knowledge norm (cf.section 5.1.4) to the Stalnakerian picture. Kölbel focuses on commitmentsinstead.

According to Kölbel, assumptions differ from assertion in tworespects. Firstly, they are temporary, which means that they can berevoked when they have served their purpose. Secondly, they do nothave the same commitment properties. On Kölbel’s view, anassertion thatp is made with the (Brandomian) undertaking ofthe “obligation to justify thatp on request”.This undertaking, according to Kölbel, also distinguishesassertion from presupposition, although in a more subtle way. It isnot, however, clear why in Kölbel’s view, Stalnaker’saccount would be needed in addition to the obligation property (foranother view that brings together Stalnaker’s andBrandom’s accounts, see Antonsen (2018).

Stokke chooses a different strategy: to differentiate betweenassertions and other speech acts, like assumptions and conjectures, heproposes to distinguish between “official” and“unofficial” common grounds. Unofficial common grounds are“temporary”: they open up in order to store informationthat is used for the purpose of an argument or a reductio; bycontrast, official common grounds are, so to say,“permanent”. Since assumptions and conjectures are onlyadded to the common ground temporarily, the only affect the“unofficial” common ground. Assertion can then be definedas a proposal to add a proposition to the official, permanent commonground (for criticisms, see Fallis 2013, Van Riel 2019, Marsili2023b).

16. An analogous move has been made as regards knowledge-varieties ofMoorean sentences, such as

(i)

It is raining, but I don’t know that it is raining.

Clearly, utterances of sentences like(i) are bad, and some think that they are as bad as the paradigmaticMoorean sentences like(25). It is then argued that their badness shows that a speaker who assertsthatp also represents himself as knowing thatp(cf. Unger 1975: 256–260; Slote 1979: 179, and Williamson 2000:253–255 with application to the knowledge norm).

For an overview and discussion, see Siebel 2020.

17. Another variant of the communicative intention analysis isRecanati’s. Part of Recanati’s solution to the sneakyintention problem, following Grice (1969), consists in simplydemanding that sneaky intentions be absent. This is what it is for anintention to beopen, ordefault-reflexive (Recanati1987: 191–207). He also follows Sperber and Wilson’s ideaof making somethingmanifest, i.e., perceptible or inferable(1987: 120, 180; Sperber & Wilson 1986: 38). Putting the variousingredients together (including prototypicality conditions ofassertion—(Recanati 1987: 183), we get:

(Re-A)

To assert thatp is to make an utteranceu bywhich it is made manifest that the speaker has an open(default-reflexive) intention that

a.

u gives the audience reason to believe that the speakerknows thatp and wishes to share that knowledge with theaudience, and

b.

the audience recognize (a), and recognize it as open.

This is another complex analysis. The complexity of these accounts isitself a problem, since it assumed that ordinary speakers are in thehabit of making assertions, and thereby to have the requiredintentions for doing it. But since it requires detailed analytic workto come up with the accounts, and there even are competing accounts,it is unlikely that ordinary speakers have the intentions required. Ifthey do, they are clearly not aware of having them as agents usuallyare aware of their intentions. Postulating such intentions in ordinaryspeakers is clearly problematic.

The difficulty is made more severe, because there are speakers with ademonstrated inability to understand belief and other cognitiveattitudes. Some speakers with autism, who are clearly by everydaystandards using language for making assertions, fail so-calledfalse-belief tests. Thereby they reveal an inability to distinguishbetween a proposition being believed and being true, and hence (sincethey do distinguish between truth and falsity), reveal a lack ofunderstanding of what it is to believe something. If you cannotunderstand what it is to believe something, you cannot intend someoneto believe something either (cf. Glüer & Pagin 2003). All inall, the complexity and sophistication required of asserters by thesecommunication-intentions accounts, gives a reason to suspect that theydo not provide necessary conditions for making assertions.

18. Only minor and partial exceptions to this pattern occur: a fewaccounts concern norms that are not content-directed, ornon-epistemic. These accounts will be discussed in this section forsimplicity, and flagged as exceptions

19. Some authors have explored versions of the norm that also specify asufficiency condition. A good biconditional formulation of(A5) is as follows (cf. Lackey 2011: 252):

(A5*)

Bi-Permissibility: One is epistemically positioned toassert thatp iffp meetsC.

DeRose (2002) defends a biconditional version of the knowledge normKNA, Hawthorne (2004: 23 n 58) expresses sympathy to this view.Several counterexamples against the sufficiency part have beenpresented (see Brown 2010, 2011; Lackey 2011; and Carter 2017; Gerken2017: 141–143; for replies, Benton 2016 and Simion 2016).

20. These include Williamson 2000: 238–241;García-Carpintero 2019a; Stanley 2008: 52; Rescorla 2009a:99–101; Kölbel 2010: 109–111; and MacFarlane 2014:101–102.

21. Kvanvig 2009: 149–50, 156; Hill & Schechter 2007; Douven2009; Lackey 2007; McKinnon 2015: chs 5 and 6.

22. Strategies along these lines are pursued by Douven (2006:474–475), Maitra & Weatherson (2010: 110), and Cappelen(2011: 38–40) in relation to Moorean assertions, and by Weiner(2005: §3), Levin (2008), Hill & Schechter (2007), and Lackey(2007) in relation to Lottery assertions.

23. Weiner 2005: 248fn7; Hill & Schechter 2007: 110–111; Lackey2007: 618; Cappelen 2011: 38–40.

24. For discussion, see Turri 2011; Blaauw & Ridder 2012; Pritchard2014; Pelling 2013; and Milić 2015. Additional arguments against(KNA) can be found in Weiner 2005: §2, §4; Douven 2006: §2;Maitra & Weatherson 2010; and Begby 2020.

25. DeRose argued from the knowledge norm and the observation that indifferent contexts more or less stringent standard for assertingapply, to the conclusion that epistemic contextualism is true (2002b:182). Epistemic contextualism is the view that “know” issemantically context dependent. The truth value of a knowledgeattribution “X knows thatp” depends onstandards of knowledge in the context of the knowledge attributor.

DeRose’s argument has been challenged by several authors. Forinstance, Brown (2008, 2010) points out that the argument depends onthe biconditional version(A5*) of the knowledge norm, and argues that the sufficiency part is lesswell supported. Stanley also criticizes DeRose, despite accepting thatthe standards of proper assertion vary between contexts. According toStanley, the reason this does not lead to contextualism aboutknowledge is that assertion is governed by the certainty norm (2008:55–56). According to Stanley, the varying standards of properassertion depend on the context dependence of “certain”,not on any context dependence of “know” (which Stanleyrejects). According to Schaffer (2008), on the other hand, knowledgeitself is relative to aquestion under discussion, which isreflected in his version of the knowledge norm (2008: 10).

26. Factive views like(KNA) and(TNA) share another problem: they seem to predict that certain assertionsare both permissible and impermissible. For discussion, see Pelling(2011, 2013b) and Rosenkranz (2023).

27. See Douven (2006: 476–480), Lackey (2007: 604), Engel (2004:56), Kvanvig (2011: 242), Stone (2007: 100), Koethe (2009: 631. n 16),Cappelen (2011: 242), Greenough (2011: 208), Hinchman (2013: 641 n 6),and Marsili (2018: 646).

28. Lackey (2011), on the other hand, proposes that justification has twoaspects, a quantitative and a qualitative. The first concernshowmuch justification the speaker has, the secondthe kindof justification it is.

29. Selecting the context of utterance itself as the context ofassessment relevant for assertion avoids an early critical point madeby Gareth Evans (“Does tense logic rest on a mistake?”,1985: 349–350): if it is left open when to assess an assertion,so that an assertion can be correct at one time and incorrect later,the speaker aiming at correctness cannot decide what to say. If thecontext of assessment is the context of utterance, then the speakerdoes know. As a result, however, a traditional connection betweencorrectness and truth is given up. If the sentence is a futurecontingent, the truth value determined at a later time has no bearingon the correctness of the utterance (cf. García-Carpintero2008; Greenough 2011; Marques 2014; and Caso 2014 for furtherdiscussion of assertion in connection with relativism).

30. Stanley also considers an alternative “subjectivecertainty” norm, where it is the degree of confidence of thespeaker that matters, but he eventually opts for regarding this normas derivable from the epistemic certainty norm.

31. Searle does not claim that the standard sentence types are forceindicating devices (but speculates that a representation ofillocutionary type would be part of the syntactic deep structure).

32. The termcommitment denotes several subordinate conceptsalong a descriptive-normative axis. At the descriptive end, we havepurelypsychological commitments. A commitment, in thisdescriptive sense, consists in mental states (intentions,expectations, and preferences). At the normative end of the scale, anagent can have commitments that are completely independent of theirown actions, intentions or preferences. An agent might be committed togiving up smoking, whether they like to or not, simply because that isthe morally right thing to do. In between there is a spectrum ofpossible notions combining descriptive and normative elements.Standard commitment accounts tend not to be explicit about where onthe spectrum the account lies, but on natural interpretations, theyall have a normative ingredient. At the descriptive end of the scale,if I in such a sensecommit myself to stop smoking, mycommitment consists in a plan , i.e., a complex intention, to stopsmoking, a preference for realizing the intention over not realizingit, and an expectation of, for instance, rebuke from my family if Ifail. In this sense, I cancancel my commitment at any time;I just stop having the intention.

At the normative end of the scale, I may count as committed to stopsmoking in virtue of, say, being a physician (who should set anexample of a healthy lifestyle), whatever I myself think about it.

Between these two extremes, we find commitments thatresultfrom freely chosen actions that the agent was not originally committedto perform (like making a promise). But once the commitment isincurred by the action, e.g., a public promise or declarationto stop smoking, the agent is not free to cancel it. If I continuesmoking, then I have failed to live up to my commitment, and I couldnot prevent this by first canceling the commitment. The commitment,once incurred, has an independent normative status outside the controlof the agent.

Commitment accounts of assertion tend to belong in the middle of thisscale. To make an assertion is a free action that incurs a commitmentthat is not under the discretion of the speaker. The speaker cannotcancel the commitment short of retracting the assertion. Because ofthis feature, we shall treat commitment accounts as being mainly of anormative type.

33. In his (2000), Alston reviews many accounts of taking responsibility(in his terminology, “R’ing”), identifying themerits and weaknesses of each. The one we mentioned is apt tocharacterize assertoric commitment, but Alston eventually endorses adifferent view, according to which R’ing can be characterized asfollows:

(R’ing)

A speakerSR’s thatp inutteringU iff in utteringU,S subjectshis utterance to a rule that, in this context, implies that it ispermissible forS to utterU only ifp(2006b: 60, edited).

Alston then (2000: 120) analyses assertion as a speech act by means ofwhich the speaker R’s a proposition that they explicitlyexpressed:

(AS)

S asserted thatp in utteringU iff:

a.

S R’d thatp

b.

S explicitly presents the proposition thatp, orS is uttered as elliptical for a sentence that explicitlypresents the proposition thatp.

For a critical discussion of Alston’s analysis of assertion, seeCull 2019.

34. Which specific sanctions are linked to false assertions? Thesanctions to which assertors are subject cannot be easily codified:asserting a proposition “is to make oneself responsible for it,without any definite forfeit” (Peirce [CP]: 5.543).Still, asserting falsehoods leads to a loss of credibility, which initself is a significant price to pay for speaking falsely: “ifwhat is asserted is not true, the assertor forfeits in a measure hisreputation for veracity” (Peirce [MS]: 5). Since communicatorscare about their credibility, it also seems that these reputationalcosts play an important role in limiting the spread of misinformationwithin communication systems, human or otherwise (Green 2009, Graham2020).

35. For detailed discussion of this point, see Toulmin 1958, Hamblin1970a: ch. 8, Brandom 1983, Brandom 1994: 172–175, MacFarlane2003 [Other Internet Resources]; 2005: 227–229; 2011), Rescorla 2009a; cf. also Green 2013;2017.

36. More specifically, Geurts characterizes commitment as follows:

To say thata is committed tob to act onpis to say thata is committed tob to act in a waythat is consistent with the truth ofp. I take this to entailthatb is entitled bya to act onp, andshouldb wish to act onp, andp turn outfalse, thenb may hold a responsible for theconsequences.

The reader interested in how the notion of commitment relates to otherpragmatic notions such as common ground, implicature, andcommunicative intentions can refer to Geurts 2019 and other papers ina dedicated special issue ofTheoretical Linguistics (2019:45(1–2)).

37. That noted, there is substantial disagreement on what counts as an“appropriate” challenge: for an overview, see Rescorla(2009b).

38. See Lyons 1977: 793–809, Holmes 1984, Coates 1987, Caffi 1999,Sbisà 2001: §3.3, Labinaz & Sbisà 2014: 52, andLabinaz 2018; cf. Nes 2016 and Incurvati & Schlöder 2019.This “expressivist” analysis of modifiers has a“descriptivist” alternative, according to which suchmodifiers simply alter theproposition to which the speaker(plainly) commits herself, instead of the strength of her commitmentto the proposition (for overviews, see Papafragou 2006, Brogaard &Gatzia (2017).

39. For more on illocutionary logic, see Green 2020b.

40. The reader who is interested in exploring Peirce’s views aboutassertion in better detail can refer to Hookway 1985: 128–129,Brock 1981, Tuzet 2006, Marsili 2015: 113–115, Shapiro 2018, andthe articles in a dedicated special issue of theTransactions ofthe Charles S. Peirce Society (Vol. 57, No. 2, 2021).

41. This distinction was popularized by Searle (1969), but its earliestformulation is arguably in Znamierowski (1924); other precursorsinclude Reinach (1983), Rawls (1955), and Midgley (1959). For ahistorical overview on the notion of constitutive rule, see Conte1991; for further discussion, cf.section 5.1.3 of this entry.