Meaning Meeting - Gonzalo Ricaldi / Assertion and Common Ground
Meaning Meeting - Gonzalo Ricaldi / Assertion and Common Ground
Wednesday November 2, Gonzalo presents his work on assertion, abstracted below.
We argue that debates about epistemic norms of assertion would benefit from a clearer anchoring in an account of Common Ground (CG). CG is the mutually recognized pool of information shared between conversation partners, which in turn guides their collective deliberation and decision-making. A shared assumption in many debates is that assertion plays a special, and even unique, role in bringing new propositions to consideration in CG. This assumption, however, is clearly false: there is also the whole suite of pragmatic mechanisms, such as implicatures and presuppositions. And while it is true that conversation partners care about and monitor the quality of the information they incorporate into CG, they do not appear to be overly concerned about the particular mechanism by which a proposition entered CG. Thus, rather than suppose that specific epistemic norms govern – and may even define – specific speech-act types, we argue that a contextually variable epistemic norm can apply generically to different communicative mechanisms. In this sense, switching to a CG-centric perspective on communication can help resolve long-standing theoretical and empirical concerns at the intersection of philosophy of language and epistemology.