Assertion

Assertion is one of the central kinds of speech act, typically carried out by the utterance of a declarative sentence, such as the very sentences you are reading now. It might be defined as a speech act in which a proposition is presented as true or claimed to be true. Two of the central philosophical questions involving assertion concern its nature and its norms. From about the mid-20th century onward, philosophical work on assertion tended to focus on its nature: what it is to make an assertion and what distinguishes assertion from other kinds of speech act. Later work...

Assertion is one of the central kinds of speech act, typically carried out by the utterance of a declarative sentence, such as the very sentences you are reading now. It might be defined as a speech act in which a proposition is presented as true or claimed to be true. Two of the central philosophical questions involving assertion concern its nature and its norms. From about the mid-20th century onward, philosophical work on assertion tended to focus on its nature: what it is to make an assertion and what distinguishes assertion from other kinds of speech act. Later work (especially beginning in the 1990s) concentrated more on the question of the norms of assertion: what factors, especially epistemic factors, govern when it is permissible to assert something. This bibliography focuses on those two questions, but it should be noted that many areas of philosophy of language will bear on assertion; discussions of implicature often concern implicatures of assertions, discussions of the content of assertions, and discussions of presupposition and (somewhat less often) the difference between assertion and presupposition.