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The existence and nature of the a priori are defining issues for philosophy. A philosopher's attitude to the a priori is a touchstone for his whole approach to the subject. Sometimes, as in Kant's critical philosophy, or in Quine's epistemology, a major new position emerges from reflection on questions that explicitly involve the notions of the a priori or the empirical. But even when no explicit use is made of the notion of the a priori in the questions addressed, a philosopher's methodology, the range of considerations to which the philosopher is open, his conception of the goals of the subject, his idea of what is involved in justification — all of these cannot fail to involve commitments about the nature and the existence of the a priori. So understanding the a priori is of interest in itself.

This chapter discusses Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s philosophical reflections on ars characteristica (“characteristic art,” the art of forming and arranging characters so that they agree with thoughts), logical calculus, and natural languages. It begins by providing an overview of Leibniz’s project for a universal language, his division of general science into analysis and synthesis, and his investigations on grammar. It then considers Leibniz’s notion of natural language in relation to words and particles, the logic of propositions, real addition and mereology, and the nature and origin of historical language based on the concepts of affect, onomatopoeia, and cases and circumstances. Finally, the article examines Leibniz’s views on artificial language and the nature of monads.

This article describes the concept of ascriber contextualism in relation to skepticism. It explains that ascriber contextualism in epistemology is the view that the truth conditions for sentences containing “know” and its cognates are context sensitive. It discusses the motivations for contextualism, skeptical paradoxes, the mechanism of context shifting, and sensitive moderate invariantism (SMI). It also comments on objections to ascriber contextualism and SMI.

Antinomies involving the assertibility modal arise when we consider what are called “syntactic interpretations” of the assertibility operator A, translation schemes in which the operator is interpreted in terms of a monadic predicate in the nonmodal fragment of the language. Such a translation scheme, of course, is nothing more than a systematic attempt to replace the assertibility modality by a concept, and trouble tends to arise precisely when the concept is too truthlike. In this chapter, a number of paradoxical syntactic interpretations of the assertibility modality are explored. In each case, the paradox consists in an inconsistency affecting the syntactic transcription of certain apparently unexceptionable combinations of modal principles concerning the assertibility operator. It is argued that the modal construal of the notion of assertibility is fundamental, and a standard model theoretic semantics is presented for it. I finally suggest that an assertibility predicate for a language L with the assertibility operator be recovered at the metalinguistic level: a sentence p will be said to be assertible in L if and only if the sentence Ap is true in L, with the result that the alternative forms for a theory of the assertibility property in L exactly mirror the alternative forms for a theory of truth for L. Some consequences of these observations for the philosophy of mathematics are explored.

This article explores to what extent ignorance is assertable. More specifically, can one properly assert that one is ignorant with respect to some specific proposition p? This article argues that, depending on one’s account of ignorance, there are six or seven different kinds of ignorance. Subsequently, it examines whether or not each of these varieties of ignorance is assertable. It defends the view that only two out of six or seven kinds of ignorance are assertable, at least de dicto: what the author calls “suspending ignorance” and “undecided ignorance.” The other four or five kinds of ignorance are unassertable: what the author calls “disbelieving ignorance,” “unconsidered ignorance,” “deep ignorance,” “complete ignorance,” and, on some accounts of what it is to be ignorant, “unwarranted ignorance.” It turns out they are unassertable for very different reasons, though. Finally, the article applies its argument to two issues. First, the debate about whether there is inexpressible ignorance has focused entirely on various kinds of propositions or facts that are supposed to be such that one cannot express ignorance with regard to them. It has failed to pay attention to the various attitudes that ignorance can consist in. Second, Transparency as an account of self-knowledge may be true for belief and some other mental states, but not for various kinds of ignorance.

This article discusses how assertion is an illocutionary act. Once assertion is taken to be an illocutionary act, the question arises of how it relates to other illocutionary acts. This is the main issue tackled in this article, and it is two-fold. It examines how assertion relates to illocutionary acts that are in some way similar to it, at least as to their involving the utterance of plain declarative sentences; and how assertion and its cognates should best be collocated within the whole gamut of illocutionary acts. The former exploration will rely upon a largely intuitive grasp of the “family” of assertive illocutionary acts; the latter will involve both a fuller characterization of assertion and reconsideration of illocutionary act classification. The article then turns to the question of the role or rank of assertion among illocutionary acts: whether it is “just” one among them, or there are reasons for granting it some primacy or some special function.

In light of a view of assertion as a product of cultural evolution, we disentangle a number of distinct questions that might be raised concerning the relation of assertion to convention and lay down eight benchmarks that any viable theory of assertion should respect. We next consider two well-known forms of conventionalism about speech acts, that of Millikan and that associated with Austin and Searle, showing why neither approach is viable. We go on to develop two positive accounts of assertion, one in terms of belief expression, the other in terms of commitment, neither of which requires what we shall term “extra-semantic conventions.” From there we consider two recent defenses of a form of conventionalism offered by Stainton (2016) and Jary (this volume), showing that neither succeeds in its aim. The lesson that we may draw from the failure of these arguments is that assertion is facilitated by, but does not crucially rely on, extra-semantic conventions.

This article discusses three issues about the relations between fiction and assertion that have figured prominently in recent debates. In the first section, it addresses questions about assertions in connection with fiction raised by the standard occurrence of prima facie empty referential expressions in fictions. In the second, it considers whether fictions can make assertions, or related assertoric acts. The third and final section explores the possible effects that this would pose for the distinction between fiction and non-fiction.

Pragmatic accounts of assertion commonly assume that language users engage in some form of mindreading. For example, Stalnaker proposed that the critical context for any assertion is the set of pragmatic presuppositions that can be taken as shared between speaker and addressee—that is, their common ground. From a cognitive psychological perspective, though, the processing and representational requirements of considering common ground are substantial. This chapter considers several cognitively oriented descriptions of mindreading in communication, contrasting the metarepresentational requirements of speaker meaning with the more general psychological construct of false belief in theory of mind. Ultimately, the cognitive demands of real-time conversation may circumscribe the ability of language users to engage in sophisticated forms of mindreading during the communication of assertion.

This essay is an opinionated exploration of the constraints that modal discourse imposes on the theory of assertion. Primary focus is on the question whether modal discourse challenges the traditional view that all assertions have propositional content. This question is tackled largely with reference to discourse involving epistemic modals, although connections and parallels with deontic modals and conditionals are noted along the way. The essay also discusses the impact of the idiosincrasies of modal discourse on the theory of assertion. The first topic in this thread is whether the relevant fragment of modal discourse is subject to some of the norms of assertion that are ordinarily invoked for nonmodal discourse. The second topic is whether theories of assertion that focus on the effects of assertions on context must be viewed as fundamentally disjunctive in order to capture the distinctions between modal and nonmodal assertion.

Which is more fundamental, assertion or testimony? Should we understand assertion as basic, treating testimony as what one gets when one adds an interpersonal addressee? Or should we understand testimony as basic, treating mere assertion—assertion without testimony—as what one gets when one subtracts that interpersonal relation? This article argues for the subtractive approach and for the more general thesis that its treatment of the interpersonal element in assertion makes understanding that interpersonal element the key to understanding how assertion expresses belief. This theory of belief expression in assertion treats it as internalizing the transmission of belief in testimony. How we understand that internalizing move depends on how we conceptualize the interpersonal element in testimony. Since what will be called the Command Model does not give one the conceptual resources to make this move, one should adopt an alternative that will be called the Custodial Model, on which a testifier aims not to convince her addressee but to reason with him—to give him reasons to believe what she tells him, where those reasons are grounded in her trustworthiness in thus attempting to influence him. The subtractive approach to assertion thus rests on a key distinction between the aims of reasoning and persuasion.

This chapter argues that assertion is fundamentally linguistic, in that it is a practice that can exist only in a speech community that has a linguistic form specified for the performance of assertions, that is, a declarative mood marker. Such a conception is required in order to distinguish assertion from other content-conveying linguistic acts, such as presupposition and implicature. The declarative mood also plays an information-structure role, but this can be separated from its role as an indicator of illocutionary force. Finally, while in human natural languages the declarative is a sentential mood, consideration of imaginary languages lacking the category of sentence shows that the declarative need not be sentential.

It is disputed what norm, if any, governs assertion. We address this question by looking at assertions of future contingents: statements about the future that are neither metaphysically necessary nor metaphysically impossible. Many philosophers think that future contingents are not truth apt, which together with a Truth Norm or a Knowledge Norm of assertion implies that assertions of these future contingents are systematically infelicitous.In this article, we argue that our practice of asserting future contingents is incompatible with the view that they are not truth apt. We consider a range of norms of assertion and argue that the best explanation of the data is provided by the view that assertion is governed by the Knowledge Norm.

Assertions of knowledge—that is, assertions which constitute ascriptions of knowledge—have served both as a central source of data in the epistemological theorizing and as an important target of such theorizing themselves. This chapter considers three issues concerning knowledge ascriptions that have figured prominently in recent discussion: their use as evidence for specific epistemological claims and theories, the pragmatics and psychology of knowledge ascriptions, and the social role(s) that the relevant assertions might play. There are important interactions among these topics; and they, and positions taken in response to them, interact as well with central questions about both assertion and linguistic communication generally. One central point on which epistemologists divide, however, is over how closely tied various features of our knowledge-attributing behavior are to semantics, or to (presumed) facts about assertion per se.

This chapter explores the prospects for justifying the somewhat widespread, somewhat firmly held sense that there is some moral advantage to untruthfully implicating over lying. The author calls this the “Difference Intuition.” The author defines lying in terms of asserting but remains open about what precise definition best captures our ordinary notion. The author defines implicating as one way of meaning something without asserting it. The author narrows down the kind of untruthful implicating that should be compared with lying for purposes of evaluating whether there is a moral difference between them. Just as lying requires a robust form of assertion, so the kind of untruthful implicating to be compared with lying requires a robust form of implicating. Next, the author sets out various ways of sharpening the Difference Intuition and surveys a range of approaches to justifying one class of sharpenings. The author finishes by sketching an approach to justifying an alternative sharpening of the Difference Intuition, which is inspired by John Stuart Mill’s discussion of lying.

Ludwig Wittgenstein responds in his Notes on Logic to a discussion of Bertrand Russell's 1903 Principles of Mathematics concerning assertion. In Principles of Mathematics, Russell makes a distinction between asserted and unasserted propositions. Whilst this distinction is not given a fully worked-out account, Russell sees it as a point of considerable theoretical importance. It is introduced in the context of a separation by Russell of modus ponens from the proposition that ‘if p and q be propositions then p together with p implies q’. In reply to Russell, Wittgenstein argues that ‘Assertion is merely psychological. In not-p, p is exactly the same as if it stands alone; this point is absolutely fundamental’. Wittgenstein's response is intriguing, not least because of the centrality to his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus of the idea that a proposition says something.

This chapter defends the view that research about language and communication should not appeal to anything that falls under the label “assertion.” According to the No-Assertion view (Cappelen 2011), what philosophers have tried to capture by the term “assertion” is largely a philosopher’s invention. It fails to pick out an act type that we engage in, and it is not a category we need in order to explain any important component of our linguistic practice. The phenomena that theories of assertion aim to explain are better accounted for by appeal to the notion of what is said. Sayings are governed by variable norms, come with variable commitments, and have variable causes and effects. This chapter outlines the No-Assertion view, presents some of the core arguments in favor of it, and responds to some criticisms.

Two important philosophical questions about assertion concern its nature and normativity. This article defends the optimism about the constitutive norm account of assertion and sets out a constitutivity thesis that is much more modest than that proposed by Timothy Williamson. It starts by looking at the extant objections to Williamson’s Knowledge Account of Assertion (KAA) and argues that they fail to hit their target in virtue of imposing implausible conditions on engaging in norm-constituted activities. Second, it makes a similar proposal and shows how it does better than the competition. It suggests that Knowledge Norm of Assertion (KNA) is not constitutive of the speech act of assertion in the same way in which rules of games are constitutive, and thus KAA comes out as too strong. The final section embarks on a rescue mission on behalf of KAA; it puts forth a weaker, functionalist constitutivity thesis. On this view, KNA is etiologically constitutively associated with the speech act of assertion, in virtue of its function of generating knowledge in hearers.

The practice of assertion is said to be governed by an epistemic norm, with one of the leading candidates being the Knowledge Norm of Assertion (KNA). In this paper, I focus on the sufficiency condition of this norm, according to which one is properly positioned to assert that p if one knows that p. I show that this condition is false, and that the arguments to this end reveal something very important about the nature of epistemically proper assertion: the assertoric quality of the epistemic support, such as whether the belief in question has firsthand or secondhand grounding, is just as important as the quantity of epistemic support.