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Mind 2009 118(470):377-397; doi:10.1093/mind/fzp060
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© Hawthorne and Magidor 2009

Discussions

Assertion, Context, and Epistemic Accessibility

John Hawthorne and Ofra Magidor

Magdalen College Oxford OX1 4AU UK john.hawthorne{at}philosophy.ox.ac.uk Balliol College Oxford OX1 3BJ UK ofra.magidor{at}philosophy.ox.ac.uk


  Abstract

In his seminal paper ‘Assertion’, Robert Stalnaker distinguishes between the semantic content of a sentence on an occasion of use and the content asserted by an utterance of that sentence on that occasion. While in general the assertoric content of an utterance is simply its semantic content, the mechanisms of conversation sometimes force the two apart. Of special interest in this connection is one of the principles governing assertoric content in the framework, one according to which the asserted content ought to be identical at each world in the context set (the Uniformity principle).

In this paper, we present a problem for Stalnaker's meta-semantic framework, by challenging the plausibility of the Uniformity principle. We argue that the interaction of the framework with facts about epistemic accessibility—in particular, failures of epistemic transparency—cause problems for the Uniformity principle and thus for Stalnaker's framework more generally.


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O. Magidor
Natural Language and How We Use it: Psychology, Pragmatics, and Presupposition
Analysis, November 13, 2009; (2009) anp149v1.
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