Truth and content are theoretically prior in Frege to the act of judgment. Wittgenstein takes the opposite view, maintaining that truth is fundamentally correctness in judgment and that a content is fundamentally something to be judged. At Tractatus 4.063, Wittgenstein gives an argument against the Fregean position. Judgment can aim internally at truth, Wittgenstein holds, only if it is internal to truth that it is correctness in judgment.

This chapter introduces the theoretical constructs adopted by Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) in the treatment of information structure and addresses the question of the place of information structure in the architecture of grammar. It is claimed that RRG offers an approach to information structure which is flexible enough to capture the cross-linguistic variation in the role played by discourse in the semantics–syntax and syntax–semantics linking, while also being sufficiently constrained to make important generalizations on the expression of pragmatic states and pragmatic relations, and their interface with prosody, morphology and sentence structure.

I argue that rejection cannot be reduced to assertion. Adapting an observation by Huw Price, I argue that rejection is best conceived of as the speech act that is used to register that some other speech act is (or would be) violating a rule of the conversation game. This can be understood as registering norm violations where speech acts are characterized by their essential norms. However, rejection itself cannot be characterized by a norm. Instead, registering violations is a necessary condition for grasping the conversation game. The core observation is that the concept of an ‘illegal move’ is intelligible, so a speech act can be (say) an assertion, despite violating the essential norm of asserting. Rejection has the function of pointing out that a move is illegal. Registering rule violations is a precondition of playing games with rules (it is part of the concept ‘game’), not itself a rule in a game. A similar special role of rejection (that it is not explicable in the terms provided by a conceptual framework, but needed to grasp these terms) likely occurs in other frameworks as well, e.g. when one characterizes speech acts by commitments or their effect on a common ground.

In a seminal contribution, Paul Grice took what he called the ‘total signification of an utterance’ (i.e. the complete content someone communicates by a linguistic signal) and divided it in two, distinguishing between ‘what the speaker says’ versus ‘what the speaker implies’. However, recent developments have served to throw doubt on Grice’s taxonomy, with both sides of his divide coming under fire. I examine these challenges to Grice’s framework, but argue that they do not show that Grice’s notion of implicature is ill-founded, nor that his ’favoured sense’ of what is said is unnecessary. What they do serve to highlight is a peculiar tension in Grice’s original account. For it seems Grice merged two distinct features when defining what the speaker says versus what the speaker implicates: the idea of a content dictated by word meaning and structure alone, on the one hand, and the idea of an asserted or directly expressed proposition on the other. Yet once we resolve this tension it is possible to deliver an account of the total signification of an utterance which is both (fairly) faithful to Grice’s original account and which is able to do a great deal of explanatory work.

Is logic intrinsically normative? Given that we often make errors in reasoning, one might hold that logic is not about how we do think but about how we ought to think. However, logical laws say nothing about thinking. How does logic gain normative traction on psychological processes such as belief formation or reasoning? To answer this question, the chapter begins by examining the debate between descriptivists, who hold that logic simply describes truth-preserving entailment relations, and normativists, who hold that logic is intrinsically normative. Husserl was a descriptivist, and Heidegger’s early work follows him. But Heidegger’s phenomenological account of the truth-predicate as grounded in the comportment of assertion, and his analysis of the “hermeneutic as” that grounds such comportment, affords a different perspective on the debate. Logic provides constitutive norms for the practice of reason-giving, a kind of rationality – being answerable to others – that is not an essential property of, but is nevertheless demanded by, Dasein’s being as “care.” The chapter concludes by showing how Heidegger’s phenomenological approach can affirm the main claims of descriptivism while insisting that “the reign of logic” in philosophy “disintegrates into the turbulence of a more original questioning.”

This chapter examines the connection between Heidegger’s analysis of assertions and the present-at-hand. It argues that Heidegger does not claim that assertions can only intend present-at-hand entities. Only in limiting cases, after a changeover in our understanding of being, are assertions so constrained. There are both textual and phenomenological grounds for this argument. Phenomenologically it is evident that many assertions are part of circumspective and absorbed dealing with equipment. The textual argument lies in an interpretation of Heidegger’s underdeveloped notions of unthematic understanding and the changeover. The chapter draws on Aron Gurwitsch’s phenomenology of thematic fields and argues that the changeover, in Being and Time, functions like a figure–ground switch. An upshot of the argument is that there is no paradox in Being and Time making assertions about entities that are not present-at-hand. It also explains Heidegger’s careful methodological considerations about how to thematize and grasp these entities phenomenologically.

This chapter examines the different functions that resolutions serve in state submissions before international courts and tribunals. The analysis revolves around two interrelated issues. On the one hand, it discerns between instances in which states treat resolutions as evidence of state practice and instances in which states treat resolutions as the practice of the General Assembly. On the other hand, the analysis evaluates the extent to which states and judges hold different views on the legal significance of resolutions. It demonstrates that issues relating to the legal significance of resolutions revolve around a double dichotomy generated by the different positions taken by states and judges in relation to assertion and attribution of the source of the legal significance of resolutions to state practice or the separate will of the General Assembly. It contends that it is difficult, if not impossible, to generalize about the legal significance of resolutions given the character of international polyarchy of the General Assembly. It then offers insights into the concept of autonomy of the General Assembly from its member states.

Chapter 8 takes a closer look at the relation between the knowledge rule of assertion and the divide between contextualist and invariantist semantics for knowledge attributions. We argue that DeRose’s influential argument that the knowledge rule of assertion demands contextualism fails and show how it can be turned on its head.

Chapter 5 fits the knowledge rule of assertion into the functionalist picture. We ask the question of why assertion should be governed by the knowledge rule, look at some proposals from the rule first camp, due, respectively, to Bach and Hindriks on the one hand and Douven on the other, and show that they remain unsatisfactory. We then offer a functionalist account of the status of the knowledge rule of assertion as well as a functionalist rationale for it.

The vast majority of the literature on the knowledge rule of assertion focuses on the claim that knowledge is necessary for permissible assertion. Chapter 3 turns to the thesis that knowledge is sufficient for permissible assertion and defends it against recent objections by Jessica Brown and Jennifer Lackey.

Chapter 2 discusses a number of classical problems for the knowledge rule of assertion and argues that these problems can be solved. Worth special notice here is a general normative framework with accounts of criticisability, blamelessness and blameworthiness that we develop. Applied to the case of assertion, this framework allows us to give a well-motivated and knowledge-rule-friendly response to some classical cases that are often thought to show that the knowledge rule of assertion is too strong.

According to the knowledge rule of assertion, one must assert that p only if one knows that p. Chapter 1 mounts a case for the knowledge rule of assertion. It surveys relevant evidence for it in the literature and develops a couple of additions that serve to strengthen the case for the knowledge rule of assertion.

Chapter 6 turns to rules of assertion on the hearer side. One of the central aims of this chapter is to argue for one specific such rule which requires hearers believe what is asserted. We argue that in order to make proper sense of testimonial injustice, we must countenance a duty to believe on the part of the hearer. Having looked at some proposals that emerge from recent literature on conversational pressure and found them wanting, we offer a functionalist account of this duty to belief.