Published : 2024-12-30

The Warranted Assertibility Maneuvers and a Test for Conversational Implicature

Abstract

Keith DeRose has pointed out that one can attempt to defend the invariability of knowledge attributions by means of what is known as the warranted assertability maneuver. Invariantists like Timothy Black who employ this maneuver maintain that the truth-value of a knowledge attribution does not change with the context of its assertion; what may change is what the assertions conversationally imply, resulting in the impression that the truth-value of the attribution changes. An analogous maneuver is discernible in various philosophical debates. Fred Adams, among others, contends that fictional sentences lack truth value; if such sentences appear to have such value, it is only by virtue of the fact that by uttering such sentences, one is conversationally implying a proposition. Further, scholars such as Emery and Hill assert that false conversational implicatures, stemming from the assertions of counterpossibles, contribute to the misleading perception that viciously true counterpossibles are false. In the discourse dedicated to veracity of knowledge, Alan Hazlett argued that ‘p’ does not follow from ‘A knows that p’; rather, ‘p’ emerges as a conversational implicature of such a knowledge attribution. The merits of the maneuver hinges upon whether the assertions under consideration generate specific conversational implicatures. In this paper, I will demonstrate that this can be questioned. To this end, I identify a property of conversational implicatures—specifically, their sensitivity to what I term pressing YES/NO questions. In essence, an affirmative response to such questions fails to generate the conversational implicature that the assertion of a given sentence might elicit in an alternative context. However, as I show in the paper, this property is not possessed by propositions which, according to the mentioned researchers, are supposed to be conversational implicatures of the assertions of the sentences under consideration.

Keywords:

test for conversational implicature, warranted assertability maneuver, conversational implicature



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Roczniki Filozoficzne · ISSN 0035-7685 | eISSN 2450-002X
© Towarzystwo Naukowe KUL & Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II

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