Asserting

-------------- By J. L. Speranza, of the Grice Circle
for The Carnap Corner


I AM GLAD to see that Brandom, a good philosopher, has paid good attention to 'asserting' qua verb, in a title of one of his essays, with special reference to the Carnap, shall we say, and Grice 'interface'.

For Carnap, to 'assert' is a, or the, pragmatic concept par excellence. He was possibly influenced by Morris on this, as to 'assertion' being 'evidence' for 'belief' -- and in turn Morris would have been influenced by Peirce.

The route to Grice is similar. He was also influenced by Peirce and Morris, and would use, as any Oxonian worth his name would, use 'assert' and 'state' perhaps interchangeably to deal with issues of 'belief' "expression".

A good point here is

Moore


It is raining but I don't believe it.



This amused Grice in ways that probably did not amuse Carnap. Grice spends a good whole pasage to deal with in in terms of the _semantics_ (rather than the 'pragmatics') of 'asserting'.

--- I drop these notes, because as we consider the sub-components or modules of a system (System C, System G, you name it), we may come to believe (and yet, also assert) that the pragmatic subcomponent is about _this_.

One problem of divergence of Carnap and Grice would be their reactions to Quine's idiocies (I use 'idiocy' alla Aristotle, to refer to his idiosyncratic things). In "Word and Object" he considers various alternatives to the analysis (the cheek! He thinks there's no such thing!) of

Paul asserts that p.

He wants "asserts that p" to be treated as a monadic predicate. Since he won't believe in "Paul" either, that comes out as:

Fx & Gx.

i.e. x is paulising and x is asserting that p. None of that nonsense (Grice calls it 'stupidity' in WoW:RE, last page) in Carnap or Grice.

In Grice it's all very complicated, but 'assert' is associated with a type of psychological acceptance. He thinks 'accept' must do general duty for both assertoric acceptance and boulomaic acceptance.

In Carnap, the issue, perhaps because he was no Gricean, was, perhaps, simpler, and he would say things like Paul asserting that it is raining is a relation between Paul and a sentence.

Davidson may come in here with his analysis of things like: Paul asserts that. It is raining. So one has to be careful. Etc. But this _is_ fun.