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Full Idea
Stalnaker's guiding idea is that in making an assertion the speaker is trying to get the audience to rule out certain possibilities. ....If all goes well, further planning will proceed on the basis of a smaller and more accurate range of possibilities.
Gist of Idea
An assertion is an attempt to rule out certain possibilities, narrowing things down for good planning
Source
report of Robert C. Stalnaker (Assertion [1978]) by Laura Schroeter - Two-Dimensional Semantics
Book Ref
'Stanford Online Encyclopaedia of Philosophy', ed/tr. Stanford University [plato.stanford.edu], p.37
A Reaction
This sounds intuitively rather plausible, and is a nice original thought. This is what we pay clever chaps like Stalnaker to come up with. It seems to imply some notion of verisimilitude (qv. under 'truth'), depending on how much narrowing happens.
| 24097 | The pragmatics of language is more comprehensible than the meaning [Nietzsche] |
| 18046 | Grice's maxim of quantity says be sufficiently informative [Grice, by Magidor] |
| 18045 | Grice's maxim of quality says do not assert what you believe to be false [Grice, by Magidor] |
| 18044 | Grice's maxim of manner requires one to be as brief as possible [Grice, by Magidor] |
| 10991 | Key conversational maxims are 'quality' (assert truth) and 'quantity' (leave nothing out) [Grice, by Read] |
| 9043 | We use expressions 'deferentially', to conform to the use of other people [Evans] |
| 14718 | An assertion is an attempt to rule out certain possibilities, narrowing things down for good planning [Stalnaker, by Schroeter] |
| 3169 | A simple chaining device can't build sentences containing 'either..or', or 'if..then' [Rey] |
| 21639 | 'Background deletion' is appropriately omitting background from an answer [Hofweber] |
| 18042 | The infelicitiousness of trivial falsity is explained by expectations, or the loss of a context-set [Magidor] |
| 18043 | The infelicitiousness of trivial truth is explained by uninformativeness, or a static context-set [Magidor] |