This is a past event
Professor Peter Graham, Department of Philosophy, Program in Linguistics at the University of California, Riverside.
Playing and Asserting
Many philosophers have seen a strong analogy between speech acts and rules of games. Some have gone so far as to argue that the speech act of assertion is constituted by an epistemic rule in just the way that games are partly constituted by their rules. Does the analogy hold up? There are recent arguments designed to show that it does not. These arguments report to show that there is a kind of rule of games that cannot be broken, but that the same kind of rule can be broken when asserting. So there’s an important disanalogy between assertion and playing games. Partly through an analysis of what is it to play a game and the analogy that would hold for assertion, I show that these arguments fall short. To answer the question as to whether assertion is partly constituted by a rule, armchair, arguments about playing games will not suffice.
- Speaker
- Peter Graham, University of California
- Venue
- CB009, 50/52 College Bounds