Peirce on Assertion

Description:

In 1902 Peirce wrote: "one and the same proposition may be affirmed, denied, judged, doubted, inwardly inquired into, put as a question, wished, asked for, effectively commanded, taught, or merely expressed, and does not thereby become a different proposition". He thus clearly distinguished between the locutionary content of a speech act and its illocutionary force. Not only that, but in his subsequent semiotic work on the classification of signs he provided taxonomic genera for the locutionary, the illocutionary, and the perlocutionary dimensions of analysis in terms of a classification of "interpretants". His ideas about assertion also emerge in his graphical logic of Existential Graphs, where, unlike in Frege's Begriffsschrift, there is no ad hoc sign of assertion but the space in which the formulas are scribed is already a sign of assertion.

The workshop "Peirce on Assertion" attempts to further research on this crucial aspect of Peirce's logic and philosophy.