Authors
L. Bussière
Date (dd-mm-yyyy)
2019-10-03
Title
Dissent and Rejection
Journal
Erkenntnis
Publication Year
2019-10-03
Document type
Article
Abstract
Assent and dissent are fundamental attitudes, the expression of which determines the sense of sentences in a bilateral manner. Although I maintain the equivalence between rejection and expression of dissent, I cast doubt on the limitation of rejection to the content level. Indeed, the rejection of an utterance can occur both at a pragmatic level and at a semantic level. From there, I argue that an account of rejection should include the category of ‘pragmatic rejection’, which does not follow from a semantic rejection, nor is a particular instance of rejection of a proposition. Then, I examine whether silence is a good candidate for a pragmatic equivalent of the third possible attitude to a proposition: suspension
of judgment. Having defended the claim that it is not, and that it should not be considered an assent or a dissent either, I further this study of rejection by seeing how an account of rejection can be drawn from various standpoints on assertion. To do so, I offer a classification of the four contemporary accounts of assertion. Then, I examine how the theories of rejection constructed from these accounts fare with respect to the features of rejection previously examined in this paper: weak rejection and the existence of pragmatic rejection. I draw conclusions on the type of theory that would accommodate best a bilateral view that treats assertion and
rejection as two equally important acts.
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https://hdl.handle.net/11245.1/ae6f3356-0266-4f2a-b047-7f0f9e8d18a4