Vitalij Dolgorukov

Higher School of Economics, Moscow

Irony, Deception and Lying: an Epistemic Taxonomy for Assertions

5 April 2019, 16:00

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: We aim to present a taxonomy for assertions, describing both cooperative and non-cooperative types of the speaker’s behaviour. Our model involves the combination of 4 parameters of assertions: its relation to reality, its relation to the shared speaker’s and hearer’s doxastic attitudes, its relation to speaker’s doxastic attitudes, and the degree of a speech act indirectness. The different combinations of these parameters yield 20 types of assertions, including different forms of lying, deceiving, irony and misleading. Also, we will demonstrate that our approach can shed some light on some other issues in pragmatics: the distinction between generalized and particularized implicatures, logical properties of the common ground, an explanation for the hierarchical order of Gricean maxims and some others.