Asserzione, riasserzione e responsabilità discorsiva /Assertion, reassertion and discursive responsibility
Abstract
Within Brandom’s theory of language, asserting is conceived as the basic move that speakers can make in the language game which describes our discursive practices: the game of giving and asking for reasons. In order to defend this theoretical commitment, Brandom provides a detailed account of assertions, moving from the pragmatist question “what is it that we are doing when we assert something?”, and stressing the social significance of asserting in our common discursive practices. His account sets out the notions of “discursive commitment”, “epistemic authority” and “justificatory responsibility” as crucial to understand assertion and its social significance.
The goal of this paper is to find out Brandom’s proposal on the speech act of assertion, by retracing in detail his model and stressing its theoretical problems. According to my reading, Brandom’s account is defective in considering the perspectival distinction between the two acts of asserting and reasserting in relation with the notion of responsibility he uses. My hypothesis is that this problem (that I call “the problem of derived responsibility”) can be solved by emphasizing the performative significance of assertion as first-person undertaking of commitment and discursive responsibility.References
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