Juan Ignacio Murillo Vargas

This paper offers a unified account of Moorean speech acts beyond assertion. While the knowledge norm of assertion provides a familiar explanation of Moorean assertions, it does not generalize easily to non‐assertoric cases. I argue that Stalnaker's model of common ground provides a suitable framework for explaining these phenomena. Speech acts propose updates to the common ground, understood as targeting common knowledge, involving both their satisfaction and sincerity conditions, and Moorean speech acts universally generate incompatible update proposals. The resulting account applies across speech act categories and explains characteristic patterns of conversational coordination and presupposition.

This essay offers an explanation of how assertions express that the speaker has a propositional attitude toward what's asserted. The explanation is that this feature of assertion is owed to a hearer's spontaneous mindreading. I call this the assertoric mindreading hypothesis. Once developed and defended, the hypothesis is used to investigate which attitude is expressed. Since the attitude expressed is the attitude tracked during mindreading, the attitude must have a certain profile. It is argued that only factive attitudes like knowledge have this profile. Non‐factive attitudes like belief or acceptance are ineligible.