Noah Betz-Richman

Human speech is socially meaningful: Linguistic expressions and forms carry information about the social properties of the speaker and/or the discourse situation, independent of their at‐issue, truth‐conditional, compositionally determined contents. Further, speakers leverage these social meanings to perform conversational moves. In this article, we synthesize recent work that incorporates social meaning into the philosophy of language. We showcase similarities and differences among classes of socially meaningful speech and review some of the main theoretical challenges such speech raises. In particular, we contrast indexical, intentional, and neo‐inferentialist approaches to social meaning; ask whether and when socially meaningful speech should be treated as representing or as altering the world; and explore what semantic classifications and pragmatic functions to assign social meaning. We conclude by proposing some promising avenues for future research.

The concept of lying is generally assumed to be closely related to the concept of assertion. However, the literature on lying has focused almost exclusively on lies expressed by unqualified assertions. Sometimes a speaker chooses to qualify her assertion by hedging, making her utterance a hedged declarative. This paper defends the thesis that lies can be expressed by untruthful hedged declaratives, and explores the implications of this thesis for the definition of lying. Many standard approaches to the definition of lying allow lies to be expressed by untruthful hedged declaratives, which may explain why these cases have been ignored in the literature. However, untruthful hedged declaratives present a problem for a recently-proposed theory that analyzes lying in terms of the Knowledge Norm of Assertion. According to this theory, a necessary condition on lying is that in asserting that p, the speaker represents herself as knowing that p; however, in making an untruthful hedged declarative a speaker represents herself as having an epistemic attitude weaker than knowledge. The fact that such a theory fails to adequately explain untruthful hedged declaratives provides a reason to prefer alternative theories of lying. The discussion draws out some important observations about the concepts of lying, assertion, belief, and the relations between them.