Universitat de Barcelona, Spain; Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna, Italy.
Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany.
Cognition. 2021 Jul;212:104657. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104657. Epub 2021 Mar 31.
Assertions are our standard communicative devices for sharing and acquiring information. Recent studies seemingly provide converging evidence that assertions are subject to a factive norm: you are entitled to make an assertion only if it is true. However, these studies assume that we can treat participants' judgements about what an agent 'should say' as evidence of their intuitions about assertability. This paper argues that this assumption is incorrect, so the conclusions drawn in the aforementioned studies are unwarranted. We provide evidence that most people do not interpret statements about what one 'should say' as statements about assertability, but rather as statements about what is in the agent's interest to do. Measures for prompting the intended reading of the test question are identified, and their efficacy is tested. We found that when these measures are implemented, people's judgements consistently and overwhelmingly align with non-factive accounts of assertion.
断言是我们用于分享和获取信息的标准交际工具。最近的研究似乎提供了趋同的证据，表明断言受到事实规范的约束：只有在真实的情况下，你才有资格做出断言。然而，这些研究假设我们可以将参与者对代理人“应该说什么”的判断视为他们对可断言性的直觉的证据。本文认为，这种假设是不正确的，因此上述研究中得出的结论是没有根据的。我们提供的证据表明，大多数人不会将关于一个人“应该说什么”的陈述解释为关于可断言性的陈述，而是将其解释为关于代理人做什么符合其利益的陈述。确定了提示测试问题预期阅读的措施，并测试了它们的效果。我们发现，当实施这些措施时，人们的判断始终与非事实断言的解释一致，并且压倒性地倾向于这种解释。
