Assoc. Prof. Dimitar Vatsov will present his research proposal on the topic: "What Do We Do When We Say "This Is the Truth!"?" on 21 April 2016 (Thursday) at 16:30h at CAS Conference Hall.

Summary:

I will examine truth-telling as a specific performative in John Austin's sense: as a performative utterance made here and now in a situational and indexically-oriented context. That is to say, my project takes a maximally pragmatic and contextual approach to truth-telling in the spirit of ordinary language philosophy.

The comparison between performatives of the "It is true!" type and a particular type of commands – such as "Take as an example!", "Do this always!", or "Follow the rule!" – is distinctive and constructive for my analysis. It is through this comparison that I will try to find the basic meaning of the performatives that declare the truth: telling the truth is a practical gesture of providing an example, an instance, a sample, a model to be followed.

But unlike explicit commands, which usually indexically indicate the concrete situational circumstances as well as the speaker and addressee of the command, truth-telling hides the situational context in which such an utterance is made. Hence the need to demonstrate that truth-telling is a specific performative whose main function is to produce maximum de-indexicalization and, thereby, maximum generalization of what is declared to be true: it is a practical gesture of de-contextualizing the utterance, through which the utterance should produce an extra-contextual standard to be followed. This is the performative purpose of such utterances – their "pragmatic implication" in the sense of Stanley Cavell (1998: 9ff.).