The paradox of asserting clarity.
Christian Barker, Gina Taranto · 2003
assertions are felicitous only if they add new information to the common ground. After all, what use could it be to claim that a proposition is true if it is already accepted as true? In this paper we suggest that this question is not rhetorical. Our answer is that some sentences can have side effects besides adding information to the common ground, and that sometimes it is worth asserting a sentence entirely for the sake of its side-effects. To motivate our claim, consider a variation on Partee’s marble example: (1) a. Exactly two out of three marbles are on the table. b. One marble is not on the table. c. It’s under the couch. (1b) is entailed by (1a); it adds no new information about the situation under discussion. However, it causes the creation of a discourse referent for the missing marble, which allows the pronominal reference in (1c). Without (1b) it would be infelicitous to use the pronoun in (1c). Thus, as pointed out in Beaver (2002:172), it is possible to assert a sentence purely for the sake of its sideeffects,