Assertion As A Speech Act

In recent research of philosophy of language, huge amount of interest has been attracted by the notion of assertion. I believe that clarifying the notion of assertion will do great help to our work in many related areas such as the research of speech act theory, truth theory, action theory, semantics, pragmatics, logic, epistemology, etc. My interest in accounts of assertion is motivated in part by my particular concern with the framework of speech act theory. The research question I intend to discuss in this paper is that how to characterize assertion as a particular speech act and distinguish it from other speech-act types like questions, commands, promises and so on.In this paper, I classify the contemporary theories of assertion into four main categories:conventional theories of assertion, normative theories of assertion, theories based on certain effects of assertion and theories based on certain (psychological) causes of assertion. By analyzing their different ways and theoretical defects in operating the notion of assertion, I try to indicate that the form of a proper theory of assertion within the framework of speech act theory is better be constructed based on a understanding of the relationship between the surface properties and the deep properties of an utterance.