Directing Thought

I consider the claim that directing is a more fundamental kind of speech act than asserting, in the sense that the conditions under which an action counts as an assertion are sufficient for it to count as a directive. I show how this follows from a particular way of conceiving intentionalism about speech acts, on which acts of assertion are attempts at changing a common body of information—or conversational common ground—grounded in conversational participants' practical attitude of acceptance. I suggest that the function of assertion in conversation is not to share information, but to signal that we can be relied on to act as though some information is true, and to foster that same reliability in others.