Asserting Clarity & Managing Awareness

Abstract

Barker and Taranto (2003) introduce the “paradox of asserting clarity,” arguing that true assertions of the form It is clear that p are necessarily uninformative. Following a Stalnakerian perspective according to which assertions are felicitous only if they are informative, assertions of clarity should therefore never be felicitous: either they are false or they are uninformative. I address this problem in two ways. First, I argue for a semantics of clear according to which assertions of clarity may be both true and straightforwardly informative in certain contexts. Second, I argue that in those contexts in which asserting the clarity of p appears to be uninformative, such an assertion may nonetheless by felicitous in virtue of its function of raising awareness of p. I formalize this proposal using a model of awareness in discourse following Franke and Jager (2011).