Assertion and rejection

This thesis discusses the interplay between the speech acts of assertion and rejection. First, it defends that it is even sensible to distinguish these two speech acts, against an old consensus—going back to Frege—that rejection is merely negative assertion. To this end, I introduce the speech act of weak rejection and defend it against its critics. Based on this notion, I develop a logic of asserted and rejected content—weak bilateral logic—and demonstrate its usefulness in the analysis of natural language inferences