Abstract
Some speech acts are made indirectly. It is thus natural to think that assertions
could also be made indirectly. Grice’s conversational implicatures appear to
be just a case of this, in which one indirectly makes an assertion or a related constative
act by means of a declarative sentence. Several arguments, however, have
been given against indirect assertions, by Davis (1999), Fricker (2012), Green
(2007, 2015), Lepore & Stone (2010, 2015) and others. This paper confronts and
rejects three considerations that have been made: arguments based on the distinction
between lying and misleading; arguments based on the ordinary concept
of assertion; and arguments based on the testimonial knowledge that assertions
provide