“You Should Know” as Imperative

DOI

10.2991/icelaic-18.2018.72How to use a DOI?

Keywords

knowledge; belief; imperative; utterance; truth; semantic meaning; human power

Abstract

We often use the verb “know” to form utterances which look like imperatives (like “You should know that p”). But while people can choose to believe in certain subject-matter proposed in an utterance they cannot literally choose to know that subject-matter, because to know means not only to be in certain state of mind but also to be in certain relation to the world, and we cannot literally choose to be or not to be in corresponding relation. We cannot do it because being in such state is partly determined by facts of the world. Then “You should know that...” may be an imperative? Or cannot they? The semantic meaning of utterances of the form “You should know…” is investigated in this article, and the author shows that in spite of human inability to choose to make oneself knowing what is required to be known by such imperatives they still may be treated as partial imperatives.

Copyright

© 2018, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Cherniak Alexei
PY  - 2018/12
DA  - 2018/12
TI  - “You Should Know” as Imperative
BT  - Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Education, Language, Art and Inter-cultural Communication (ICELAIC 2018)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 323
EP  - 325
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/icelaic-18.2018.72
DO  - 10.2991/icelaic-18.2018.72
ID  - Alexei2018/12
ER  -