The law statement, a linguistic assertion, must in his view be distinguished from the law itself.
The primary realization of understanding is as skilled activity in the domain of the ready-to-hand, but it can be manifested as interpretation, when Dasein explicitly takes something as something (e.g., in cases of disturbance), and also as linguistic assertion, when Dasein uses language to attribute a definite character to an entity as a mere present-at-hand object.
Despite the pragmatic criticism of the correspondence theory, Dewey, Hook and other pragmatists like C.I. Lewis recognized the legitimacy of the goal of this theory in its aspiration to realize a connection between human language about the world and the facts of the world, or between linguistic assertions and what actually "is the case" in the world.
To argue that the criterion itself is meaningless because it has no standing in Ln is to commit a category mistake, for meta-linguistic assertions need not have counterparts in their object languages (Goldfarb 1997, Creath 2004, Richardson 2004).
Thus, Timothy Williamson (2000, Chapter 11) defends at length what is come to be known as 'the knowledge account of assertion,' whereby our linguistic practices are governed by the rule: "One must: assert p only if one knows p" (2000, 243) Several objections to this argument have been made.
According to Harman, the speaker should then withdraw or explicitly relativize the assertion, or be guilty of linguistic impropriety (ibid).
Central to the controversial assertion of Silesian nationality were conflicting linguistic interpretations: some scholars (and Silesian nationalists) argued that Silesian was a language unto itself, while other scholars (and the Polish government) classified Silesian as a dialect of Polish.
But one might hold out hope that some justification for a categorial scheme could be given that did not rest entirely on the unjustified assertion of some deep correspondence between linguistic and metaphysical structures.
His early studies on the linguistic behaviour of children led him to endorse noted linguist Noam Chomsky's assertion that humans possess an innate facility for understanding language.
They are not studying formally valid inference procedures, but exploring ways in which inferences based on linguistic parallelism do or do not yield correct assertions.
The former enjoys the complacency of the au courant and the lassitude of at-hand language, while the latter believes with Thoreau that "this world is but canvas to our imaginations," that the only worthy assertion of imagination occurs by way of linguistic originality wed to intellect and emotional verity.
