Introduction

Many times, what we say and think proves to be wrong. It might turn out that what we thought to be a comforting remark was, in fact, making things worse. Or that a joke was inappropriate. Or that yelling out loud was rude. Perhaps more importantly, there are plenty of cases in which what we said turns out to be false: we spoke without paying attention, we were misinformed or tricked, or we realize that we made a reasoning mistake. Sometimes we “take back” the assertions we made when we realize they are no longer true. Such speech acts of taking back can be performed in various ways: more formally, as effected in a court of law or when an official speaks to the press, or more informally in our day-by-day interactions. They can also be done explicitly, as in the cases just mentioned, but also implicitly, with our interlocutors taking it for granted that we intend to take something back. These acts of taking back are known as retraction. This introduction sketches the main debates in which retraction has been appealed to, signals the issues the authors think are interesting and worth pursuing, and describes what the contributions to this volume—gathering together for the first time work from the semantics of perspectival expresisons and from Speech Act Theory—amount to.