The Topology of Assertion: A Diagrammatic Rationale for Our Enduring Love of Truth

Our practices prioritize truth. We take free-standing utterances of a statement to be normed on the speaker’s belief along with the truth of that statement’s content. But why is this so natural and universal? Why do we think it would be so absurd to have a communicative practice in which free-standing utterances are instead understood to be denials, and so normed to falsity or warranted disbelief? In this paper, I draw upon Peirce’s discussion of the diagrammatic naturalness of the existential graphs over the entitative graphs to provide a possible answer to this much more fundamental question.