Inferentialism and collaged assertions

We often use scare-quotes to indicate that some words in our statement are to be interpreted as if spoken by someone else. (This is a different thing from quoting those words, which involves referring to them.) We thereby produce what I call collaged utterances: utterances that collage, in this way, utterances made by others. Often we do this because we don’t understand the collaged words, or because they express concepts that we reject. In such cases we are not able to produce a justification of the content our collaged utterance expresses. In this paper I investigate how collaged utterances relate to Robert Brandom’s account of the speech act of assertion. At first blush it seems that his account cannot explain how collaged utterances could be assertions. But on closer examination Brandom’s account stands in need of modification; and that when so modified, it can easily count many collaged utterances as fully fledged assertions.