Arguments and explanations are two kinds of speech that have not always been properly distinguished. Currently, emphasis has been placed, both in the pedagogy of science and in argumentation studies, on the necessity of differentiating them in order to properly grasp the nature of explanations and arguments. Demarcation criteria between both of them have been most explicitly proposed in argumentation theory. However, here I will argue that the criteria that are typically used in argumentation theory to distinguish between an argument and an explanation (which I call the “standard distinction”) suffer from several problems. On the one hand, in certain relevant cases the criteria provide no guidance or yield questionable results. On the other hand, the criteria of distinction have been limited to the domain of theoretical argumentation, ignoring the peculiarities of the practical domain.

This text aims to clarify what and what kind of commitments are acquired by a speaker in assertion; assertive commitments are characterized as practical attitudes directly related to reasons. The text has three moments: in the first one, the development of the idea of assertion as a speech act is presented and it becomes evident that from its first conceptions, the speaker’s commitment plays an important role; in the second one, by means of a comparison with promise, it is clarified what kind of commitments a speaker acquires when making an assertion–the notions of primary and secondary commitments are introduced and applied specifically to the case of assertive commitments–; finally, in the third one, it is shown how assertive commitments can be understood as practical attitudes.