Online research in philosophy

In this paper I consider the concept of an illocutionary rule - i.e., the rule of the form "X counts as 7 in context C" - and examine the role it plays in explaining the nature of verbal communication and the conventionality of natural languages. My aim is to find a middle ground between John R. Searle's view, according to which every conventional speech act has to be explained in terms of illocutionary rules that underlie its performance, and the view held by Ruth G Millikan, who seems to suggest that the formula "X counts as Y in context C" has no application in our theorizing about human linguistic practice. I claim, namely, that the concept of an illocutionary rule is theoretically useful, though not explanatorily basic. I argue that using the formula "X counts as Y in context C" we can classify illocutionary acts by what Millikan calls their conventional outcomes, and thereby make them susceptible to naturalistic explanation.

Rae Langton and Jennifer Hornsby have argued that pornography might create a climate whereby a woman’s ability to refuse sex is literally silenced or removed. Their central argument is that a failure of ‘uptake’ of the woman’s intention means that the illocutionary speech act of refusal has not taken place. In this paper, I challenge the claims from the Austinian philosophy of language which feature in this argument. I argue that uptake is not in general required for illocution, nor is it required for refusal in particular. I conclude with remarks on the relationship between illocutionary and perlocutionary speech-acts.

What are we doing when we say "I forgive you"? This paper employs Austin's notion of illocutionary force to analyze three different kinds of acts in which we might engage when saying "I forgive you." We might use it (1) to disclose an emotional condition, (2) to declare a debt cancelled, or (3) to commit ourselves to a future course of action. I suggest that the forgiving utterances we seek possess qualities of both the first and the third types of speech-acts.

In this paper, illocutionary acts of commanding will be differentiated from perlocutionary acts that affect preferences of addressees in a new dynamic logic which combines the preference upgrade introduced in DEUL (dynamic epistemic upgrade logic) by van Benthem and Liu with the deontic update introduced in ECL II (eliminative command logic II) by Yamada. The resulting logic will incorporate J. L. Austin’s distinction between illocutionary acts as acts having mere conventional effects and perlocutionary acts as acts having real effects upon attitudes and actions of agents, and help us understand why saying so can make it so in explicit performative utterances. We will also discuss how acts of commanding give rise to so-called “deontic dilemmas” and how we can accommodate most deontic dilemmas without triggering so-called “deontic explosion”.

It has become standard for feminist philosophers of language to analyze Catherine MacKinnon's claim in terms of speech act theory. Backed by the Austinian observation that speech can do things and the legal claim that pornography is speech, the claim is that the speech acts performed by means of pornography silence women. This turns upon the notion of illocutionary silencing, or disablement. In this paper I observe that the focus by feminist philosophers of language on the failure to achieve uptake for illocutionary acts serves to group together different kinds of illocutionary silencing which function in very different ways.

Katz offers such a grammatical account, in which makes it possible for the first time to explain the illocutionary potential of sentences within grammar.

In this paper I try to use the conceptual framework of the speech act theory to clarify a few points regarding the philosophical debate about the existence of negative acts. For this, I start by looking at some of the most popular candidates to this title: failing, omitting, avoiding and refraining. In the second part of my paper I consider some examples of verbal actions and try to investigate how would the property of 'being negative' apply to them, concluding that we could only say about the locutionary contentent of a speech act that it is negative. Since the illocutionary force, which gives the kind of the verbal act performed, cannot be properly called 'negative', there cannot be any 'negative speech acts'. Next, I try to show how this can be applied to such cases. At the end of the paper I propose that an analysis of the situations in which our actions seem to oppose each other should replace the misleading problem of negative acts.

Abstract: A psychologically plausible analysis of the way we assign illocutionary forces to utterances is formulated using a 'contextualist' analysis of what is said. The account offered makes use of J. L. Austin's distinction between phatic acts (sentence meaning), locutionary acts (contextually determined what is said), illocutionary acts, and perolocutionary acts. In order to avoid the conflation between illocutionary and perlocutionary levels, assertive, directive and commissive illocutionary forces are defined in terms of inferential potential with respect to the common ground. Illocutionary forces are conceived as automatic but optional components of the process of interpretation.

In this article, I would like to clarify Austin's thesis that illocutionary acts are essentially conventional and to show, how this idea is connected with his concept of securing uptake. Contrary to what most critics believe, I will show that Austin provides a criterion characterising the nature of all illocutionary acts and allowing to distinguish them from perlocutionary acts.

As is shown in the introduction of the book, the notion "illocutionary act" is used with quite a number of essentially different meanings; consequently, it is quite unclear what an "illocutionary act" is actually supposed to be. This problem is the starting point of the thesis. An argument is stated, to the effect that the introduction and use of scholarly terms like, for instance, "illocutionary act", or "performative sentence", is not entirely arbitrary. It is argued that technical terms should not be re-defined without a reason, but in the absence of reasons to the contrary should be used in the way in which they have originally been introduced. This argument is applied to the notion "illocutionary act". John L. Austin is the one who introduced this notion. Consequently, his conception of these acts should be adopted unless there are good reasons to the contrary. Therefore the book provides a detailed analysis of Austin's account, and his original conception of these acts is reconstructed. The most popular alternative account of "illocutionary acts" is John R. Searle's. Therefore, secondly, the book provides an analysis of Searle's famous account of "illocutionary acts" - the first really detailed one available, including Searle's own work. It is shown that what Searle presents is in fact extremely sketchy, and can certainly not be viewed, as it often is, as an elaborated theory. It is further argued that the fundamental assumptions about language which Searle intends to illustrate with his account of "illocutionary acts" are mistaken, so that in general a theory following the lines Searle suggests is doomed to failure. Finally it is shown that Searle's account of "illocutionary acts", as far as it goes, is not an adequate adoption of the conception Austin introduced. Hence Searle's account is no reasonable alternative to Austin's account.