This article aims to connect Austin's seminal notion of a speech act with developments in philosophy of language over the last forty odd years. It starts by considering how speech acts might be conceived in Austin's general theory. Then it turns to the illocutionary acts with which much philosophical writing on speech acts has been concerned, and finally to the performatives which Austin's own treatment of speech as action took off from.

Ethical oaths for bankers, economists and managers are increasingly seen as successful instruments to ensure more responsible behaviour. In this article, we reflect on the nature of ethical oaths. Based on John Austin's speech act theory and the work of Emmanuel Levinas, we introduce a performative concept of ethical oaths that is characterised by (1) the existential self-performative of the one I want to be, which is (2) demanded by the public context. Because ethical oaths are (3) structurally threatened (...) by the possibility of infelicity or failure, we stress (4) the behavioural aspect of ethical oaths in economics and business. We conclude that a performative concept of ethical oaths can contribute to more ethical behaviour in economics and business, because the performative involves action and behaviour. At the same time, it becomes clear that a radical new perspective on the nature, function and limitation of oaths is needed. (shrink)

This paper endorses a view of argumentation and arguments that relates both to a special type of speech action, namely, the performance of speech acts of arguing. Its aim is to advance an analysis of those acts that takes into account two kinds of norms related to their correct performance, namely, felicity conditions and objective requirements related to the “correspondence with the facts.” It assumes that the requirement that certain objective conditions be satisfied is among the (...) set of felicity conditions of speech acts of arguing. Taking this into account helps clarify the position and role of warrants in the performance and assessment of these acts. (shrink)

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”. (shrink)

This article forms part of a larger project on the apocryphal Book of Judith. It explores the performative nature of turmoil, trauma and tenacity as found in the second half of the book (9–16). The impetus for this investigation is the work done by same author on chapters 1–8 of Judith while focusing on a similar theme. The present article suggests that the exploration of the turmoil, trauma and tenacity to be found in chapters 1–8 does not comprehensively represent all (...) aspects that this topic has to offer to the reader of Judith. The contention here is that the theme of turmoil, trauma and the resultant tenacity in the second half of Judith needs further scholarly exploration as it reveals contrasting developments regarding two rivalling camps, that is, the Israelites and the Assyrians. From a speech act interpretive angle, the article asserts that turmoil, trauma and tenacity are intentionally utilised as a literary tool for indicating honour (Israelites) and shame (Assyrians). This has the potential to persuade the reader to make choices and/or decisions as they read the story.Contribution: The article is a continuation of my work on the first part of Judith (chapters 1–8), as indicated. Its main contribution rests on its unique approach to investigating the performative nature of trauma, turmoil and tenacity in the second part of the book, namely, chapters 9–16. The study of the theme of trauma, turmoil and tenacity in Judith is insightful and thought-provoking and does advance research around this fascinating book. (shrink)

This paper develops a way to model performative speech acts within a framework of dynamic semantics. It introduces a distinction between performative and informative updates, where informative updates filter out indices of context sets (cf. Stalnaker, Cole (ed), Pragmatics, Academic Press, 1978), whereas performative updates change their indices (cf. Szabolcsi, Kiefer (ed), Hungarian linguistics, John Benjamins, 1982). The notion of index change is investigated in detail, identifying implementations by a function or by a relation. Declarations like _the meeting (...) is (hereby) adjourned_ are purely performative updates that just enforce an index change on a context set. Assertions like _the meeting is (already) adjourned_ are analyzed as combinations of a performative update that introduces a guarantee of the speaker for the truth of the proposition, and an informative update that restricts the context set so that this proposition is true. The first update is the illocutionary act characteristic for assertions; the second is the primary perlocutionary act, and is up for negotiations with the addressee. Several other speech acts will be discussed, in particular commissives, directives, exclamatives, optatives, and definitions, which are all performative, and differ from related assertions. The paper concludes a discussion of locutionary acts, which are modelled as index changers as well, and proposes a novel analysis for the performative marker _hereby._. (shrink)

This paper endorses a view of argumentation and arguments that relates both to a special type of speech action, namely, the performance of speech acts of arguing. Its aim is to advance an analysis of those acts that takes into account two kinds of norms related to their correct performance, namely, felicity conditions and objective requirements related to the “correspondence with the facts.” It assumes that the requirement that certain objective conditions be satisfied is among the (...) set of felicity conditions of speech acts of arguing. Taking this into account helps clarify the position and role of warrants in the performance and assessment of these acts. (shrink)

Marina Sbisà has long advocated that we think of the illocutionary force of a speech act in terms of the act’s (predictable) systematic effects on the normative relationship between a speaker and her audience. Building on this idea, I argue that the hypothesis of distinctive speech act norms can be used to explain how participants in a conversation coordinate the normative expectations they have of one another in conversation. Such an explanation earns its keep by explaining how speakers (...) render themselves illocutionarily intelligible to their audiences—thereby enabling us to articulate the sense of mutuality that characterizes speech exchanges. One important upshot of my reflections is that we should reject both Austin’s thesis that the successful performance of an illocutionary act depends on audience uptake and Sbisà’s claim that Austin’s thesis is required if we are to make sense of the illocutionary dimension of speech in terms of an act’s systematic effects on participants’ normative expectations of one another. (shrink)

Foundations of Speech Act Theoryoffers a timely, thorough and, above all, compelling examination of the complexities of illocutionary acts, performatives, and their phenomenological basis. Savas Tsohatzidis has collected an impressive range of international scholars on the subject. Clearly demonstrating the relevance of speech act theory to semantic theory, the collection further interrogates the inability of pragmatic theories of illocution to properly locate such speech acts within the logic of phenomenology and intersubjectivity.

The business of a sentence is not only to describe some state of affairs but also to perform other kinds of speech acts like ordering, suggesting, asking, etc. Understanding the kind of action performed by a speaker who utters a sentence is a multimodal process which involves the computing of verbal and non-verbal information. This work aims at investigating if the understanding of a speech act is affected by the gender of the actor that produces the utterance (...) in combination with a certain facial expression. Experimental data collected show that, as compared to men, women are less likely to be perceived as performers of orders and are more likely to be perceived as performers of questions. This result reveals a gender bias which reflects a process of women’s subordination according to which women are hardly considered as holding the hierarchical social position required for the correct execution of an order. (shrink)

With the same intellectual courage with which she addressed issues of gender, Judith Butler turns her attention to speech and conduct in contemporary political life, looking at several efforts to target speech as conduct that has become subject to political debate and regulation. Reviewing hate speech regulations, anti-pornography arguments, and recent controversies about gay self-declaration in the military, Judith Butler asks whether and how language acts in each of these cultural sites.

With the same intellectual courage with which she addressed issues of gender, Judith Butler turns her attention to speech and conduct in contemporary political life, looking at several efforts to target speech as conduct that has become subject to political debate and regulation. Reviewing hate speech regulations, anti-pornography arguments, and recent controversies about gay self-declaration in the military, Judith Butler asks whether and how language acts in each of these cultural sites.

This article investigates the performative nature of forensic dialogue as a literary device in the story of Susanna. Whilst Susanna scholars have brought significant contributions in recent years, this article contends that there has never been a special focus on the performative function of forensic dialogue in Susanna. This aspect should be explored further as it can contribute to how the story can be read, interpreted and applied in contemporary society. The article suggests that the forensic dialogue in Susanna is (...) possibly an intentional literary strategy by the implied author and has a performative function to benefit the implied reader. This means that the implied author uses forensic dialogue to invite participation from the reader. From a speech act interpretive angle, this article attempts to prove this claim by exploring the aforementioned literary device in Susanna and demonstrating its performative nature aimed at the reader. Contribution: The article’s main contribution rests on its unique approach to investigating the performative nature of forensic dynamics in Susanna. This technique of exploring narrative texts does also advance the Susanna scholarship, in that it offers a reader yet another way of reading, interpreting and applying the story to the contemporary society. (shrink)

Concerns over conflicts of interest in academic research and medical practice continue to provoke a great deal of discussion. What is most obvious in this discourse is that when COIs are declared, or perceived to exist in others, there is a focus on both the descriptive question of whether there is a COI and, subsequently, the normative question of whether it is good, bad or neutral. We contend, however, that in addition to the descriptive and normative, COI declarations and accusations (...) can be understood as performatives. In this article, we apply J.L. Austin’s performative speech-act theory to COI discourses and illustrate how this works using a contemporary case study of COI in biomedical publishing. We argue that using Austin’s theory of performative speech-acts serves to highlight the social arrangements and role of authorities in COI discourse and so provides a rich framework to examine declarations, accusations and judgements of COI that often arise in the context of biomedical research and practice. (shrink)

White lies, lies that are beneficial to the addressee and uttered out of concern for them, are pervasive in daily life. This raises a prima facie question: if white lies are so common, are they still lies? I tackle this question from the perspective of speech act theory, using the case of white lies to shed light on the broader question of whether lying itself can be considered a type of speech act. Adopting Sbisà’s (Uptake and Conventionality in (...) Illocution. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 5 33–52. Reprinted in Marina Sbisà (forthcoming), Essays on Speech Acts and Other Topics in Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) neo-Austinian approach that places the emphasis on the achievement of certain conventional effects, I claim that malicious lying cannot be a type of speech act. However, white lies are a type of speech act, a claim which finds support in three types of evidence: the conventionality of means by which white lies are performed, their online processing, and their acquisition. Moreover, the existence of a continuum between white (harmless) lies (which are a type of speech act) and malicious (harmful) lies (which are not) suggests that whether an utterance performs a certain type of speech act or not can be a matter of degree. In other words, the property itself of being a speech act of a certain kind, an utterance’s speech-act-hood, so to speak, may be graded. This is an interesting result, which applies to speech acts more generally, beyond lying. (shrink)

Recently the CJEU decision in the case of ‘Ewa Glawischnig-Piesczek v. Facebook Ireland Limited’ has raised the issue of the transcultural/trans-territorial signification of hate speech and hate crimes. Taking a cue from this decision and the related semiotic/legal implications, the paper proposes an analysis of the semio/pragmatic conditions for the production of performativity inherent in hate speech across different cultural universes of discourse. Given that web-based digital communication is global—at least, potentially—regardless of any spatial/political compartmentalization, it crosses different (...) semio-cultural circuits. This trans-spatiality implies transcultural crossings that can multiply and even transfigure the semantic implications of the original signifier and the related prognoses of ‘semantic effectiveness.’ Cultural boundaries therefore may function as a kind of ‘horizon of events’ for hate speech and, more inclusively, all linguistic acts and their legal signification/classification. The question then arises regarding whether and to what extent the performativity of hate speech is able to withstand the variation of cultural boundary conditions. Insofar as cultures are universes of experience, the issue to be investigated broadens, and ends up invoking the question of whether or not the production of performativity implicitly presupposes and tacitly epitomizes the semio-pragmatic implications/consequences (or, in Peircean terms, ‘bearings’) coextensive with cultural universes of experience. Were this the case, it would seem to call into question the very possibility of ‘making things only with words,’ or more explicitly, the alleged meaning of ‘linguistic acts.’. (shrink)

Are there moral facts? According to moral nihilism, the answer is no. Some moral nihilists are moral error theorists, who think that moral judgements purport to refer to moral facts, but since there are no moral facts, moral judgements are uniformly false or untrue. Terence Cuneo has recently raised an original and potentially very serious objection to moral error theory. According to Cuneo’s ‘normative theory of speech’, normative facts, some of which are moral facts, are crucially involved in explanations (...) of how it is that we are able to perform illocutionary speech acts, such as asserting, promising, and commanding. Many versions of moral error theory reject not only moral facts, but also normative facts of the kind Cuneo takes to be among the prerequisites of our abilities to perform illocutionary speech acts. If Cuneo’s argument is successful, then, moral error theory has the unsettling implication that we do not speak, and possibly that we cannot speak. I shall argue, however, that the argument ultimately fails, chiefly because its core premise fails to establish that illocutionary speech acts are normative in the first place. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Performative Utterances Locutionary, Illocutionary, and Perlocutionary Acts Classifying Illocutionary Acts Communicative Speech Acts and Intentions Conversational Implicature and Impliciture Conventional Implicature The Semantic‐Pragmatic Distinction Applications of the Semantic‐Pragmatic Distinction.

I argue that john r searle's speech-Act theory of meaning violates his own requirement that such a theory specify a set of conditions for the performance of a certain illocutionary (speech) act which does not include the performance of any other illocutionary act. For the "propositional act" mentioned in searle's analysans is in actuality an illocutionary act. Then I show that any speech-Act theory must include a subsidiary speech act in the analysans. Since the analysans must (...) not contain such an act, Such an analysis is impossible. (shrink)

In this paper I provide a speech act analysis of microaggressions. After adopting a notion of microaggressions found in the political philosophy literature, I provide an account of both the illocutionary force and perlocutionary effects of microaggressions. I show that there are two parts to microaggressions’ illocutionary force: (i) the general Austinian linguistic conventions; (ii) socio-political conventions that change the speech act into a microaggression. Despite the varied speech acts that can count as microaggressions, I identify (...) a unique perlocutionary effect common to all, perlocutionary frustration, in which the recipient of a microaggression is frustrated or inhibited from addressing the harms that microaggressions cause. The recipient is not necessarily silenced insofar as they are prevented from performing certain illocutionary acts. Instead, the illocutionary acts do not have their intended perlocutionary effects. (shrink)

In this essay, I propose a novel hybrid metanormative theory. According to this theory, speakers making normative claims express both cognitive and motivational attitudes in virtue of the constitutive norms of the particular speech acts they perform. This view has four principal virtues: it is consistent with traditional semantic theories, it supports a form of motivational judgment internalism that does justice to externalist intuitions, it illuminates the connection between normative language and normative thought, and it explains how speakers (...) can express different conative states when speaking in different normative domains. In the first section, I discuss the theories of Stephen Finlay and David Copp. I show that they each come very close to having it both ways but ultimately fail. Understanding the shortcomings of these views is instrumental to a clear presentation of my own Hybrid Speech Act theory in section two. In the final section, I demonstrate how my view achieves its four advantages. (shrink)

In this essay, I propose a novel hybrid metanormative theory. According to this theory, speakers making normative claims express both cognitive and motivational attitudes in virtue of the constitutive norms of the particular speech acts they perform. This view has four principal virtues: it is consistent with traditional semantic theories, it supports a form of motivational judgment internalism that does justice to externalist intuitions, it illuminates the connection between normative language and normative thought, and it explains how speakers (...) can express different conative states when speaking in different normative domains. In the first section, I discuss the theories of Stephen Finlay and David Copp. I show that they each come very close to having it both ways but ultimately fail. Understanding the shortcomings of these views is instrumental to a clear presentation of my own Hybrid Speech Act theory in section two. In the final section, I demonstrate how my view achieves its four advantages. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Speech Acts, Acts of Speech, and Performatives Acts and Their Contents Speech Acts, What is Said, and Speaker Meaning Misfires, Abuses, and How Saying Makes It So Illocutions, Perlocutions, and Implicature Direct and Indirect Speech Acts References Further reading.

There are two views of the essences of speech acts: according to one view, they are natural kinds; according to the other, they are what I call normative kinds—kinds in the (possibly non-reductive) definition of which some normative term occurs. In this article I show that speech acts can be normative but also natural kinds by deriving Williamson's account of assertion, on which it is an act individuated, and constitutively governed, by a norm (the knowledge rule), (...) from a consideration of the natural characteristics of normal cases of its performance. (shrink)

Speech act theory seems to provide a promising avenue for the analysis of the functional organization of argument. The theory, however, might be taken to suggest that arguments are a homogenous class of speech act with a specifiable illocutionary force and a single set of felicity conditions. This suggestion confuses the analysis of the meaning of speech act verbs with the analysis of the pragmatic structure of actual language use. Suggesting that arguments are conveyed through a homogeneous (...) class of linguistic action overlooks the way in which the context of activity and the form of expression organize the argumentative functions performed in using language. An alternative speech act analysis would treat folk terminology as a heuristic entry point into the development of a technical analysis of the myriad argumentative functions and structures to be found in natural language use. This would lead to a thorough-going pragmatic analysis of the rational and functional design of speech acts in argumentation. (shrink)

Not every speech act can be a lie. A good definition of lying should be able to draw the right distinctions between speech acts that can be lies and speech acts that under no circumstances are lies. This paper shows that no extant account of lying is able to draw the required distinctions. It argues that a definition of lying based on the notion of ‘assertoric commitment’ can succeed where other accounts have failed. Assertoric commitment (...) is analysed in terms of two normative components: ‘accountability’ and ‘discursive responsibility’. The resulting definition of lying draws all the desired distinctions, providing an intensionally adequate analysis of the concept of lying. (shrink)

This paper deals with the normative dimension of the states of affairs produced by the performance of speech acts (i.e., states of affairs such as commitments, obligations, rights, licenses), and has a twofold aim. First, it points out the inadequacy of Searle’s conventionalist account of both the performance of speech acts and the normativity associated with it, and advocates as an alternative an inferentialist approach along with Bach and Harnish. Second, it suggests that we can account (...) for the normative dimension engendered by speech acts within the inferentialist framework by making the presumption about the interlocutor’s rationality (a notion derived from Grice’s work) fully explicit, and by attending to the set of expectations and constraints that result from it. (shrink)

What is a speech act, and what makes it count as one kind of speech act rather than another? In the target article, Geurts considers two ways of answering these questions. His opponent is intentionalism—the view that performing a speech act is a matter of acting with a communicative intention, and that speech acts of different kinds involve intentions to affect hearers in different ways. Geurts offers several objections to intentionalism. Instead, he articulates and defends (...) an admirably clear and resolute version of the view that performing a speech act is a matter of undertaking a social commitment. Different kinds of speech acts, on his view, involve social commitments of different kinds. My aim is to respond to Geurts on behalf of intentionalism. I’ll argue that his objections aren’t all that worrying (Section 3), that Geurts’ view suffers from some quite serious problems that intentionalists don’t face (Section 4), and that intentionalists can give a principled account of the ways that speech acts give rise to commitments (Section 5). First I will spell out the two opposing views (Sections 1–2). (shrink)

Speech Acts, Criteria and Intentions What makes a speech act a speech act? Which are its necessary and sufficient conditions? I claim in this paper that we cannot find an answer to those questions in Austin's doctrine of the infelicities, since some infelicities take place in fully committing speech acts, whereas others prevent the utterance from being considered as a speech act at all. With this qualification in mind, I argue against the idea (...) that intentions—considered as mental states accomplishing a causal role in the performance of the act—should be considered among the necessary conditions of speech acts. I would thus like to deny a merely ‘symptomatic’ account of intentions, according to which we could never make anything but fallible hypotheses about the effective occurrence of any speech act. I propose an alternative ‘criterial’ account of the role of intentions in speech acts theory, and analyse Austin's and Searle's approaches in the light of this Wittgensteinian concept. Whether we consider, with Austin, that speech acts ‘imply’ mental states or, with Searle, that they ‘express’ them, we could only make sense of this idea if we considered utterances as criteria for intentions, and not as alleged behavioural effects of hidden mental causes. (shrink)

Slurs are derogatory words; they seem to express contempt and hatred toward marginalized groups. They are used to insult and derogate their victims. Moreover, slurs give rise to philosophical questions. In virtue of what is the word “chink,” unlike “Chinese,” a derogatory word? Does “chink” refer to the same group as “Chinese”? If “chink” is a derogatory word, how is it possible to use it in a non-derogatory way (e.g., by Chinese comedians or between Chinese friends)? Many theories of slurs (...) answer these questions by assuming that slurs communicate derogatory messages. However, little attention has been paid to the speech acts slurs are used to perform. In this dissertation, I argue that slurs are illocutionary force indicators: words to perform the speech acts of derogation. “Chink” is a derogatory word because its use is to derogate the Chinese, just like the phrase “I promise” has the use to make a promise. To derogate the Chinese is to enforce a norm which assigns to them an inferior normative status. Slurs are also propositional indicators: words that contribute to the truth-conditions. “Chink” has the same referent as “Chinese,” its neutral counterpart. Appealing to speech act theory enables my theory to answer questions about slurs, e.g., slurs can be used in non-derogatory ways because the felicity conditions of derogation are not met. To illustrate the advantage of my theory, I will explain how other theories of slurs fall short because they take positions opposite to mine on certain issues. For instance, Mark Richard’s theory, unlike mine, takes utterances of slurs to have no truth values. It follows from his theory, I will argue, that lying with “Chang is a chink” is impossible. Finally, I will defend the force indicator theory from common objections. My force indicator theory provides a case study of the use theory of meaning and a framework for political philosophers to study the harm of slurs. (shrink)

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

J. L. Austin was one of the more influential British philosophers of his time, due to his rigorous thought, extraordinary personality, and innovative philosophical method. According to John Searle, he was both passionately loved and hated by his contemporaries. Like Socrates, he seemed to destroy all philosophical orthodoxy without presenting an alternative, equally comforting, orthodoxy. -/- Austin is best known for two major contributions to contemporary philosophy: first, his ‘linguistic phenomenology’, a peculiar method of philosophical analysis of the concepts and (...) ways of expression of everyday language; and second, speech act theory, the idea that every use of language carries a performative dimension (in the well-known slogan, “to say something is to do something”). Speech act theory has had consequences and import in research fields as diverse as philosophy of language, ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of law, linguistics, artificial intelligence and feminist philosophy. -/- This article describes Austin’s linguistic method and his speech act theory, and it describes the original contributions he made to epistemology and philosophy of action. It closes by focusing on two main developments of speech act theory─the dispute between conventionalism and intentionalism, and the debate on free speech, pornography, and censorship. (shrink)

A common approach to drawing boundary between fiction and non-fiction is by appeal to the kinds of speech acts performed by authors of works of the respective categories. Searle, for example, takes fiction to be the product of illocutionary pretense of various kinds on the part of authors and non-fiction to be the product of genuine illocutionary action.1 Currie, in contrast, takes fiction to be the product of sui generis fictional illocutionary action on the part of authors and (...) non-fiction to be the product of assertion and other familiar kinds of illocutionary action.2 The central thesis of this paper is that the speech act approach to fictionality is simply a non-starter. Now it is, of course, commonplace to note that approaches of this kind run into difficulty accommodating nonliterary fictions3 and uncomposed or authorless fictions. What will be argued here, however, is that speech acts analyses are inadequate even understood narrowly as accounts of composed literary fiction. And the reason is that they fail to adequately attend to the distinction between composition and storytelling. (shrink)

Human rights, a language that keeps public order, is realised in ordinary life by language characteristics according to social rules. Despite this fact, research that considers the linguistic features of human rights relating to its use and effects in terms of the kingdom of God in the present world seems to have not been attempted or seldom attempted. Thus, this article proposes to examine the language of human rights by means of Speech Act Theory. The approach is predicated upon (...) the language use as performative acts. The approach shows the language of human rights with performative language by seeking to uncover the operation and effects of language of rights in real-life situations. The thrust of this article implies how we can explain the semantics of human rights and execute them in ordinary life in terms of God’s kingdom. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the ‘social meanings’ associated with sociolinguistic variation put pressure on the standard philosophical conception of language, according to which the foremost thing we do with words is exchange information. Drawing on parallels with the explanatory challenge posed by slurs and pejoratives, I argue that the best way to understand social meanings is to think of them in speech act theoretic terms. I develop a distinctive form of pluralism about the performances realized by means (...) of sociolinguistic variants, and I claim that engagement with such performances is an utterly pervasive feature of our linguistic activity. (shrink)

The contributions in this volume result from discussions on and with John R. Searle, containing Searle's own latest views - including his seminal ideas on Rationality in Action. The collection provides a good basis for advanced seminar debates in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy, and will also stimulate some further research on all of the three main topics.

This study on the Speech Act of Promising builds on an article by Egner which claims that in many African Societies a promise is most often made not to be committed to its content but to be polite and save one's own or the addressee's face. While Egner opts for a Speech Act Theory approach to explain the phenomenon and comes to the conclusion that the speech act of promising may occur minus commitment, thus refuting the standard (...) SAT claim, I have opted to treat the issue within Relevance Theory and claim that a true speech act of promising cannot be without commitment since it is a performative and institutional speech act which has to be committed by its very nature. I have rather explained that the concept PROMISE can be used as an ad hoc concept PROMISE* which conveys a speech act of "saying that" and which is a broadened version of the encoded concept to make commitment optional and include issues of politeness and face saving. While Egner claims that a committed speech act can be determined by linguistic indication most of the time I claim that the intended interpretation falls out naturally from the relevance theoretic comprehension procedure which is: "Follow the path of least effort in determining cognitive effects and stop when your expectation of relevance is fulfilled". Unlike Egner I claim that at the root of using non-committed promises as a face saving device are shame oriented cultures that need these kinds of mechanisms for politeness more than guilt oriented cultures. (shrink)

Despite the recent advances in information and communication technology that have increased our ability to store and circulate information, the task of ensuring that the right sorts of information gets to the right sorts of people remains. We argue that the many efforts underway to develop efficient means for sharing information across healthcare systems and organizations would benefit from a careful analysis of human action in healthcare organizations. This in turn requires that the management of information and knowledge within healthcare (...) organizations be combined with models of resources and processes of patient care that are based on a general ontology of social interaction. The Health Level 7 (HL7) is one of several ANSI-accredited Standards Developing Organizations operating in the healthcare arena. HL7 has advanced a widely used messaging standard that enables healthcare applications to exchange clinical and administrative data in digital form. HL7 focuses on the interface requirements of the entire healthcare system and not exclusively on the requirements of one area of healthcare such as pharmacy, medical devices, imaging or insurance transactions. This has inspired the development of a powerful abstract model of patient care called the Reference Information Model (RIM). The present paper begins with an overview of the core classes of the HL7 (Version 3) RIM and a brief discussion of its “actcentered” view of healthcare. Central to this account is what is called the life cycle of events. A clinical action may progress from defined, through planned and ordered, to executed. These modalities of an action are represented as the mood of the act. We then outline the basis of an ontology of organizations, starting from the theory of speech Acts, and apply this ontology to the HL7 RIM. Special attention is given to the sorts of preconditions that must be satisfied for the successful performance of a speech act and to the sorts of entities to which speech acts give rise (e.g. obligations, claims, commitments, etc.). Finally we draw conclusions for the efficient communication and management of medical information and knowledge within and between healthcare organizations, paying special attention to the role that medical documents play in such organizations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Joseph Margolis LITERATURE AND SPEECH ACTS The trivial truth that literature employs language has been fastened on regularly and repeatedly to spawn a remarkable variety of misconceptions. Most famously, in the context of aesthetics, it has led to the untenable thesis that all art is language,1 and to the more pointed claim that works of art somehow affirm propositions that may be linguistically rendered and straightforwardly judged (...) true or false. It has also embarrassed a good deal of theorizing about the nature of aesthetic experience and the aesthetic orientation, and has led to preposterous views about the aesthetic status of the literary arts and the exaggerated importance of words in literature. These developments are reasonably well known, partly because they form a venerable portion of the history of aesthetics, partly because the doctrines at stake take so many apparently persuasive guises—even in our own time. There are other views, however, also largely based on the example of literature, that are at once useful because they are corrective of other abuses and are in their turn prone to newer mistakes that bid fair to become fashionable. The ambivalent corrective I have in mind may be marked by the thesis that a work of art is an utterance of some sort. In effect, the thesis stresses the distortion that results from pretending to address art relevantly solely in terms of the palpable properties of some object or product—more or less on the model of examining a perceptually accessible physical object. Attention is required, on the theory, to the act or agency of the artist by which the work is "uttered," in a sense quite close to that in which a forger is said to "utter" a bad check: by this simple strategem, we are led to see that biographical, historical, intentional considerations are instructive about a work of art in an essential way and that the properties of an artwork cannot possibly be restricted to its merely sensory or sensuous features (if indeed, admitting conceptual art, a particular work has any such features at all). The proposal, therefore, is at least a heuristically useful one. Whether it ought also to be enshrined as definitional of 39 40Philosophy and Literature art is another question altogether, qualified partly by its being entirely possible to save the corrections without the thesis, partly by the debatable force of definitions themselves. A rather specialized but utterly misleading and unpromising version of the utterance theory maintains that literature as such, as well as such particularly important distinctions within literature as fiction, poetry, and metaphor, may be perspicuously defined or distinguished in terms of a speech-act model. We must be careful here. The general thesis that the phenomenon of language cannot be adequately analyzed apart from contextual considerations bearing on speakers' intentions, shared assumptions and background beliefs between speakers and hearers, and the actual histories of conversations and the like has now been abundantly confirmed by a variety of theorists—including, prominently, J. L. Austin, P. F. Strawson, H. P. Grice, John Searle, Keith Donnellan, George Lakoff, and Zeno Vendler. Still, the general concession that familiar syntactic and semantic studies of the phenomenon of language omit an entire dimension of language, as Austin so ably demonstrated, has rather little to say about the distinctions normally debated in the context of literary theory and the appreciation and criticism of literature. (This may well seem paradoxical. The argument has yet to be supplied.) But since the application of the speech-act model to literary analysis shows some tendency to attract advocates, it may be useful to draw explicit attention here to the inherent limitations and difficulties of the enterprise. Obviously, if language must be analyzed at least in part in terms of the context of performing speech acts, it will be impossible to ignore altogether the speech-act dimension of literary utterances. The question remains: what can and what cannot be illuminated by means of the speech-act model? Precisely how restricted a general speech-act model is—that is, one not restricted just to literature—can be seen at a stroke simply by noting that the meanings of sentences (i) cannot be equated with what speakers... (shrink)

Illocutionary Force and Romanian Orthodox Sermons: An Application of Speech Act Theory to Some Romanian Orthodox Sermons The aim of the paper is to analyze religious discourse with the use of the instruments of semantics and pragmatics. Essentially, it sets out to identify the linguistic elements which enable the illocutionary force in the Romanian orthodox sermons, especially in the discourse of some important figures which have influenced and still influence the Romanian orthodox theology and the religious life in Romania: (...) Father Cleopa, Father Nicolae Steinhardt, and, nowadays, Father Teofil Pârâianu. It is usually assumed that a sermon implies, on the one hand, a kerugmatik action, that of annunciation, and, on the other hand, a translating action of the biblical induce the human will to practice the words in order to Christian precepts. Mutatis mutandis, the perlocutionary effect depends on the illocutionary act and of the illocutionary force. In theory, the illocutionary force of an utterance is strictly motivated by the pragmatic. But there are linguistic elements which function as efficient markers of the illocutionary force, for example performative verbs, verbal moods and some adverbs. The criteria proposed by Searle in order to differentiate the illocutionary acts resulted in the identification of several types inside this class. Searle's taxonomy serves the research purposes: the identification of illocutionary acts found in this kind of religious discourse and, finally, outlining a pattern of manifestation of the illocutionary force inside the sermon. (shrink)

In this paper, I demonstrate how philosophical insights and empirical research on the use of religious language can be fruitfully combined to tackle issues regarding the ontology of religious collectivities and the agency of group actors. To do so, I introduce a philosophical framework that draws on speech act theory and recent advances in the fields of collective intentionality and social ontology, with particular attention paid to the work of Raimo Tuomela. Against this backdrop, I discuss a brief case (...) study based on my fieldwork among Jehovah’s Witnesses in Switzerland and Germany. In particular, I call attention to the structure of the Witnesses’ ritual interactions and to the types of speech acts that are performed in their congregational settings. I argue that the communicative framework provided by these rituals is particularly suited to the creation of genuine group intentions that cannot be reduced to the private intentions of the individual group members. In conclusion, I argue that most of the language used in religious contexts does not deviate much from everyday language; however, particular ritual settings can elicit performative effects and constitute new social realities that can have a concrete impact on both individuals and religious groups. (shrink)

Are there universal transcendent features that any natural language must possess in order to provide for its human speakers adequate means of expression and of communication of their conceptual thoughts? As Frege, Austin and Searle pointed out, complete speech acts of the type called illocutionary acts, and not isolated propositions, are the primary units of meaning in the use and comprehension of language. Thus it is in the very performance of illocutionary acts that speakers express and (...) communicate their thoughts. For this reason, speech act theory contributes to the theory of linguistic universals in formulating the necessary and universal laws governing the successful performance and satisfaction of illocutionary acts in language use and comprehension. I will argue that the logical form of illocutionary acts imposes certain formal constraints on the logical structure of a possible natural language as well as on the mind of competent speakers. In particular, certain syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features are universal because they are indispensable. Moreover, in order to perform and understand illocutionary acts, competent speakers and hearers must have certain mental states and abilities which are in general traditionally related to the faculty of reason.Há características transcendentes universais que qualquer linguagem natural tem que possuir para fornecer meios adequados de expressão e de comunicação de pensamentos conceituais aos seus falantes humanos? Como Frege, Austin e Searle mostraram, atos de fala completos do tipo denominado atos ilocucionários, e não proposições isoladas, são as unidades primárias de significado no uso e compreensão da linguagem. Assim, é no exato desempenho dos atos ilocucionários que os falantes expressam e comunicam os seus pensamentos. Por esta razão, a teoria dos atos de fala contribui para a teoria dos universais lingüísticos, formulando as leis necessárias e universais que governam o desempenho bem-sucedido e a satisfação dos atos ilocucionários no uso e compreensão da linguagem. Eu argumentarei que a forma lógica dos atos ilocucionários impõe certas restrições formais na estrutura lógica de uma possível linguagem natural como também na mente de falantes competentes. Em particular, certos aspectos sintáticos, semânticos e pragmáticos são universais porque eles são indispensáveis. Além disso, a fim de desempenhar e entender os atos ilocucionários, os falantes e ouvintes competentes têm que ter certos estados mentais e habilidades que estão, em geral, tradicionalmente relacionadas à faculdade de razão. (shrink)

The superlative quantifiers, at least and at most, are commonly assumed to have the same truth-conditions as the comparative quantifiers more than and fewer than. However, as Geurts & Nouwen have demonstrated, this is wrong, and several theories have been proposed to account for them. In this paper we propose that superlative quantifiers are illocutionary operators; specifically, they modify meta-speech acts.Meta speech-acts are operators that do not express a speech act, but a willingness to make (...) or refrain from making a certain speech act. The classic example is speech act denegation, e.g. I don't promise to come, where the speaker is explicitly refraining from performing the speech act of promising What denegations do is to delimit the future development of conversation, that is, they delimit future admissible speech acts. Hence we call them meta-speech acts. They are not moves in a game, but rather commitments to behave in certain ways in the future. We formalize the notion of meta speech acts as commitment development spaces, which are rooted graphs: The root of the graph describes the commitment development up to the current point in conversation; the continuations from the root describe the admissible future directions.We define and formalize the meta-speech act GRANT, which indicates that the speaker, while not necessarily subscribing to a proposition, refrains from asserting its negation. We propose that superlative quantifiers are quantifiers over GRANTs. Thus, Mary petted at least three rabbits means that the minimal number n such that the speaker GRANTs that Mary petted n rabbits is n = 3. In other words, the speaker denies that Mary petted two, one, or no rabbits, but GRANTs that she petted more.We formalize this interpretation of superlative quantifiers in terms of commitment development spaces, and show how the truth conditions that are derived from it are partly entailed and partly conversationally implicated. We demonstrates how the theory accounts for a wide variety of phenomena regarding the interpretation of superlative quantifiers, their distribution, and the contexts in which they can be embedded. (shrink)

I will argue that the logical form of illocutionary acts imposes certain formal constraints on the logical structure of a possible natural language as well as on the mind of competent speakers. In particular, certain syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features are universal because they are indispensable. Moreover, in order to perform and understand illocutionary acts, competent speakers and hearers must have certain mental states and abilities which are in general traditionally related to the faculty of reason. (edited).

In this article, I will use the frame-model to analyze different kinds of concept change. Mainly, I will use frames to distinguish between what I will call inter-conceptual change and intra-conceptual change as well as between conceptual structure change and conceptual content change. Further, I will introduce the notion of conceptual enrichment as opposed to conceptual change. To achieve these goals, I will expand the frame-model where necessary and exemplify the proposed extensions by means of a frame-based analysis of John (...) L. Austin’s distinction between constative and performative utterances. (shrink)

Language is nothing but human subjects in as much as they speak, say and know. Language is something coming from the inside of the speaking subject manifest in the intentional meaningful purpose of the individual speaker. A language, on the contrary, is something coming from the outside, from the speech community, something offered to the speaking subject from the tradition in the technique of speaking. The speech act is the performance of an intuition by the subject, both individual (...) and social. (shrink)

Despite its status at the heart of a closely related field, philosophers have so far mostly overlooked a phenomenon sociolinguists call ‘social meaning’. My aim in this paper will be to show that by properly acknowledging the significance of social meanings, we can identify an important new set of forms that discursive injustice takes. I begin by surveying some data from variationist sociolinguistics that reveal how subtle differences in the way a particular content is expressed allow us to perform importantly (...) different illocutionary actions, actions we use to do things like constructing a public persona and building a rapport with an audience. The social importance of these activities and the pervasiveness of our engagement in them means that the ethical stakes involved are high—substantial injustices may result if speakers from different social groups are differently empowered with regard to the illocutionary possibilities made available to them by variation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:WORKS OF FICTION AND ILLOCUTIONARY ACTS by Gregory Currie ii O peech act theory is remarkably unhelpful in explaining what ficOtion is." So says Kendall Walton.1 My purpose here is to showjust how wrong diis judgment is. Not that I want to endorse all die attempts there have been to connect fiction with the notion of a speech act. Elsewhere I have argued diat the most prominent (...) attempt at such a theory, the one due to John Searle, fails.2 But my complaint is not mat Searle employs the idea of a speech act; rather it is that he employs it in too half-hearted a fashion. The idea of Searle and odiers is diat to write fiction is not to perform a speech act, but rather to pretend to do so. I, on the odier hand, take the view that the writer of fiction engages in an act of speech diat is distinctively fictional, and distinctively different from speech acts such as asserting, requesting, questioning, and so forth. What follows is a much simplified account of this idea.3 Following die program of Strawson and Grice, I believe diat the different kinds of speech acts are to be individuated in terms of the utterer's intentions.4 The intention of the one who asserts is to get a certain kind of response; perhaps to get the audience to believe the proposition asserted.5 The one who commands wants the audience to obey, die requester wants the audience to answer, etc. And in all these cases the utterer intends to get the response partly as a result of the audience's recognition of diat very intention. (This is the familiar Gricean mechanism.) The utterer of fiction, on the odier hand, wants to get the audience to make-believe die proposition uttered.6 Thus we have an act structurally similar to 304 Gregory Currie305 paradigmatic speech acts like asserting, commanding, and requesting (die structural similarity being given by the use in all cases of the Gricean intention ), but differing from diese odiers with respect to die content of the utterer's intention. Let us call such an act a.fictive illocutionary act. Pursuing this line in more detail leads to an intuitively satisfactory taxonomy of speech acts which places the uttering (usually writing) of fiction fully widiin die purview of the theory, rather dian shutting it off to one side as a pseudo-performance, as widi Searle. Is such a theory susceptible to the objections diat Walton brings? Walton is quite right to say (and here I suppose he has Searle in mind) that fiction is not simply the absence ofillocutionary force: "it is something positive, something special" (p. 79). As already indicated, my theory gives a positive account of fiction as a special kind of speech act. But Walton presses the issue further by suggesting that the essence of fiction has nodiing to do with die absence of assertive force. It is possible, he says, "to make an assertion by writing fiction." His point is not merely that fictional stories are sometimes told in order to get across some serious but not explicit point — everyone can agree to that. It is rather diat fictional works contain explicit assertions — e.g., some of Tolstoy's sentences about Napoleon in War and Peace — and that a fiction might contain nothing but assertions. He imagines a genre of historical fiction in which "authors are allowed no liberties with the facts, and in which they are understood to be asserting as fact whatever they write" (p. 80). Let us grant that this is a possibility. What, dien, would distinguish a piece of fiction belonging to this genre from, say, a work of historical scholarship? The answer comes when we see that the same utterance can be used to perform more than one illocutionary act. Thus if I say to someone "I have no money" it may be that I want him both to believe that I have no money and to give me the goods on credit. And in both cases I intend to get die desired responses via his recognition of my intentions. The same utterance can count both as an assertion... (shrink)