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Agreeing on a Norm: What Sort of Speech Act?

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Abstract

What type of speech act is a norm of action, when the norm is agreed upon as the conclusion of an argumentative dialogue? My hypothesis is that, whenever a norm of action is the conclusion of an argument, it should be analyzed as the statement of a norm and thus as a verdictive speech act. If the context is appropriate, and the interlocutors are sincerely (or institutionally) committed to their argumentative exchange and its conclusion, then this verdictive motivates and institutes a new one with the force of an exercitive. The interlocutors’ recognition and acceptance that the new illocution has been performed lends the norm its exercitive force.

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Notes

  1. The title of this paper aims to reflect this interest. It has been suggested to me by an anonymous referee, to whom I am indebted.

  2. For an alternative conception of the rationality of ends and whether those ends can be rationally chosen, see Schmidtz (1995).

  3. Although Hitchcock refers to reasoning, his discussion is applicable to practical argumentation as well, as his examples show.

  4. In this respect, it is worth keeping in mind that there is a conceptual difference between the norm that has been introduced by means of a speech act and the norm-producing act itself. (I am thankful to Maciej Witek for pointing out this difference.).

  5. I am once more grateful to Maciej Witek for raising this point.

  6. I am thankful to Neri Marsili for posing this question.

  7. This objection has been raised by Mitchell Green, to whom I am grateful.

  8. I am thankful to an anonymous referee for suggesting those types of case as worth of consideration.

  9. Sbisà (2020) provides an insightful discussion of Austin’s notion of “correspondence with the facts” and its relationship with assertion.

  10. In the last years, there have been in the feminist philosophy of language some proposals dealing with the issue of how speech can have exercitive force and contribute to harmful speech. There are cases in which a certain speech act with the force, say, of a weak verdictive can become an exercitive as well by setting the limits of what is admissible to say in similar situations. A prominent example of those proposals is McGowan’s original notion of a conversational exercitive (see McGowan 2004, 2019). This notion has been convincingly applied to the analysis of different pragmatic phenomena in speech. Of interest for our present discussion is that the notion exemplifies another way in which many speech acts can bring about the performance of another type of speech act, namely an exercitive, provided that certain conditions are fulfilled and without a further utterance being needed. (In relation to this topic, I am grateful to both Mary Kate McGowan and Laura Caponetto for their commentaries.).

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Acknowledgements

A previous version of this paper was presented at the workshop “Norms of public argument: A speech act perspective” (Lisbon, 2022). I am grateful to the participants for their interest and useful comments. I would like to also express my gratitude to the Editors of this special issue.

Funding

This work has received funding from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (=Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Gobierno de España), research projects PID2019-107478GB-I00 and PGC2018-095941-B-I00.

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  1. Department of Logic, History and Philosophy of Science, UNED, Edificio de Humanidades, Paseo Senda del Rey S/N, 28040, Madrid, Spain

    Cristina Corredor

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Correspondence to Cristina Corredor.

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Corredor, C. Agreeing on a Norm: What Sort of Speech Act?. Topoi 42, 495–507 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-022-09876-0

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