Speech Acts: An Annotated Bibliography (from Oxford Bibliographies Online) (original) (raw)
Inquiry, 2020
In this article I argue that the distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary acts needs examination, not just in its details but in its philosophical standing. We need to consider whether the distinction is motivated by (sometimes unwittingly) assumed problematic philosophical assumptions concerning the nature of our dependence on the words of others and the rationality of speech reception. Working with an example of the act of telling, I argue against the idea that the distinction is self-evident or easy to draw. By developing an analogy with perception, I argue further that defending the distinction requires one to engage in an argumentative dialectic with powerful alternative positions. I end by suggesting that taking the challenge further would require us to look more closely at how passivity and rationality might be reconciled in the reception of speech.
Philosophy, 2020
The prevailing view among contemporary analytic philosophers seems to be that, as philosophers, we primarily issue assertions. Following certain suggestions from the work of Rudolf Carnap and Sally Haslanger, I argue that the non-assertoric speech act of stipulation plays a key role in philosophical inquiry. I give a detailed account of the pragmatic structure of stipulations and argue that they are best analyzed as generating a shared inferential entitlement for speaker and audience, a license to censure those who give uptake to the stipulation but do not abide by this entitlement, and as justified on the basis of the speaker and audience's shared ends. In presenting this account, I develop a novel taxonomy for making sense of criticisms of speech act performances generally and clarify the notions of successful speech act performance and uptake. To demonstrate the fruitfulness of this view of stipulation for recasting and advancing philosophical disputes, I apply my account to ...
Speech Act Theory: From Austin to Searle
Augustinian: A Journal for Humanities, Social Sciences, Business, and Education., Vol. 19, Issue #1, pp. 35-45, 2018
The speech act theory is one of the rigorous attempts to systematically explain the workings of language. It is not only widely influential in the philosophy of language, but in the areas of linguistics and communication as well. This essay traces the development of this theory from J. L. Austin's first formulation of the theory to John Searle's further systematization and grounding of it. The essay first situates the theory in the general approaches to the philosophy of language. After which, it explicates the main features of the theory as initially articulated by Austin and further improved by Searle. Among the innovations introduced by Searle, the essay highlights the following: the distinction between the utterance and propositional acts, the distinction between the effects of illocutionary acts and those of perlocutionary acts, a consistent set of criteria for classifying speech acts, and the grounding of speech acts in terms of rules and facts.
This brings us to a last point, viz. the relation between action and responsibility. On the basis of the fact that actions are particulars and thus subjected to different descriptions, we can explain the relationship between being declarations of responsibility and how one finds apologies for what one does. Persons are responsible for what they do under the description that makes the action intentional. Persons are not responsible for all the consequences of their actions, but only for those they intended (or could reasonably foresee). I may apologize for what I did (killing the goose that laid the golden egg) by giving the description under which the action was intentional (killing the goose I want to eat for dinner). The excuse works under the assumption that ^killing the goose that laid the golden egg' and 'killing the goose I want for dinner' refer to the same action and that the former description was not the one under which the action was intentional. 'It follows that there is no description which is the description of a.given .action (any more than there is the description of an object or event (see Austin 1961)). Ascriptions of responsibility (and by extension: rights, duties, praise and blame) presuppose the non-eliminability of intentional descriptions or the intentional vocabulary. Many technical insights in philosophy of action were developed and/or used by J.L. Austin, whose seminar work How to do thin^ with words (Austin 1962) had a major influence on the emerging field of pragmatics. Austin, who was well aware of the importance of insights in the philosophy of action for speech act theory, used in fact a great many insights in his work: the distinction between the locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary actions is a distinction on the level of descriptions of actions; perlocutionary actions are distinguished from illocutionary actions because they are described in terms of the (intended) effects the speaker wants to bring about in the hearer. J.R. Searle's Speech acts (Searle 1969) made speech act theory a serai-autonomous discipline whose main sources were no longer the philosophy of action but the philosophy of language and linguistics.
2009. Ethical neo-expressivism
2020
A standard way to explain the connection between ethical claims and motivation is to say that these claims express motivational attitudes. Unless this connection is taken to be merely a matter of contingent psychological regularity, it may seem that there are only two options for understanding it. Either we can treat ethical claims as expressing propositions that entail something about the speaker's motivational attitudes (subjectivism), or we can treat ethical claims as nonpropositional and as having their semantic content constituted by the motivational attitudes they directly express (noncognitivism). In this chapter, we argue that there is another option, which can be recognized once we see that there is no need to build the expression relation between ethical claims and motivational states of mind into the semantic content of ethical claims. In articulating the third option, we try to capture what we think is worth preserving about the classical expressivist idea that ethical claims directly express motivational states, and separate it from the wrong semantic ideas with which it has traditionally been caught up. Doing so requires arguing for and deploying a distinction between claims considered as products-such as sentences-and claims considered as linguistic acts-such as utterances. In our view, the former are properly seen as standing in an expression relation to propositions, whereas the latter are properly seen as standing in an expression relation to mental states. In the first section below, we use this act/product distinction to defend a ''neo-expressivist'' view of the way in which ethical claims express For helpful feedback on earlier versions of this chapter, we'd like to thank the audience at the fourth annual metaethics workshop in Madison, Wisconsin (especially
Philosophy of Language or Speech Acts' Philosophy
Communication to Medellin University Columbia, 2013
In this paper I address the question of the philosophy of language. Not exactly as a philosophy of a faculty – the capacity, for example, to speak a language –; not as a philosophy of a universal structure, or logic, or grammar, that would express itself through all the particular languages that the people speak, but mainly as a practice, a social practice of action and communication. For this, I will build on what is usually called as the Speech Acts Theory. My point is that the philosophy of language, as we usually understand it, at least in the analytic philosophy, grew as a response to a logical and epistemological questioning. Most of the authors that are currently quoted were first concerned with the question of the foundations of science, and in particular of mathematics that they addressed by growing what we call today the modern logic, a highly formalised and mathematized logic that did not exist in Kantian times. In the nineteenth century, however, mathematics not only made a leap forward, asserting themselves as a purely rational science, cutting its last links with empiricism – with intuition, to use Kant concepts – but provided also new ways to think logic and to analyse the inferences’ relations. Logic grew as a powerful tool, so powerful that some philosophers thought it could henceforth absorb – and justify – all the other sciences, including the mathematics themselves. This was the time of logicism. I will try to show, today, that there is an alternative to the philosophy of language, which is usually known under the name of “Speech Acts Theory”. This theory, which was put forward by John Langshaw Austin (1911-1960) and by John Roger Searle (1932 - ), sees language as a social and communication practice, that requires to be considered as such. I will introduce it briefly and discuss some of its main thesis. I do not aim to present here a comprehensive view of all the concepts proposed by Austin and Searle. But I would like to highlight at least the main differences between the philosophy of language and the speech acts theory. I hope that, by doing so, I will also be able to show you that this theory opens new ways to understand the language and could be a genuine alternative to the philosophy of language.