Speech Acts: The Contemporary Theoretical Landscape

What makes it the case that an utterance constitutes an illocutionary act of a given kind? This is the central question of speech-act theory. Answers to it—i.e., theories of speech acts—have proliferated. Our main goal in this chapter is to clarify the logical space into which these different theories fit. We begin, in Section 1, by dividing theories of speech acts into five families, each distinguished from the others by its account of the key ingredients in illocutionary acts. Are speech acts fundamentally a matter of convention or intention? Or should we instead think of them in terms of the psychological states they express, in terms of the effects that it is their function to produce, or in terms of the norms that govern them? In Section 2, we take up the highly influential idea that speech acts can be understood in terms of their effects on a conversation’s context or “score”. Part of why this idea has been so useful is that it allows speech-act theorists from the five families to engage at a level of abstraction that elides their foundational disagreements. In Section 3, we investigate some of the motivations for the traditional distinction between propositional content and illocutionary force, and some of the ways in which this distinction has been undermined by recent work. In Section 4, we survey some of the ways in which speech-act theory has been applied to issues outside semantics and pragmatics, narrowly construed

Proxy Assertion

In proxy assertion an individual or group asserts something through a spokesperson. The chapter explains proxy assertion as resting on the assignment of a status role to a person (that of spokesperson) whose utterances acts in virtue of that role have the status function of signaling that the principal is committed in a way analogous to an individual asserting that in his own voice. The chapter briefly explains how status functions and status roles are grounded and then treats, in turn, the case of a spokesperson for an individual and a group and the differences in the significance of what the spokesperson does in each case. Finally, it reviews complications introduced by spokesperson autonomy, where the spokesperson is given leave to represent her principal’s views or positions in her own words and to respond to questions on his behalf

Bargaining Practices: Negotiating the Kampala Compromise for the International Criminal Court

At the International Criminal Court\u27s (ICC) Review Conference in 2010, the ICC\u27s Assembly of States Parties (ASP) agreed upon a definition of the crime of aggression, jurisdictional conditions, and a mechanism for its entry into force (the Kampala Compromise ). These amendments give the ICC jurisdiction to prosecute political and military leaders of states for planning, preparing, initiating, or executing illegal wars, beginning as early as January 2017. This article explains the bargaining practices of the diplomats that gave rise to this historic development in international law. This article argues that the international-practices framework, as currently conceived, does not adequately capture the role sincerity played in the negotiations. Sincerity was an international practice, but not a performance. It follows that the international practices framework should be adjusted to accommodate the decisive role of sincerity, a special nonperformative international practice, in the face-to-face interactions of international politics and diplomacy. The remainder of the article lays out the international-practices framework and explains the place of performances within it. The article then introduces the concept of sincerity as a social practice. The second half of the article discusses some ways that sincerity played a role in the negotiations. The article concludes that sincerity is a special kind of international practice: It cannot be a performance, but it can be an international practice, and an effective one at that

Assurance Views of Testimony

Assurance theories of testimony attempt to explain what is distinctive about testimony as a form of epistemic warrant or justification. The most characteristic assurance theories hold that a distinctive subclass of assertion (acts of “telling”) involves a real commitment given by the speaker to the listener, somewhat like a promise to the effect that what is asserted is true. This chapter sympathetically explains what is attractive about such theories: instead of treating testimony as essentially similar to any other kind of evidence, they instead make testimonial warrant depend on essential features of the speech act of testimony as a social practice. One such feature is “buck-passing,” the phenomenon that when I am challenged to defend a belief I acquired through testimony, I may respond by referring to the source of my testimony (and thereby “passing the buck”) rather than providing direct evidence for the truth of the content of the belief. The chapter concludes by posing a serious challenge to assurance theories, namely that the social practice of assurance insufficiently ensures the truth of beliefs formed on the basis of testimony, and thereby fails a crucial epistemological test as a legitimate source of beliefs

The Law of Deception: A Research Agenda

The law of deception is the body of laws that address acts and omissions that wrongfully cause others to hold false beliefs. So defined, the law of deception cuts across traditional doctrinal boundaries. It encompasses the torts of deceit and defamation, false advertising laws, labeling requirements, securities fraud and disclosure regulations, criminal fraud, perjury statutes, and a host of other generic and more targeted laws. This essay suggests that the law of deception constitutes a coherent body of law, and identifies four salient questions about it. The questions are these: First, within the law of deception one finds several different approaches to interpreting potentially deceptive communications. These include highly contextualist approaches (e.g., the tort of deceit), more restrictive literal-meaning rules (federal perjury law), and occasionally default legal meanings (the FTC’s reasonable basis rule). One set of questions concerns when and why which interpretive approach is appropriate. A second set of questions concerns legally salient harms. Laws of deception can be designed to protect those who might be deceived (e.g., negligent misrepresentation), those about whom a lie is told (defamation), honest competitors (false advertising laws), and credible communication more generally (as the Stolen Valor Act attempted). A theory of the law of deception should disaggregate these distinct purposes and evaluate the justifications for and design implications of each. A third set of questions concerns the relationship between deception and consent. Although deception sometimes vitiates consent (in the torts of battery and trespass, in contract law, in fourth amendment searches, and in rape law), it does not always do so. And the line between vitiating and non-vitiating deception shifts across different laws. This too demands explanation. Finally, sometimes the law permits parties to contract out of liability for deception (e.g., “big boy” letters), effectively consenting to what would otherwise be deceptive behavior. A theory of the law of deception should also provide an account when, why and how parties are able to contract out of laws of deception. These are not the only interesting questions one might ask about the law of deception. Nor does this essay attempt to answer them. The goal is to make the case for thinking about the law of deception as a whole, and to suggest some directions for further research

Socialising Epistemic Cognition

We draw on recent accounts of social epistemology to present a novel account of epistemic cognition that is ‘socialised’. In developing this account we foreground the: normative and pragmatic nature of knowledge claims; functional role that ‘to know’ plays when agents say they ‘know x’; the social context in which such claims occur at a macro level, including disciplinary and cultural context; and the communicative context in which such claims occur, the ways in which individuals and small groups express and construct (or co-construct) their knowledge claims. We frame prior research in terms of this new approach to provide an exemplification of its application. Practical implications for research and learning contexts are highlighted, suggesting a re-focussing of analysis on the collective level, and the ways knowledge-standards emerge from group-activity, as a communicative property of that activity

Representing Conversations for Scalable Overhearing

Open distributed multi-agent systems are gaining interest in the academic community and in industry. In such open settings, agents are often coordinated using standardized agent conversation protocols. The representation of such protocols (for analysis, validation, monitoring, etc) is an important aspect of multi-agent applications. Recently, Petri nets have been shown to be an interesting approach to such representation, and radically different approaches using Petri nets have been proposed. However, their relative strengths and weaknesses have not been examined. Moreover, their scalability and suitability for different tasks have not been addressed. This paper addresses both these challenges. First, we analyze existing Petri net representations in terms of their scalability and appropriateness for overhearing, an important task in monitoring open multi-agent systems. Then, building on the insights gained, we introduce a novel representation using Colored Petri nets that explicitly represent legal joint conversation states and messages. This representation approach offers significant improvements in scalability and is particularly suitable for overhearing. Furthermore, we show that this new representation offers a comprehensive coverage of all conversation features of FIPA conversation standards. We also present a procedure for transforming AUML conversation protocol diagrams (a standard human-readable representation), to our Colored Petri net representation