Lying by Promising

This paper is divided into two parts. In the first part, I extend the traditional definition of lying to illocutionary acts executed by means of explicit performatives, focusing on promising. This is achieved in two steps. First, I discuss how the utterance of a sentence containing an explicit performative such as “I promise that Φ ” can count as an assertion of its content Φ . Second, I develop a general account of insincerity meant to explain under which conditions a given illocutionary act can be insincere, and show how this applies to promises. I conclude that a promise to Φ is insincere (and consequently a lie) only if the speaker intends not to Φ , or believes that he will not Φ , or both. In the second part, I test the proposed definition of lying by promising against the intuitions of ordinary language speakers. The results show that, unlike alternative accounts, the proposed definition makes the correct predictions in the cases tested. Furthermore, these results challenge the following necessary conditions for telling a lie with content p: that you have to assert p directly; that you have to believe that p be false; that p must be false; that you must aim to deceive the addressee into believing that p

Modelling Users, Intentions, and Structure in Spoken Dialog

We outline how utterances in dialogs can be interpreted using a partial first order logic. We exploit the capability of this logic to talk about the truth status of formulae to define a notion of coherence between utterances and explain how this coherence relation can serve for the construction of AND/OR trees that represent the segmentation of the dialog. In a BDI model we formalize basic assumptions about dialog and cooperative behaviour of participants. These assumptions provide a basis for inferring speech acts from coherence relations between utterances and attitudes of dialog participants. Speech acts prove to be useful for determining dialog segments defined on the notion of completing expectations of dialog participants. Finally, we sketch how explicit segmentation signalled by cue phrases and performatives is covered by our dialog model.Comment: 17 page

Use of implicit performative utterances at University of Padjadjaran and at University of Pennsylvania

The use of implicit performative utterances can be found in some announcements at Universitas Padjadjaran (Unpad) in Bandung, Indonesia and at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) in Philadelphia, U. S. A. In linguistics, there is a form of speech known as performative utterances (Austin, 1962). The word comes from the verb ‘perform’ and refers to the noun ‘action’; it is said that the word refers to a speech for performance or action. Performatives cannot be regarded as right or wrong statements, but refer to appropriate or inappropriate, legitimate or illegitimate actions. Implicit performatives are performative utterances with performative verbs but they are not explicitly stated. With an implicit performative, the sentence does not have an explicit performative verb, but it has illocutionary force which is known from the context. Knowing the context, the hearer assumes the performative verb that appears. The use of this kind of utterances in notices at Unpad and at UPenn is quite different. This paper examines the differences and the similarities between the announcements at Unpad and at UPenn which use implicit performative utterances

The Level of Directness in Apologising in Akeelah and the Bee Movie Dialogue

This paper discusses precisely the production of the speech acts of apology.The choice for apology is due to its popularity as a study of speech act and being anillocutionary force so common to take place in daily context. This paper aims toexplicate the appropriate strategies of conveying apologies as part of Speech Acts inthe social interaction done by the speaker and addressee in movie conversation.Apologies is one of these speech acts, discussed through the analysis of conversation in?óÔé¼?¥Akeelah and the Bee?óÔé¼?© movie concerned with the level of directness. The data for theanalysis is taken from the dialogue transcripts of Akeelah and the bee movie. Remedialapology with assymetrical relationship are mostly found in the dialogue. The various wayof conveying apology between the characters prefers in polite apology

THE LEVEL OF DIRECTNESS IN APOLOGISING IN AKEELAH AND THE BEE MOVIE DIALOGUE

This paper discusses precisely the production of the speech acts of apology.The choice for apology is due to its popularity as a study of speech act and being anillocutionary force so common to take place in daily context. This paper aims toexplicate the appropriate strategies of conveying apologies as part of Speech Acts inthe social interaction done by the speaker and addressee in movie conversation.Apologies is one of these speech acts, discussed through the analysis of conversation in?óÔé¼?¥Akeelah and the Bee?óÔé¼?© movie concerned with the level of directness. The data for theanalysis is taken from the dialogue transcripts of Akeelah and the bee movie. Remedialapology with assymetrical relationship are mostly found in the dialogue. The various wayof conveying apology between the characters prefers in polite apology.Keywords : Apology, politeness, the level of directnes

Meaning, intentionality and communication

This chapter probes the connections between the metaphysics of meaning and the investigation of human communication. It first argues that contemporary philosophy of mind has inherited most of its metaphysical questions from Brentano's puzzling definition of intentionality. Then it examines how intentionality came to occupy the forefront of pragmatics in three steps. (1) By investigating speech acts, Austin and ordinary language philosophers pioneered the study of intentional actions performed by uttering sentences of natural languages. (2) Based on his novel concept of speaker's meaning and his inferential view of human communication as a cooperative and rational activity, Grice developed a three-tiered model of the meaning of utterances: (i) the linguistic meaning of the uttered sentence; (ii) the explicit truth-conditional content of the utterance; (iii) the implicit content conveyed by the utterance. (3) Finally, the new emerging truth-conditional trend in pragmatics urges that not only the implicit content conveyed by an utterance but its explicit content as well depends on the speaker's communicative intention

Permissive consent:a robust reason-changing account

There is an ongoing debate about the “ontology” of consent. Some argue that it is a mental act, some that it is a “hybrid” of a mental act plus behaviour that signifies that act; others argue that consent is a performative, akin to promising or commanding. Here it is argued that all these views are mistaken—though some more so than others. We begin with the question whether a normatively efficacious act of consent can be completed in the mind alone. Standard objections to this “mentalist” account of consent can be rebutted. Here we identify a much deeper problem for mentalism. Normatively transformative acts of consent change others’ reasons for acting in a distinctive—“robust”—way. Robust reason-changing involves acts aimed at fulfilling a distinctive kind of reflexive and recognition-directed intention. Such acts cannot be coherently performed in the mind alone. Consent is not a mental act, but nor is it the signification of such an act. Acts of consent cannot be “completed” in the mind, and it is a mistake to view consent behaviour as making known a completed act of consent. The robust reason-changing account of consent developed here shares something with the performative theory, but is not saddled with a label whose home is philosophy of language. Certain kinds of performative utterance may change reasons robustly, but not all robust reason-changing involves or requires acts of speech, and consent can be effected by a wide range of behavioural acts

Speech Act Theoretic Semantics

I defend the view that linguistic meaning is a relation borne by an expression to a type of speech act, and that this relation holds in virtue of our overlapping communicative dispositions, and not in virtue of linguistic conventions. I argue that this theory gives the right account of the semantics-pragmatics interface and the best-available semantics for non-declarative clauses, and show that it allows for the construction of a rigorous compositional semantic theory with greater explanatory power than both truth-conditional and dynamic semantics

Japanese Linguistic Politeness as Speakers’ Rational Choice and Social Strategy

Japanese linguistic politeness is a commonly observed phenomenon and the speaker’s being linguistically polite is an expected social behavior in the Japanese society. Most previous studies of Japanese politeness describe such a polite social behavioral pattern at a superficial or observational level without exploring the linguistic nature of such a polite behavior or the speaker’s motivations for performing a polite speech act in a particular speech context. From some linguistic, sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic and sociological perspectives, this study defines “politeness” as the speaker’s rational choices and a social strategy in the Japanese culture beyond surface language forms themselves. This paper claims that so-called “polite” or “honorific” language forms as commonly employed by the speaker in various social interactions do not necessarily always indicate that such a speaker must be a polite person. The so-called “polite” language is “linguistic” in nature and is thus more about a particular language form itself than about the speaker himself/herself. This paper further claims that the speaker makes rational choices of particular polite language forms to realize his/her communicative intention with the outcomes as perceived. Thus, this study explores the relationship between polite language forms and their social, cultural, and pragmatic functions. It concludes that speakers in the same speech community are conscious of linguistic choices which conform to their normative views for the interaction types; there is no simple equation between polite forms and polite speakers, and speakers are rational actors in making linguistic choices