5,302 research outputs found
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 itâi.e., theories of speech actsâhave 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 conversationâs context or âscoreâ. 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
Wittgensteinâs influence on Austinâs philosophy of language
Many philosophers have assumed, without argument, that Wittgenstein influenced Austin. More often, however, this is vehemently denied, especially by those who knew Austin personally. We compile and assess the currently available evidence for Wittgensteinâs influence on Austinâs philosophy of language. Surprisingly, this has not been done before in any detail. On the basis of both textual and circumstantial evidence we show that Austinâs work demonstrates substantial engagement with Wittgensteinâs later philosophy. In particular, Austinâs 1940 paper, âThe Meaning of a Wordâ, should be construed as a direct response to and development of ideas he encountered in Wittgensteinâs Blue Book. Moreover, we argue that Austinâs mature speech-act theory in How to Do Things with Words was also significantly influenced by Wittgenstein
Intention Recognition as the Mechanism of Human Communication
Intentionalism is a research program that seeks to explain facts about meaning and communication in psychological terms, with our capacity for intention recognition playing a starring role. My aim here is to recommend a methodological reorientation in this program. Instead of a focus on intuitive counterexamples to proposals about necessary-and-sufficient conditions, we should aim to investigate the psychological mechanisms whose activities and interactions explain our capacity to communicate. Taking this methodologi- cal reorientation to heart, I sketch a theory of the cognitive architecture underlying language use that I have defended elsewhere. I then show how this theory can be used to give an account of non-communicative language useâa phenomenon that has long posed a challenge to intentionalism
Intentionalism versus The New Conventionalism
Are the properties of communicative acts grounded in the intentions with which they are performed, or in the conventions that govern them? The latest round in this debate has been sparked by Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone (2015), who argue that much more of communication is conventional than we thought, and that the rest isnât really communication after all, but merely the initiation of open-ended imaginative thought. I argue that although Lepore and Stone may be right about many of the specific cases they discuss, their big-picture, conventionalist conclusions donât follow. My argument focuses on four phenomena that present challenges to conventionalist accounts of communication: ambiguity, indirect communication, communication by wholly unconventional means, and convention acquisition
Intentionalism versus The New Conventionalism
Are the properties of communicative acts grounded in the intentions with which they are performed, or in the conventions that govern them? The latest round in this debate has been sparked by Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone (2015), who argue that much more of communication is conventional than we thought, and that the rest isnât really communication after all, but merely the initiation of open-ended imaginative thought. I argue that although Lepore and Stone may be right about many of the specific cases they discuss, their big-picture, conventionalist conclusions donât follow. My argument focuses on four phenomena that present challenges to conventionalist accounts of communication: ambiguity, indirect communication, communication by wholly unconventional means, and convention acquisition
Intention and Commitment in Speech Acts
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 intentionalismâthe 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. Iâll argue that his objections arenât all that worrying (Section 3), that Geurtsâ view suffers from some quite serious problems that intentionalists donât 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 1â2)
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
Semantics without Semantic Content
I argue that semantics is the study of the proprietary database of a centrally inaccessible and informationally encapsulated inputâoutput system. This systemâs role is to encode and decode partial and defeasible evidence of what speakers are saying. Since information about nonlinguistic context is therefore outside the purview of semantic processing, a sentenceâs semantic value is not its content but a partial and defeasible constraint on what it can be used to say. I show how to translate this thesis into a detailed compositional-semantic theory based on the influential framework of Heim and Kratzer. This approach situates semantics within an independently motivated account of human cognitive architecture and reveals the semanticsâpragmatics interface to be grounded in the underlying interface between modular and central systems
How the Philosophy of Language Grew Out of Analytic Philosophy
This chapter tells the story of how the philosophy of language, as it exists now, grew out of work in the history of analytic philosophy. I pay particular attention to the history of semantics, to debates about propositional content, and to the origins of contemporary pragmatics and speech-act theory. I identify an overarching narrative: Many of the ideas that are now used to understand natural language on its own terms were originally developed not for this purpose, but as methodological tools for diverse philosophical ends
Intentionalism and Bald-Faced Lies
In Lying and Insincerity, Andreas Stokke argues that bald-faced lies are genuine lies, and that lies are always assertions. Since bald-faced lies seem not to be aimed at convincing addressees of their contents, Stokke concludes that assertions neednât have this aim. This conflicts with a traditional version of intentionalism, originally due to Grice, on which asserting something is a matter of communicatively intending for oneâs addressee to believe it. I argue that Stokkeâs own account of bald-faced lies faces serious problems and give several responses on behalf of intentionalism. Some bald-faced lies are best understood as irrational attempts to deceive. Others are best understood as indirect speech acts of various kinds. Still, others are best understood as conventional speech acts, which differ from communicative acts like assertion in the ways that they must be embedded in social institutions or practices. An overarching theme of this essay is that we should not make theoretical decisions about how to classify speech acts by consulting ordinary usage
- âŠ