Argues that out of the confrontation between Rorty and Habermas may be found a new way to answer the question of what kind of politics do we need today.

Something out of the ordinary -- The interminable Shakespearean text -- Fred Astaire asserts the right to praise -- Henry James returns to America and to Shakespeare -- Philosophy the day after tomorrow -- What is the scandal of skepticism? -- Performative and passionate utterance -- The Wittgensteinian event -- Thoreau thinks of ponds, Heidegger of rivers -- The world as things.

Over the last five decades, philosophers of language have looked into the mechanisms for doing things with words. The same attention has not been devoted to how to undo those things, once they have been done. This paper identifies and examines three strategies to make one’s speech acts undone—namely, Annulment, Retraction, and Amendment. In annulling an act, a speaker brings to light its fatal flaws. Annulment amounts to recognizing an act as null, whereas retraction and amendment amount to making it (...) null. Speakers employ retraction to cancel the deontic updates engendered by a given act. They instead use amendment to adjust its degree of strength. I will argue that annulling, retracting, and amending are second-order speech acts, whose felicity conditions vary with the type of illocution they operate on. Undoing is therefore conceived of as a form of doing. Furthermore, I claim that, in calling off our acts, we undo the conventional or illocutionary effects of our words while leaving intact their past causal or perlocutionary outcomes. (shrink)

Silencing is usually explained in terms of conventionalism about the nature of speech acts. More recently, theorists have tried to develop intentionalist theories of the phenomenon. I argue, however, that if intentionalists are to accommodate the conventionalists' main insight, namely that silencing can be so extreme as to render certain types of speech act completely unavailable to victims, they must take two assumptions on board. First, it must be possible that speakers' communicative intentions are opaque to the speakers themselves. Secondly, (...) it needs to be assumed that structural oppression can have hidden psychological effects on its victims. Since both assumptions can be motivated independently, I argue that silencing can be fully understood without appealing to linguistic conventions. (shrink)

In this article we present the bases for a computational theory of the cognitive processes underlying human communication. The core of the article is devoted to the analysis of the phases in which the process of comprehension of a communicative act can be logically divided: (1) literal meaning, where the reconstruction of the mental states literally expressed by the actor takes place: (2) speaker's meaning, where the partner reconstructs the communicative intentions of the actor; (3) communicative effect, where the partner (...) possibly modifies his own beliefs and intentions; (4) reaction, where the intentions for the generation of the response are produced; and (5) response, where an overt response is constructed. The model appears to be compatible with relevant facts about human behavior. Our hypothesis is that, through communication, an actor tries to exploit the motivational structures of a partner so that the desired goal is generated. A second point is that social behavior requires that cooperation be maintained at some level. In the case of communication, cooperation is, in general, pursued even when the partner does not adhere to the actor's goals, and therefore no cooperation occurs at the behavioral level. This important distinction is reflected in the two kinds of game we introduce to account for communication. The main concept implied in communication is that two agents overtly reach a situation of shared mental states. Our model deals with sharedness through two primitives: shared beliefs and communicative intentions. (shrink)

Speech acts are a staple of everyday communicative life, but only became a topic of sustained investigation, at least in the English-speaking world, in the middle of the Twentieth Century.[1] Since that time “speech act theory” has been influential not only within philosophy, but also in linguistics, psychology, legal theory, artificial intelligence, literary theory and many other scholarly disciplines.[2] Recognition of the importance of speech acts has illuminated the ability of language to do other things than describe reality. In the (...) process the boundaries among the philosophy of language, the philosophy of action, the philosophy of mind and even ethics have become less sharp. In addition, an appreciation of speech acts has helped lay bare an implicit normative structure within linguistic practice, including even that part of this practice concerned with describing reality. Much recent research aims at an accurate characterization of this normative structure underlying linguistic practice. (shrink)

Compliments have received only cursory attention from speech act theorists and are usually characterised as run-of-the-mill illocutionary acts. Yet both intentionalist and conventionalist theories of illocutionary force struggle to accommodate ordinary language uses of ‘compliment’. I argue that this is because there are in fact two kinds of compliment: illocutionary compliments and perlocutionary compliments. This account illuminates the practice of complimenting, as well as its converse, insulting, and illustrates the complex relationship between illocutionary force and perlocutionary effect.

How do Dutch people let each other know that they disagree? What do they say when they want to resolve their difference of opinion by way of an argumentative discussion? In what way do they convey that they are convinced by each other’s argumentation? How do they criticize each other’s argumentative moves? Which words and expressions do they use in these endeavors? By answering these questions this short essay provides a brief inventory of the language of argumentation in Dutch.

While entanglement is a phenomenon discussed in quantum theory, it can also be found in art. We propose to connect entanglement to art’s most fundamental question: what is creativity? For example, Marcel Duchamp found the essence of the creative act in the “art coefficient,” the difference and/or gap between the artist’s intention and realization which is created. This paper locates the common sense understanding of entanglement in an inseparable whole that ensures difference between the intention and realization. Seeing the artistic (...) act as actively designing entanglement within artistic production, we present examples of this from the work of the Japanese-style painter Nakamura, and present a concrete vision for an answer regarding the question of the nature of creativity. (shrink)

1. One of Aesop's fables tells of a speech act gone awry: A shepherd-boy, who watched a flock of sheep near a village, brought out the villagers three or four times by crying out, ‘Wolf! Wolf!’ and...

In this article it is pointed out what kind of rules for communication and argumentation are required in order to make it possible to resolve disputes in an orderly way. In section 2, Gricean maxims and Searlean speech act conditions are integrated in such a way that five general rules for communication can be formulated. In section 3, starting from Lewis's definition of convention, it is argued that the interactional effect of accepting is conventionally linked with the complex communicative act (...) complex of argumentation. In section 4, the rules for argumentation are placed in a dialogical perspective. (shrink)

In this article it is pointed out what kind of rules for communication and argumentation are required in order to make it possible to resolve disputes in an orderly way. In section 2, Gricean maxims and Searlean speech act conditions are integrated in such a way that five general rules for communication can be formulated. In section 3, starting from Lewis's definition of convention, it is argued that the interactional effect of accepting is conventionally linked with the complex communicative act (...) complex of argumentation. In section 4, the rules for argumentation are placed in a dialogical perspective. (shrink)

la noción de perlocución ha resultado problemática desde su primera formulación en Austin . Se exploran dos vías diferentes para su clarificación. la vía reconstructiva examina las ambigüedades incrustadas en la caracterización austiniana y trata de deshacerlas mediante taxonomías basadas en criterios precisos. la vía eliminativa , finalmente adoptada, propone sustituirla por una noción alternativa, la de marco situacional de una emisión, capaz de servir mejor al propósito de estudiar “el acto de habla total en la situación de habla total”.