A groundbreaking examination of Michel Foucault's history of truth. Many blame Michel Foucault for our post-truth and conspiracy-laden society. In this provocative work, Daniele Lorenzini argues that such criticism fundamentally misunderstands the philosopher’s project. Foucault did not question truth itself but what Lorenzini calls “the force of truth,” or how some truth claims are given the power to govern our conduct while others are not. This interest, Lorenzini shows, drove Foucault to articulate a new ethics and politics of truth-telling precisely (...) in order to evade the threat of relativism. The Force of Truth explores this neglected dimension of Foucault’s project by putting his writings on regimes of truth and parrhesia in conversation with early analytic philosophy and by drawing out the “possibilizing” elements of Foucault’s genealogies that remain vital for practicing critique today. (shrink)

In this paper, I claim that even though the conventional account of illocution (Sbisà, in Lodz Pap Pragmat 5(1):33–52, 2009a; In: B Fraser, K Turner (eds) Language in life, and a life in language. Emerald, pp 351–357, 2009b) makes an attempt to theorize social relations in illocutions, the attempt is unsuccessful. Sbisà's conventional account fails to describe the ways in which a fair social agreement can be established. A fair social agreement is a key element for the idea of social (...) relations in the conventional account of illocution. However, considering the role of gender and power relations embedded in social construction, it is difficult to accept the possibility of such an agreement. Since Sbisà fails to provide a probe into power relations, her attempt to establish the point of social relationships remains insufficient. The main argument here is that in the unjust social milieu, the kind of social agreement essential to illocution is difficult. Moreover, what may look like a social agreement might be a result of the systemic oppression done to one particular group. In what follows, I claim that the problem of theorizing the social relation in illocutions remains unresolved. (shrink)

Considering the short history of the feminist philosophy of language, Rae Langton’s article “Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts” was highly influential as one of the first positive research programs in the movement. In that paper, Langton – using John L. Austin’s speech act theory – tries to interpret Catharine MacKinnon’s thesis: pornography is a speech that subordinates and silences women. Despite the importance of the subject, those unfamiliar with certain historical and contextual features of the topic would hardly understand it. (...) My paper aims to introduce some of the major accounts in this special area in the intersection of speech act theory and feminist philosophy. Rather than just reconstructing Langton’s arguments and the most common objections against it, I will take a more holistic approach, examining its surrounding literature as well. This article has six sections. In Section 1, I contrast the conservative and liberal arguments against pornography and sketch MacKinnon’s liberal critique. In Section 2, I give alternative interpretations of MacKinnon’s thesis, “pornography is harm.” In Section 3, I try to make sense of the prima facie implausible assumption that pornography is speech. In Section 4 and 5, I will analyze the Langtonian theories about subordination and silencing. Finally, in Section 6, I will mention the most challenging problems for Langton’s approach, considering the verbal nature or pornography, the limits of the protection of free speech, and the different positions on sexual consent. (shrink)

This paper gives an outline of truthmaker semantics for natural language against the background of standard possible-worlds semantics. It develops a truthmaker semantics for attitude reports and deontic modals based on an ontology of attitudinal and modal objects and on a semantic function of clauses as predicates of such objects. It also présents new motivations for 'object-based truthmaker semantics' from intensional transitive verbs such as ‘need’, ‘look for’, ‘own’, and ‘buy’ and gives an outline of their semantics. This paper is (...) a commissioned 'target' article, with commentaries by W. Davis, B. Arsenijevic, K. Moulton, K. Liefke, M. Kaufmann, R. Matthews, P. Portner and A. Rubinstein, P. Elliott, G. Ramchand and my reply. (shrink)

Human rights, a language that keeps public order, is realised in ordinary life by language characteristics according to social rules. Despite this fact, research that considers the linguistic features of human rights relating to its use and effects in terms of the kingdom of God in the present world seems to have not been attempted or seldom attempted. Thus, this article proposes to examine the language of human rights by means of Speech Act Theory. The approach is predicated upon the (...) language use as performative acts. The approach shows the language of human rights with performative language by seeking to uncover the operation and effects of language of rights in real-life situations. The thrust of this article implies how we can explain the semantics of human rights and execute them in ordinary life in terms of God’s kingdom. (shrink)

This Master's Thesis discusses the nature of the Eucharistic Sacrifice in the systematic theology of two German scholars; Lutheran theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg and Roman Catholic theologian Joseph Ratzinger, the latter perhaps better known as pope (emeritus) Benedict XVI.

Mind &Language, Volume 35, Issue 1, Page 115-138, February 2020.

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. (shrink)

[This is an old version which is superseded by the published version. I keep it here for the record, as it has been cited.] A strict dichotomy between the force / mode of speech acts and intentional states and their propositional content has been a central feature of analytical philosophy of language and mind since the time of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell. Recently this dichotomy has been questioned by philosophers such as Peter Hanks (2015, 2016) and Francois Recanati (2016), (...) who argue that we can't account for propositional unity independently of the forceful acts of speakers and propose new ways of responding to the notorious 'Frege point' by appealing to a notion of force cancellation. In my paper I will offer some supplementary criticisms of the traditional view, but also a way of reconceptualizing the force-content distinction which allows us to preserve certain of its features, and an alternative response to the Frege point that rejects the notion of force cancellation in favor of an appeal to intentional acts that create additional forms of unity at higher levels of intentional organization: acts such as questioning a statement or order, or merely putting it forward or entertaining it; pretending to state or order; or conjoining or disjoining statements or orders. This allows us to understand how we can present a forceful act without being committed to it. In contrast, the Frege point confuses a lack of commitment to with a lack of commitment or force in what is put forward. (shrink)

When should you engage with difficult arguments against your cherished controversial beliefs? The primary conclusion of this book is that your obligations to engage with counterarguments are more limited than is often thought. In some standard situations, you shouldn't engage with difficult counterarguments and, if you do, you shouldn't engage with them open-mindedly. This conclusion runs counter to aspects of the Millian political tradition and political liberalism, as well as what people working in informal logic tend to say about argumentation. (...) -/- Not all misleading arguments wear their flaws on their sleeve. Each step of a misleading argument might seem compelling and you might not be able to figure out what's wrong with it. Still, even if you can't figure out what's wrong with an argument, you can know that it's misleading. One way to know that an argument is misleading is, counterintuitively, to lack expertise in the methods and evidence-types employed by the argument. When you know that a counterargument is misleading, you shouldn't engage with it open-mindedly and sometimes shouldn't engage with it at all. You shouldn't engage open-mindedly because you shouldn't be willing to reduce your confidence in response to arguments you know are misleading. And you sometimes shouldn't engage closed-mindedly, because to do so can be manipulative or ineffective. -/- In making this case, Jeremy Fantl discusses echo chambers and group polarization, the importance in academic writing of a sympathetic case for the opposition, the epistemology of disagreement, the account of open-mindedness, and invitations to problematic academic speakers. (shrink)

Meaningful work refers to the idea that human work is an integral part of the way we think of our lives as going well. The concept is prevalent in sociology and business studies. In philosophy, its discussion tends to revolve around matters of justice and whether the State should take steps to eradicate meaningless work. However, despite the breadth of the recent, general literature, there is little to no discussion about how it is in fact the case that work is (...) meaningful. There is a basic assumption that certain facts about work make it meaningful. After noting the shortcomings in the literature, this essay argues that we can better understand the production of meaning in work by an analogy to speech acts. Using Paul Ricoeur’s theory of action as discourse, one can see how meaning is predicated in the performance of work in ways that are locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the debate between Alice Crary and Nat Hansen concerning Austin’s view of ‘literal meaning’. Crary suggests that Austin thinks that there is no literal meaning, while Hansen thinks that for Austin there is literal meaning. I will argue that for Austin there is indeed a literal meaning, a fixed meaning, which sentences carry across all occasions of use, however, such meaning does not suffice to determine whether, independent of these occasions, the sentences can be used (...) to say something true or false. Thus I suggest a middle ground between the two readings. My reading highlights the importance of Austin’s claim that ‘true’ is a dimension-word, which both Crary and Hansen overlook. (shrink)

This is a prepublication version of my book Objects and Attitudes. The book develops a novel semantics of attitude reports, modal sentences, and quotation based on the view that sentences semantically act as predicates of various attitudinal and modal objects, entities like claims, requests, promises, obligations, and permissions, rather than standing for abstract propositions playing the role of objects. The approach develops truthmaker semantics for attitudinal and modal objects and has a wide range of applications to issues in philosophy of (...) language, semantics, and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Alice Crary has recently developed a radical reading of J. L. Austin's philosophy of language. The central contention of Crary's reading is that Austin gives convincing reasons to reject the idea that sentences have context-invariant literal meaning. While I am in sympathy with Crary about the continuing importance of Austin's work, and I think Crary's reading is deep and interesting, I do not think literal sentence meaning is one of Austin's targets, and the arguments that Crary attributes to Austin or (...) finds Austinian in spirit do not provide convincing reasons to reject literal sentence meaning. In this paper, I challenge Crary's reading of Austin and defend the idea of literal sentence meaning. (shrink)

Peter Hanks and Scott Soames both defend pragmatic solutions to the problem of the unity of the proposition. According to them, what ties together Tim and baldness in the singular proposition expressed by ‘Tim is bald’ is an act of the speaker : the act of predicating baldness of Tim. But Soames construes that act as force neutral and noncommittal while, for Hanks, it is inherently assertive and committal. Hanks answers the Frege–Geach challenge by arguing that, in complex sentences, the (...) force inherent in the content of an embedded sentence is cancelled. Indrek Reiland has recently objected to Hanks’s proposal that it faces a dilemma: either force cancellation dissolves the unity of the proposition secured by the cancelled act of assertion, or Hanks’s proposal reduces to Soames’s. In this paper, I respond to Reiland by offering an analysis of force cancellation which gets rid of the alleged dilemma. The proposal is based on a set of distinctions from speech act theory : between two senses of ’force’, two types of act, and two types of context. The role of simulation in force cancellation is emphasized, and connections drawn to broader issues such as the evolution of complex language. (shrink)

This paper will outline a novel semantics of verbs of saying and of quotation based on Austin’s (1962) distinction among levels of linguistic acts (illocutionary, locutionary, rhetic, phatic, and phonetic acts). It will propose a way of understanding the notion of a rhetic act and argue that it is well-reflected in the semantics of natural language. The paper will furthermore outline a novel, unified and compositional semantics of quotation which is guided by two ideas. First, quotations convey properties related to (...) lower-level (phonetic or phatic) linguistic acts; second, such meanings of quotations are strictly based on syntactic structure, namely a lower-level (phonetic, phonological or morpho-syntactic) structure as part of the syntactic structure that is input to semantic interpretation. Such lower-level linguistic structures will contribute properties of utterances, to the semantic composition of the sentence, in one way or another. (shrink)

This paper criticizes Langton's speech act account of MacKinnon's claim about (the subordinating force of) pornography and offers a different account of how speech might enact harmful norms and thus constitute harm.

semantic minimalism and moderte contextualism.

(2013). What are the primary bearers of truth? Canadian Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 43, Essays on the Nature of Propositions, pp. 558-574.

I employ William Alston’s account of speech act theory in order to analyze the concept of consecration. I describe consecrations as EXERCITIVE-type illocutionary acts, whereby objects are distinguished for God’s use. I test my reasoning and definition on the first instance of consecration in Scripture, the consecration of the Sabbath. This allows me to probe further the necessary and sufficient conditions for veridical consecrations. Finally, I describe that the speech act of consecration brings about an ownership relation between God and (...) the consecrated object. (shrink)

Given John L. Austin’s Oxonian pedigree, we should expect his discussion of how “to say something is to do something” (1962, 12) to be taken up analytically. However, Austin also offers resources that have been exploited outside of traditional analytic philosophy—think of certain analytic feminist work, for example, or literary critical uses of performativity. For the most part, such work extends and inflects Austin’s notion of illocution and its related concepts of force and performativity for disciplinary-specific ends. This tendency in (...) reading Austin to focus on illocution and its related concepts is understandable. After all, Austin devotes most of his Harvard lectures, assembled in How to Do Things .. (shrink)

In this survey paper, I start from two classical theses of speech act theory: that speech act content is uniformly propositional and that sentence mood encodes illocutionary force. These theses have been questioned in recent work, both in philosophy and linguistics. The force/content distinction itself – a cornerstone of 20‐century philosophy of language – has come to be rejected by some theorists, unmoved by the famous ‘Frege–Geach’ argument. The paper reviews some of these debates.

a comprehensive, somewhat Gricean theory of speech acts, including an account of communicative intentions and inferences, a taxonomy of speech acts, and coverage of many topics in pragmatics -/- .

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)

Austin's distinction between locutionary and illocutionary acts has offered a fruitful way of focussing the relation between language and communication. In particular, by adopting the distinction we attend to linguistic and communicative subjects as actors, not just processors or conduits of information. Yet in many attempts to explicate the constitution of illocutionary acts the subject as actor is subsumed within the role of linguistic rules or conventions. I propose an account of illocutionary acts in which rules or conventions are secondary (...) to what I call communicative skills. These skills are taken as the primary component of communicative competence. They are derived from the principle that linguistic communication is not ultimately a linguistic matter, but relates instead to the way a communicator uses language. This principle is found in the work of Donald Davidson, but Davidson has tended to concentrate on semantics, and leaves the details of linguistic communication for pragmatics. The aim of this paper is to defend the general principle and supply some pragmatic details. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a new (i.e., previously overlooked) breed of exercitive speech act (the conversational exercitive). I establish that any conversational contribution that invokes a rule of accommodation changes the bounds of conversational permissibility and is therefore an (indirect) exercitive speech act. Such utterances enact permissibility facts without expressing the content of such facts, without the speaker intending to be enacting such facts and without the hearer recognizing that it is so. Because of the peculiar nature ofthe rules (...) of accommodation that generate them, conversational exercitives have importantly different felicity conditions and therefore constitute a new breed ofexercitive speech act. (shrink)

Our examination of the controversy surrounding the intentionalist conception of textual interpretation shows that the critics of this approach to questions of meaning and interpretation have so far failed to prove their case. The standard objections to intentionalism, on grounds of logical or empirical fallacy, cannot be maintained. We reconstruct the objections which have been raised in the literature against the intentional conception and discuss them as criticism of a conception hold to be inadequate with respect to the problem of (...) literary interpretation. In our evaluation of the intentional conception we conclude that it represents a perfectly ‘normal’ conception of meaning and interpretation, of a kind by no means inferior to other approaches adopted by the various disciplines concerned with interpreting texts. (shrink)

Los estudiantes de las instituciones educativas de educación básica y media en Colombia y en el mundo, se tuvieron que enfrentar a nuevas realidades y situaciones de su proceso académico, debido a la crisis sanitaria del 2020 por el virus COVID 19, que impidió que alrededor de 1370 millones de estudiantes no asistan a la escuela en condiciones tradicionales de educación, en Latinoamérica más de 156 millones de niños y jóvenes, según la UNESCO y en Colombia más de 9,4 millones (...) de niños de educación inicial, básica y media según cifras del MEN Colombia. (shrink)

Despite its status at the heart of a closely related field, philosophers have so far mostly overlooked a phenomenon sociolinguists call ‘social meaning’. My aim in this paper will be to show that by properly acknowledging the significance of social meanings, we can identify an important new set of forms that discursive injustice takes. I begin by surveying some data from variationist sociolinguistics that reveal how subtle differences in the way a particular content is expressed allow us to perform importantly (...) different illocutionary actions, actions we use to do things like constructing a public persona and building a rapport with an audience. The social importance of these activities and the pervasiveness of our engagement in them means that the ethical stakes involved are high—substantial injustices may result if speakers from different social groups are differently empowered with regard to the illocutionary possibilities made available to them by variation. (shrink)

This is a study of the syntax and semantics of reports containing speech-act and propositional attitude verbs with quotational complements. I make the case that while the quotational complements of some verbs, including _utter_, are nominal and metalinguistic, those of others, including _assert_ and _believe_, are clausal and nonmetalinguistic. Quotational reports with ‘say’ are ambiguous. When quotational complements are clausal, they are like _that_-clauses in being subordinate content clauses with main-clause form. Unlike _that_-clauses, quote-clauses force deictic shift and are unambiguously (...) opaque. I also argue that quotation marks serve a different function in “mixed” reports, and that use of the traditional “direct” and “indirect” is not consistent with their traditional definitions. (shrink)

I am often asked to explain the difference between my notion of impliciture (Bach 1994) and the relevance theorists’ notion of explicature (Sperber and Wilson 1986; Carston 2002). Despite the differences between the theoretical frameworks within which they operate, the two notions seem very similar. Relevance theorists describe explicatures as “developments of logical forms,” whereas I think of implicitures as “expansions” or “completions” of semantic contents (depending on whether or not the sentence’s semantic content amounts to a proposition). That is (...) not much of a difference. We agree that implicitures/explicatures go beyond what is said (in a strict sense) and yet fall short of being implicatures. So, what is the difference, or is it just terminological? As we will see, the real differences emerge when the two notions are situated in their respective theoretical frameworks with their contrasting conceptions of what is involved in linguistic communication. (shrink)

: Although others have focused on Catharine MacKinnon's claim that pornography subordinates and silences women, I here focus on her claim that pornography constructs women's nature and that this construction is, in some sense, false. Since it is unclear how pornography, as speech, can construct facts and how constructed facts can nevertheless be false, MacKinnon's claim requires elucidation. Appealing to speech act theory, I introduce an analysis of the erroneous verdictive and use it to make sense of MacKinnon's constructionist claims. (...) I also show that the erroneous verdictive is of more general interest. (shrink)

To perform an illocutionary act – e.g. to apologise – is it necessary, sufficient, or irrelevant that a hearer understand you to be performing that act? This issue is sometimes called the ‘problem of uptake’. Famously, Austin’s inaugural account makes uptake necessary for illocutionary force. For decades, critics have objected to this view: Some have sought to show that uptake is irrelevant; others have argued that uptake is important though not essential; while still others have argued that uptake is necessary (...) though must be radically reframed. Nevertheless, it is widely agreed that there is a problem of uptake in Austin. In this paper, I contend that this view is wrong. Austinian uptake, I argue, is essential; yet, contra the standard reading, it is not synonymous with understanding. Uptake is a narrow criterion pertaining to conventional-linguistic competencies, which rules out specific kinds of misunderstanding, not misunderstanding überhaupt. The importation of non-Austinian assumptions about uptake from subsequent speech act theorists – specifically, the mis-equivocation of uptake with understanding a speaker’s intention – I show, has muddied the water. This paper offers a novel reconsideration and salvaging of uptake and its significance, whose stakes I elucidate through intervention in the fraught issue of conceptualising sexual consent. (shrink)

In an historic moment in Dutch politics, the entire cabinet left the House of Representatives during a debate due to extreme right politician Thierry Baudet's conspiracy-laden speech. After espousing a variety of conspiratorial claims, Baudet accused the Minister of Finance, Sigrid Kaag, of being a secret agent for a global Deep State since her studies at Oxford. The accusation prompted Kaag and the entire cabinet to exit the chamber. While some MPs defended Baudet's right to speak, others supported the chair's (...) decision to silence him for violating the rules. These events showcase the divisive potential of conspiracy accusations in politics, causing polarised reactions. Our analysis delves into the dynamics of conspiracy accusations, their impact on polarisation, and the role of intended audiences (as opposed to general audiences) in both advancing accusations and shaping responses thereto. We argue that Baudet's tactics aimed at capitalising on the polarisation his accusations generated. We argue further that dismissing conspiracy accusations too hastily can deepen public distrust in elected officials, emphasising the need for caution in handling such claims. Ultimately, we highlight the broader pattern of conspiracy accusations being employed to fuel political polarisation, raising questions about their role in democratic deliberation. (shrink)

La investigación analiza las competencias transversales movilizadas en relación a la empleabilidad y los ODS durante la formación del alumnado de la Facultad de CC.Sociales y de la Comunicación (UPV/EHU). La metodología, basada en encuestas,ha medido a través de los resultados de aprendizaje la relación de competencias depensamiento crítico y compromiso social con los ODS. Los resultados muestran quelos resultados de aprendizaje de los ODS se encuentran en una etapa muy temprana,reducidos al debate y reflexión, muy lejos de iniciativas con (...) capacidad efectiva detransformación social. (shrink)

Although others have focused on Catharine MacKinnon's claim that pornography subordinates and silences women, I here focus on her claim that pornography constructs women's nature and that this construction is, in some sense, false. Since it is unclear how pornography, as speech, can construct facts and how constructed facts can nevertheless be false, MacKinnon's claim requires elucidation. Appealing to speech act theory, I introduce an analysis of the erroneous verdictive and use it to make sense of MacKinnon's constructionist claims. I (...) also show that the erroneous verdictive is of more general interest. (shrink)

This article aims to disrupt received views about the significance of J. L. Austin's contribution to philosophy of language. Its focus is Austin's 1955 lectures How To Do Things With Words . Commentators on the lectures in both philosophical and literary-theoretical circles, despite conspicuous differences, tend to agree in attributing to Austin an assumption about the relation between literal meaning and truth, which is in fact his central critical target. The goal of the article is to correct this misunderstanding and (...) to show that Austin is deeply critical of a picture of correspondence between language and the world which nearly half a century after he delivered his lectures continues to structure philosophical discussions of language. (shrink)

This paper addresses the following question: Can one and the same utterance token, in one unique speech situation, intentionally and conventionally perform a plurality of illocutionary acts? While some of the recent literature has considered such a possibility Perspectives on pragmatics and philosophy. Springer, Cham, pp 227–244, 2013; Johnson in Synthese 196:1151–1165, 2019), I build a case for it by drawing attention to common conversational complexities unrecognized in speech acts analysis. Traditional speech act theory treats communication as: a dyadic exchange (...) between a Speaker and a Hearer who trade illocutionary acts endowed with one and only one primary force. I first challenge assumption by discussing two contexts where plural illocutionary forces are performed in dyadic discussions: dilemmatic deliberations and strategic ambiguity. Further, I challenge assumption by analyzing poly-adic discussions, where a speaker can target various participants with different illocutionary acts performed via the same utterance. Together, these analyses defend illocutionary pluralism as a significant but overlooked fact about communication. I conclude by showing how some phenomena recently analyzed in speech act theory—back-door speech acts New work on speech acts. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 144–164, 2018) and dog-whistles New work on speech acts. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 360–383, 2018)—implicitly presuppose illocutionary pluralism without recognizing it. (shrink)

I identify a notion of compositionality at the intersection of the different notions philosophers, linguists, and psychologists are concerned with. The notion is compositionality of expression content: the idea that the content of a complex expression in a context of its utterance is determined by its syntactic structure and the contents of its constituents in the contexts of their respective utterances. Traditional arguments from productivity and systematicity cannot establish that the contents of linguistic expressions are compositionally determined in this sense. (...) I present a novel argument for this thesis. (shrink)

This paper presents and defends a reappraisal of J.L. Austin’s infamous analogy between saying ‘I know’ and ‘I promise’ in ‘Other Minds.’ The paper has four sections. In §1, I contend that the standard reading of Austin’s analogy is a strawman that distorts the terms of the analogy and superimposes philosophical commitments that Austin was precisely trying to combat. In §§2 and 3, I argue that to understand the point of the analogy we must contextualize ‘Other Minds’ as a response (...) to logical positivism. I recap A.J. Ayer’s influential account of positivism, before arguing that ‘Other Minds’ and its centrepiece analogy should be read as an attack on Austin’s colleague’s organizing positivist assumptions – specifically, descriptivism and the fact/value dichotomy that it props up. My main thesis is that Austin sought to show that epistemic discourse is imbricated with ethical commitments. This reading is anticipated by Cavell, to whom I turn in §4. I bring together insights from across Cavell’s oeuvre to develop this reading of Austin’s analogy and finally to critique certain aspects of it. This paper adds to the recent resurgence in Austin scholarship and aims to get clear the philosophical and historical stakes of his historically maligned analogy. (shrink)

[ENG] The aim of this paper is to analyze the „possibility puzzle” presented by Shapiro (2011) in the context of the debate between conventionalism and non-conventionalism in speech act theory. Conventionalism claims that for every speech act there is a pattern (convention) which determines its illocutionary force. To perform a felicitous speech act is to fulfil necessary and sufficient conditions for this particular speech act. Non-conventionalism criticizes the view that for every speech act there is a conventional pattern and hidden (...) conditions, which are to be fulfilled. This view maintains the conventional thesis for the so-called strict conventional speech acts (e.g. performatives), but negates using universal quantifier for so-called communicative speech acts whose aim is, in short, to express an intention and force someone to act by virtue of this intention. As in (Shapiro 2011), Phil said: in order for someone to have the power to make, change and apply rules, there has to be a rule that empowers someone to do so. This objection concerned „The First Legis- lator” only from the conventional perspective on speech acts. If it can be maintained that The First Legislator’s speech acts may be non-conventional, then Phil’s argument misses the point. Finally, I will emphasize that only lawyers analyze „the very first speech acts” whereas for philosophers, the problem of e.g. „the very first question” is less absorbing. -/- [PL] Celem niniejszego artykułu jest przedstawienie tak zwanej Aporii Phila (possibility puz- zle) przedstawionej przez Shapiro (2011) w kontekście sporu konwencjonalizm–nonkon- wencjonalizm w teorii aktów mowy. Konwencjonalizm utrzymuje, że dla każdego aktu mowy istnieje konwencja, która determinuje moc illokucyjną aktu. Wykonać w pełni for- tunny akt mowy to spełnić wystarczające i konieczne warunki określone dla danego aktu mowy. Nonkonwencjonalizm krytykuje pogląd, że dla każdego aktu mowy istnieje okre- ślona konwencja oraz ukryte warunki, które należy spełnić. Ten pogląd utrzymuje kon- wencjonalną tezę dla tak zwanych stricte konwencjonalnych aktów mowy (na przykład performatywów), ale neguje użycie dużego kwantyfikatora dla tak zwanych komunika- cyjnych aktów mowy, których celem jest, w skrócie, wyrażenie pewnej intencji i zmusze- nie kogoś poprzez jej wyrażenie do określonego postępowania. Phil, bohater historii z książki Shapiro (2011), podkreślił, iż zawsze musi istnieć reguła upoważniająca do two- rzenia prawa. Ten zarzut dotyczący „Pierwszego Legislatora” jest zasadny tylko z per- spektywy konwencjonalizmu. Jeżeli można utrzymywać, że akt mowy Pierwszego Legislatora może być nonkonwencjonalny, wtedy argument Phila jest nietrafny. Na końcu scharakteryzowany jest następujący fenomen: tylko prawnicy analizują „pierwsze akty mowy”, natomiast dla filozofów problem „pierwszego pytania” nie jest tak absorbujący. (shrink)