The speech act of inquiry is generally treated as a default kind of asking questions. The widespread norm states that one inquires whether p only if one does not know that p. However, the fact that inquiring is just one kind of asking questions has received little to no attention. Just as in the declarative mood we can perform not only assertions, but various other speech acts, like guesses or predictions, so in the interrogative mood we can also make various (...) speech act types. I propose a speech-act-theoretic account of a distinct kind of question that I label exam questions. According to the proposed account, one performs an exam question p only if (i) one has access to the answer to p, and (ii) one does not officially know whether the hearer knows the answer to p. Exam questions satisfy all the necessary requirements of being a distinct kind of speech act. Additionally, my proposal contributes to the recent expansion of the normative approach to a variety of speech acts. (shrink)

Generics about social kinds (or GSKs) frequently propagate descriptions that carry normative force (e.g., 'women are emotional'). Some philosophers of language attribute this to GSKs’ tendency to transmit essentialist beliefs about social kinds. According to these accounts, utterances of GSKs implicate that there is something in the nature of social kinds that causes them to possess the properties described, and that individual members of these social kinds therefore ought to exhibit (or be expected to exhibit) these properties. Here, I draw (...) on empirical evidence to suggest an alternative account. According to my framework, an utterance of a GSK implicates a distinction between the social kind described and its salient conceptual opposite, producing what I call a dichotomizing perspective. For example, ‘women are emotional’ suggests that men are not. Importantly, such distinctions frequently persist in the societal common ground as a function of social power, in part due to their alignment with hierarchical social structures between dichotomized social kinds. This enables such GSKs to perpetuate biased patterns of attention, expectation, and behavior even in the absence of essentialist belief. (shrink)

This paper offers a systematic classification and characterization of speech acts and their norms. Recently, the normative approach has been applied to various speech acts, most notably to constatives. I start by showing how the work on the norms of assertion has influenced various approaches to the norms of other speech acts. I focus on the fact that various norms of assertion have different extensions, i.e., they denote different clusters of illocutions as belonging to an assertion. I argue that this (...) has consequences for theorising about norms of other speech acts and generates certain arbitrary divisions. In the central part, I analyse two groups of speech acts. Firstly, ordinary speech acts, like predictions or retractions. Secondly, I indicate how the normative view can be extended to so-called ancillary speech acts, like presuppositions or implicatures. I end with a discussion of possible extensions of the normative approach, focusing on the debate on lying. (shrink)

This paper pursues the idea that human and non-human great apes share a common set of directive (imperative) gestures and their meanings. We investigate gestures that are multifunctional, in that they have different effects in different contexts, focusing on non-human ape gestures that communicate “Stop that” in some contexts, and “Move away” in others. What may superficially appear to be lexical ambiguity can be derived from a single abstract lexical entry, “Not X!”, concluded to be a candidate for a universal (...) building block of meaning, shared by human and non-human great apes, reflections of which may also be found in the pragmatic gestures in humans. (shrink)

The last decades have seen major advances in the study of gestures both in humans and non-human primates. In this paper, we seriously examine the idea that there may be gestural form types that are shared across great ape species, including humans, which may underlie gestural universals, both in form and meaning. We focus on one case study, the hand fling gesture common to chimpanzees and humans, and provide a semantic analysis of this gesture.

Analyses of so-called ‘post-truth’ discourse in populist politics have so far largely focussed on sorting it into cases of lying, bullshitting, bubble-like epistemic constraints, or alternative epistemic norms flouting objective truth. We review these proposals and point out problems with each. Some scholars, however, have recently drawn attention to how apparent assertions of facts in these contexts seem to be functionally entangled with expressing or affirming social identities. To get a clearer picture of what such an explanation might amount to, (...) we differentiate four different ways in which social identities might be connected to apparently assertive discourse: signalling, expressive affirmation, dissonance reduction, and identity grounding. Distinguishing and deciding among these will matter not only for providing an accurate analysis of post-truth discourse, but also for determining the exact grounds on which it merits criticism and for what might be done about it. (shrink)

Analytical philosophy is ruled by the alliance of logic, linguistics and mathematics since its beginnings in the syllogistic calculus of terms and premises in Aristotle's Analytica protera, in the theories of medieval logic that dealt with what are Proprietatis Terminorum (significatio, suppositio, appellatio), in the theological apologetics of argumentation with the combinatorics of symbols by Raymundus Llullus in the work Ars Magna, Generalis et Ultima (1305-08), in what is presented as Theologia Combinata (cf. Tomus II.p.251) in Ars Magna Sciendi sive (...) Combinatoria by Athanasius Kircher (1669), in analytical combinatorics based in Leibniz's dissertation Ars Combinatoria (1666), where language is understood as a lingua characteristica and as a calculus ratiocinator, in the combinatorics of classes that have the meanings 1 or 0 given in the idea of Boolean functions (1854), in Frege's work Begriffschrift, eine der arithmeticeschen nachgebildete Fomelsprache des reinen Denkens (Concept letter, the language of formulas of pure thought made according to the model in arithmetical language), in Cantor's study of set theory / Grundlagen einer allgemeinen Mannigfaltigkeitstheorie (1883) and up to algorithms of fuzzy logic as a "means of approximate thinking that is in the human prior" (Zadeh, 1990) and fuzzy linguistics in computer semantics (Burghard B. Rieger, 1993). These are all the philosophical ideas of mathematicians and logicians that founded what we call logical pragmatism here as a demand that logic be absolutely used in every way in which it will dominate the grammar of language until logic itself becomes the philosophical grammar of the mind!!! (shrink)

Consider the opening sentence of Tolkien’s The Hobbit: In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. By writing this sentence, Tolkien is making a fictional statement. There are two influential views of the nature of such statements. On the pretense view, fictional discourse amounts to pretend assertions. Since the author is not really asserting, but merely pretending, a statement such as Tolkien’s is devoid of illocutionary force altogether. By contrast, on the alternative make-believe view, fictional discourse prescribes that (...) the reader make-believe the content of the statement. In this paper, we argue that neither of these views is satisfactory. They both fail to distinguish the linguistic act of creating the fiction, for instance Tolkien writing the sentence above, from the linguistic act of reciting it, such as reading The Hobbit out loud for your children. As an alternative to these views, we propose that the essential feature of the author’s speech act is its productive character, that it makes some state of affairs obtain in the fiction. Tolkien’s statement, we argue, has the illocutionary force of a declaration. (shrink)

According to the normative approach, speech acts are governed by certain norms. Interestingly, the same is true for classes of speech acts. This paper considers the normative treatment of constatives, consisting of such classes as assertives, predictives, suggestives, and more. The classical approach is to treat these classes of illocutions as species of constatives. Recently, however, Simion (Shifty Speech and Independent Thought: Epistemic Normativity in Context, Oxford University Press, 2021) has proposed that all constatives (i) are species of assertion, and (...) (ii) are governed by the knowledge norm. I defend the classical treatment of constatives and show that Simion’s conclusion is untenable. No taxonomy of speech acts can accommodate such a view. More importantly, we can test whether a particular speech act is an assertion or not. I propose five tests of assertion, the passing of which is a necessary condition for being an assertion. Some constative speech acts fail these tests. Thus, contrary to Simion, not all constatives can be regarded as species of assertion. (shrink)

The book’s core argument is that an artificial intelligence that could equal or exceed human intelligence—sometimes called artificial general intelligence (AGI)—is for mathematical reasons impossible. It offers two specific reasons for this claim: Human intelligence is a capability of a complex dynamic system—the human brain and central nervous system. Systems of this sort cannot be modelled mathematically in a way that allows them to operate inside a computer. In supporting their claim, the authors, Jobst Landgrebe and Barry Smith, marshal evidence (...) from mathematics, physics, computer science, philosophy, linguistics, and biology, setting up their book around three central questions: What are the essential marks of human intelligence? What is it that researchers try to do when they attempt to achieve "artificial intelligence" (AI)? And why, after more than 50 years, are our most common interactions with AI, for example with our bank’s computers, still so unsatisfactory? Landgrebe and Smith show how a widespread fear about AI’s potential to bring about radical changes in the nature of human beings and in the human social order is founded on an error. There is still, as they demonstrate in a final chapter, a great deal that AI can achieve which will benefit humanity. But these benefits will be achieved without the aid of systems that are more powerful than humans, which are as impossible as AI systems that are intrinsically "evil" or able to "will" a takeover of human society. (shrink)

In this short article, I analyze forms of public speech by individuals in positions of power through a framework based on Austin’s theory of speech acts. I argue that because of the illocutionary and perlocutionary force attached to such individuals’ offices and their public figures, their public speech qualifies for being framed as speech acts—which are not covered by even a broad understanding of freedom of speech or right to privacy. Therefore, I formulate a call for the assessment of public (...) speech by individuals in positions of power through a framework based on “linguistic responsibility.” This framework accounts for the peculiar power structure that such individuals can and do exploit to bring about considerable real-world effects through what could be understood as an exploitation of their speech act power. (shrink)

Irving Singer has defended the thesis that the "fine gold thread" of love, its sine qua non, is the bestowal of value by the lover on the beloved, even in those cases where the love itself is grounded in a positive appraisal of the beloved's attributes. He suggests that bestowal is a matter of elevating the importance of the beloved and his or her needs and interests above their appraised merit. I argue that love's bestowal is principally effected through speech (...) acts of the kind that John Searle refers to as _Status Function Declarations_, the very same linguistic mechanism by which, according to him, all of social or institutional reality is created. On this picture, the roles of lover and beloved are shown to be status functions constituted by a deontology that delineates the partiality of the former towards the latter. (shrink)

Translated from: Searle, J. R. 'Social Ontology: some basic principles'. Anthopological Theory, 2006, Vol. 6, issue 1, pp.51-71.

Translated from: W.V.O.Quine, W. H. O. (1986): Philosophy of Logic. Second Edition. Harvard University Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, 47-61.

This essay attempts to recover the ancient Egyptian category of "maat" as a valuable resource for contemporary metaethics and particular attention is given to its affinity with versions of modern non-cognitivism.

Usually, apologies are made by using non-conditional utterances: “I apologize for ruining your evening!” Very little, if any, attention has been given so far to conditional apologies which typically use utterances such as “If I have ruined your evening, I apologize!” This paper argues that such conditional utterances can constitute genuine apologies and play important moral roles in situations of uncertainty. It also proposes a closer analysis of such conditional apologies and contrasts them with unconditional apologies.

Philosophers, political theorists, and the general public are increasingly concerned with the moral complexities of riots, especially those that occur in overtly political circumstances within democratic societies. Many believe the riots can play no constructive role in a democracy, but recently some theorists have argued that riots can be morally justifiable forms of political protest. To adjudicate this important issue, we think a better account is needed of the ways in which riots can be politically communicative, and this paper aims (...) to supply such an account. We start from the assumption that some riots are protests and then use speech-act theory to develop an account of the complex illocutionary logic of riotous protests. We argue that political riots, like all political protests, have a vocative element that is often overlooked. This element is what Martin Luther King Jr. pointed to when he described political riots as “the voice of the unheard” through which rioters demand recognition as equal participants in democratic decision making. An appreciation of the communicative structure of political riots, in particular their vocative dimension, provides a way of understanding the constructive role they can play in democratic deliberation. (shrink)

In the last decade, many problematic cases of scientific conduct have been diagnosed; some of which involve outright fraud others are more subtle. These and similar problems can be interpreted as caused by lack of scientific objectivity. The current philosophical theories of objectivity do not provide scientists with conceptualizations that can be effectively put into practice in remedying these issues. We propose a novel way of thinking about objectivity for individual scientists; a negative and dynamic approach.We provide a philosophical conceptualization (...) of objectivity that is informed by empirical research. In particular, it is our intention to take the first steps in providing an empirically and methodologically informed inventory of factors that impair the scientific practice. The inventory will be compiled into a negative conceptualization, which could in principle be used by individual scientists to assess objectivity of scientific practice. We propose a preliminary outline of a usable and testable instrument for indicating the objectivity of scientific practice. (shrink)

This dissertation is an investigation into the relation between mind and language from different perspectives, split up into three interrelated but still, for the most part, self-standing parts. Parts I and II are concerned with the question how thought is affected by language while Part III investigates the scope covered by mind and language respectively. Part I provides a reconstruction of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous Private Language Argument in order to apply the rationale behind this line of argument to the relation (...) between mind and language. This argumentative strategy yields the conclusion that reasoning – an important type of thought – is constitutively dependent on language possession and is therefore not available to non-linguistic creatures. This result is achieved by considering the preconditions for reasoning – given that it is a rule-governed activity – and eliminating competitors to language for providing reasoners with what it takes to reason. Part II provides a critical outlook on the wide and highly heterogeneous field of linguistic relativity theories. It is argued that no kind of linguistic relativity whatsoever follows from the conclusion of Part I – i.e., the claim that reasoning is constitutively dependent on having a language. While Part II does not provide a conclusive argument against the linguistic relativity hypothesis, it is argued that endorsement of linguistic relativity theories often rests on a mistaken assumption to the effect that language and culture are interwoven in a way which makes it impossible to separate culture and language, as well as their respective studies. This assumption is undermined by providing examples of languages which clearly predate their culture or do not even have a culture at all. So, the assumption that language and culture are inextricably intertwined is refuted by way of counterexample. Part III provides an in-depth examination of the Principle of Expressibility – prominently endorsed and formulated by John Searle – which claims that whatever can be thought can also be said. The domains of what can be thought and of what can be said are considered in set theoretic terms in order to determine whether one is contained in the other, so that everything we can think can also be adequately communicated. After thorough study of interpretative issues regarding the Principle of Expressibility and consideration of the most pressing potential counterexamples to the principle, we can conclude that we have good reason to believe in the truth of the Principle of Expressibility. In conclusion, the achieved results are related back to prominent positions in the discussion about thought and language which already make their appearance in the very beginning of this investigation. The final chapter of this dissertation reminds us that eminent figures in philosophy have often taken a wrongheaded perspective on the relation between language and thought, so that language has frequently appeared to be an impediment to thought. We can, however, confidently conclude that language, on the contrary, is by far our most apt means for thought and that reasoning would not even be possible without the resources language provides. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that textualism is far less attractive as a theory of written law than some of its modern proponents think. For it is not usually sensible to expect the grammatical meaning of a provision to determine its appropriate legal meaning. Factors that are unrelated to grammar in the identification of law (e.g., legal theory, context) do too much of the work. **Draft -- acknowledgments welcome, but please do not cite.**.

Este trabajo pretende ser una reconstrucción de uno del equilibrio reflexivo. Proporcionaré un concepto, enunciaré sus elementos y describiré cada uno de sus pasos. Afirmaré que puede suscribirse al uso del equilibrio reflexivo no solo desde esquemas coherentistas sino también –contrariamente a lo tradicionalmente sostenido- fundacionalistas. Afirmaré también que ambos esquemas pueden ser sensibles a la experiencia moral humana y que, por tanto, ninguno de los dos representa, necesariamente, un modo viciado de hacer filosofía moral. Finalmente, dado que muchas investigaciones (...) morales se edifican sobre la construcción de diferentes experimentos mentales, intentaré describir ciertas ventajas y desventajas de cada uno de ellos. (shrink)

There are many alleged problems with trusting another person’s moral testimony, perhaps the most prominent of which is that it fails to deliver moral understanding. Without moral understanding, one cannot do the right thing for the right reason, and so acting on trusted moral testimony lacks moral worth. This chapter, however, argues that moral advice differs from moral testimony, differs from it in a way that enables a defender of moral advice to parry this worry about moral worth. The basic (...) idea is that an advisor and an advisee can together constitute a joint agent, and that this joint agent’s action can indeed have moral worth. So while the advisee himself might not do the right thing for the right reason (this because all alone he lacks the right reason), and while the advisor herself might not do the right thing for the right reason (this because all alone she does not do the right thing), they together do the right for the right reason. (shrink)

Frege argued for the force-content distinction not only by appealing to the logical and fictional contexts which are most closely associated with the “Frege point", but also based on the fact that an affirmative answer to a yes-no question constitutes an assertion. Supposedly this is only intelligible if the question contains a forceless thought or proposition which an affirmative answer then asserts. Against this I argue that this fact more readily supports the view that questions operate on assertions and other (...) forceful acts themselves. Force is neither added to propositions as on the traditional view, nor is it cancelled as has recently been proposed. Rather higher-level acts such as questioning, but also e.g. conditionalizing, embed and present assertoric or directive acts that are forceful and committal, while suspending commitment to them. The Frege point confounds different varieties of force and the question whether something is merely presented for consideration with the question what is so presented. Force is representational: through assertoric and directive force indicators subjects non-conceptually present positions of theoretical or practical knowledge, while interrogative acts indicate positions of wondering which strive for such knowledge. (shrink)

A number of philosophers have become interested in the ways that individuals are subject to harm as the performers of illocutionary acts. This paper offers an account of the underlying structure of such harms: I argue that speakers are the subjects of illocutionary harm when there is interference in the entitlement structure of their linguistic activities. This interference comes in two forms: denial and incapacitation. In cases of denial, a speaker is prevented from achieving the outcomes to which they are (...) entitled by their speech. In cases of incapacitation, a speaker’s standing to expect certain outcomes is itself undermined. I also discuss how individual speakers are subject to interference along two dimensions: as exercisers of certain non-linguistic capacities, and as producers of meaningful speech. (shrink)

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)

This paper attempts to explain what a protest is by using the resources of speech-act theory. First, we distinguish the object, redress, and means of a protest. This provided a way to think of atomic acts of protest as having dual communicative aspects, viz., a negative evaluation of the object and a connected prescription of redress. Second, we use Austin’s notion of a felicity condition to further characterize the dual communicative aspects of protest. This allows us to distinguish protest from (...) some other speech acts which also involve a negative evaluation of some object and a connected prescription of redress. Finally, we turn to Kukla and Lance’s idea of a normative functionalist analysis of speech acts to advance the view that protests are a complex speech act constituted by dual input normative statuses and dual output normative statuses. (shrink)

Certainly principles of criminal liability may be understood as rules or norms outlining orders or prohibitions and standing out among other norms with their weight, for legal culture, legal doctrine, etc. In such a classic approach they are norms defining basic rights and obligations in the applicable criminal law. However, is it the only possible and cognitively interesting meaning of the word “principle” in jurisprudence? From the semiotic point of view, they can occur in three forms: special-kind norms, teleological directives, (...) rules which constitute valid performance of conventional activities. In an extra-directival sense these principles may be understood as models-descriptions of shaping the system of criminal law. From a theoretical and practical point of view principles addressed to the legislator are extremely weighty—they can be called rules constructing the system of criminal liability. These all problems are discussed in the article. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that an utterance can function to conserve or maintain the truth of its asserted content, what I call conservative speech. Conservative utterances can work to preserve the truth of their asserted content in two ways. In the first, directive conservatives, the utterance serves as an indirect directive for interlocutors to act in ways that serve to maintain the asserted content. In the second, constitutive conservatives, serve to partly constitute the truth conditions of the asserted content (...) directly. Constitutive conservatives, I argue, are particularly important because they are a central tool for how social groups enforce and thereby maintain facts about group norms and values in the face of deviation. They thus have a central role to play in understanding the role of language in the abilities of social groups to create and maintain their norms and values. (shrink)

The twenty-first century will witness an unprecedented decline in the diversity of the world’s languages. While most philosophers will likely agree that this decline is lamentable, the question of what exactly is lost with a language has not been systematically explored in the philosophical literature. In this paper, I address this lacuna by arguing that language loss constitutes a problematic form of illocutionary silencing. When a language disappears, past and present speakers lose the ability to realize a range of speech (...) acts that can only be realized in that language. With that ability, speakers lose something in which they have a fundamental interest: their standing as fully empowered members of a linguistic community. (shrink)

This paper concerns an epistemological objection against mathematical platonism, due to Hartry Field.The argument poses an explanatory challenge – the challenge to explain the reliability of our mathematical beliefs – which the platonist, it’s argued, cannot meet. Is the objection compelling? Philosophers disagree, but they also disagree on (and are sometimes very unclear about) how the objection should be understood. Here I distinguish some options, and highlight some gaps that need to be filled in on the potentially most compelling version (...) of the argument. (shrink)

This book is in honour of Professor Anna-Sofia Maurin on her 50th birthday. It consists of eighteen essays on metaphysical issues written by Swedish and international scholars.

The article develops and justifies, on the basis of the epistemological argumentation theory, two central pieces of the theory of evaluative argumentation interpretation: 1. criteria for recognizing argument types and 2. rules for adding reasons to create ideal arguments. Ad 1: The criteria for identifying argument types are a selection of essential elements from the definitions of the respective argument types. Ad 2: After presenting the general principles for adding reasons (benevolence, authenticity, immanence, optimization), heuristics are proposed for finding missing (...) reasons, for deductive arguments, e.g., semantic tableaux are suggested. (shrink)

In this paper, I show how a novel treatment of speech acts can be combined with a well-known liberal argument for multiculturalism in a way that will justify claims about the preservation, protection, or accommodation of minority languages. The key to the paper is the claim that every language makes a distinctive range of speech acts possible, acts that cannot be realized by means of any other language. As a result, when a language disappears, so does a class of speech (...) acts. If we accept that our social identities are in large part constituted by the decisions we make about how to speak, language loss, then, will amount to a substantial infringement on our autonomy in a particularly important domain. (shrink)

When an agent’s motivation is sensitive to how his supervisor thinks about the agent’s competence, the supervisor has to take into account both informational and expressive contents of her message to the agent. This paper shows that the supervisor can credibly express her trust in the agent’s ability only by being un- clear about what to do. Suggesting what to do, i.e., “directives,” could reveal the supervisor’s “distrust” and reduce the agent’s equilibrium effort level even though it provides useful information (...) about the decision environment. There is also an equilibrium in which directives are neutral in expressive content. However, it is shown that neologism proofness favors equilibria in which directives are double- edged swords. (shrink)

Can one fully succeed in performing illocutionary acts addressed to others if they do not understand what one is purportedly saying? Can one, for example, tell others something if they do not understand what one supposedly said? It is not uncommon for speech act theorist to claim that one cannot. I, in contrast, will be arguing that it is possible for a speaker to fully succeed in performing interpersonal illocutionary acts even if addressee understanding of what is said is not (...) produced, is not intended to be produced and is even intended not to be produced. (shrink)

Assertions are speech acts by means of which we express beliefs. As such they are at the heart of our linguistic and social practices. Recent research has focused extensively on the question whether the speech act of assertion is governed by norms, and if so, under what conditions it is acceptable to make an assertion. Standard theories propose, for instance, that one should only assert that p if one knows that p (the knowledge account), or that one should only assert (...) that p if p is true (the truth account). In a series of four experiments, this question is addressed empirically. Contrary to previous findings, knowledge turns out to be a poor predictor of assertability, and the norm of assertion is not factive either. The studies here presented provide empirical evidence in favour of the view that a speaker is warranted to assert that p only if her belief that p is justified. (shrink)

This paper argues for a version of metalinguistic descriptivism, the Mill-Frege view, comparing it to a currently popular alternative, predicativism. The Mill-Frege view combines tenets of Fregean views with features of the theory of direct reference. According to it, proper names have metalinguistic senses, known by competent speakers on the basis of their competence, which figure in ancillary presuppositions. In support of the view the paper argues that the name-bearing relation—which predicativists cite to account for the properties that they take (...) names to express—depends on acts of naming with a semantic significance. Acts of naming create particular words specifically designed for referential use, which they perform whether or not the language has other words articulated with the same sound or orthography. Like other forms of metalinguistic descriptivism, the Mill-Frege view affords responses to Kripke’s semantic and epistemic arguments against descriptivism. The view is prima facie more complex than predicativism; but the additional complexity is independently attested in natural languages and well-motivated. Finally, the Mill-Frege proposal deals well with Kripke’s modal argument, and accounts for modal intuitions about names, both issues that pose serious trouble to predicativism. (shrink)

Despite the recent advances in information and communication technology that have increased our ability to store and circulate information, the task remains of ensuring that the right sorts of information reach the right sorts of people. In what follows we defend the thesis that efforts to develop efficient means for sharing information across healthcare systems and organizations would benefit from a careful analysis of human action in healthcare organizations, and that the communication of healthcare information and knowledge needs to rest (...) on a sound ontology of social interaction. We illustrate this thesis in relation to the HL7 RIM, which is one centrally important tool for communication in the healthcare domain. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore the viability of accounting for presumptions as a subtype of verdictives, within the framework of the Austinian approach to speech acts. The available set of felicity conditions is examined and worked out, in order to try and account in particular for a main feature of presumptions, namely, their function in shifting the burden of proof. In order to extend the Austinian framework as required, the notion of pragmatic presupposition accommodation is shown to (...) be a useful device. (shrink)

This thesis is a contribution toward an integral cognitive theory of memory and technology. It, furthermore, develops a theory and prototype for technologically extending mind (memory and thinking).

On Pragmatics, Exercitive Speech Acts and Pornography Suppose that a suspect being questioned by the police says, "I think I'd better talk to a lawyer." Whether that suspect has invoked her right to an attorney depends on which particular speech act her utterance is. If she is merely thinking aloud about what she ought to do, then she has not invoked that right. If, on the other hand, she has thereby requested a lawyer, she has. Similarly, suppose that an unhappily (...) married man says "I want my wife dead." Whether he has thereby solicited his wife's murder depends on which particular speech act his utterance is. If he is merely describing his desires, he has committed no crime. If, by contrast, he has thereby hired an assassin, he has. As one can see, experts on speech acts have a lot to say about various issues in the law.I believe that expertise in speech act theory also illuminates various issues regarding free speech. In what follows, we consider how speech act theory may apply to certain arguments regarding the free speech status of pornography. In particular, we consider several speech act accounts of MacKinnon's claim that pornography subordinates women, but, before turning to such accounts, some background is offered. (shrink)

This chapter argues that political promises do not have to be made by individual politicians. Rather, multiparty discourses may be attributed to political leaders, a process labeled metaphorical promising. It analyzes Yukio Hatoyama's brief (2009-2010) reign as Prime Minister of Japan. Hatoyama was forced to resign amid charges that he had failed to remove a US military base from Futenma, Okinawa. Although Japanese newspapers accused him of breaking promises to move the base, Hatoyama had never explicitly promised to do so. (...) Expectation for change arose through a complex discourse involving the government, opposition, and Japanese media, among others. As political leader, Hatoyama failed to take difficult steps toward military reform. As peace is not merely the absence of war, political accord is more than the absence of divisive speech. Japan's experience reminds us that accord and mutual agreement must be sought through active engagement throughout society. (shrink)

Unsere alltagssprachlichen Mittel, mit denen wir auf den eigenen Sprachgebrauch reflektieren, geben Aufschluss darüber, woran sich halten zu müssen kommunikativ Handelnde glauben. Mit der Verwendung diktumscharakterisierender Ausdrücke wird angezeigt, dass das, was gesagt oder wie es gesagt wird, in verschiedener Hinsicht hätte anders gesagt werden müssen. Das Bemerkenswerte: Diejenigen Aspekte, die mit den unterschiedlichen diktumscharakterisierenden Ausdrücken thematisiert werden, sind im Wesentlichen die Aspekte, die in den Griceschen Konversationsmaximen zum Ausdruck kommen. Die meisten Diktumscharakterisierungen können als Bezugnahme auf eine dieser Maximen (...) bestimmt werden. Vollständig erfasst werden kann das sprachliche Phänomen des reflexiven Sprachgebrauchs jedoch erst vor dem Hintergrund eines erweiterten Maximenkatalogs. Insofern diktumscharakterisierende Ausdrücke die Maximen bestätigen, nach denen sie zustande kommen, kann die 'Existenz' dieser Maximen, insbesondere deren Wirksamkeit diesseits konversationaler Implikaturen, systematisch nachgewiesen werden. (shrink)

I demonstrate that a "speech act" theory of meaning for imperatives is—contra a dominant position in philosophy and linguistics—theoretically desirable. A speech act-theoretic account of the meaning of an imperative !φ is characterized, broadly, by the following claims. -/- LINGUISTIC MEANING AS USE !φ’s meaning is a matter of the speech act an utterance of it conventionally functions to express—what a speaker conventionally uses it to do (its conventional discourse function, CDF). -/- IMPERATIVE USE AS PRACTICAL !φ's CDF is to (...) express a practical (non-representational) state of mind—one concerning an agent's preferences and plans, rather than her beliefs. -/- Opposed to speech act accounts is a preponderance of views which deny that a sentence's linguistic meaning is a matter of what speech act it is used to perform, or its CDF. On such accounts, meaning is, instead, a matter of "static" properties of the sentence—e.g., how it depicts the world as being (or, more neutrally, the properties of a model-theoretic object with which the semantic value of the sentence co-varies). On one version of a static account, an imperative 'shut the window!' might, for instance, depict the world as being such that the window must be shut. -/- Static accounts are traditionally motivated against speech act-theoretic accounts by appeal to supposedly irremediable explanatory deficiencies in the latter. Whatever a static account loses in saying (prima facie counterintuitively) that an imperative conventionally represents, or expresses a picture of the world, is said to be offset by its ability to explain a variety of phenomena for which speech act-theoretic accounts are said to lack good explanations (even, in many cases, the bare ability to offer something that might meet basic criteria on what a good explanation should be like). -/- I aim to turn the tables on static accounts. I do this by showing that speech act accounts are capable of giving explanations of phenomena which fans of static accounts have alleged them unable to give. Indeed, for a variety of absolutely fundamental phenomena having to do with the conventional meaning of imperatives (and other types of practical language), speech act accounts provide natural and theoretically satisfying explanations, where a representational account provides none. (shrink)

A presentation and discussion of Gottlob Frege's understanding of language, both natural and artificial, with close attention to his texts.

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 -/- .