In this work I reply to Zoltán Vecsey’s criticisms of the semantic account of fictional names I put forward in Orlando. The main tenet of that proposal is that fictional names refer to individual concepts, which I understand in terms of mental files. In Vecsey, the author presents three main objections: no referential shift can be ascribed to fictional names, fictional names are supposed to play two conflicting functions, and the mental file framework is incompatible with an antirealist view of (...) fictional objects. Although the objections are deep and thoughtful, the challenge they involve can be met if certain aspects of the proposal are clarified and developed. (shrink)

In their extensive overview of various concepts of presumption Godden and Walton recognise “the heterogeneous picture of presumptions that exists in argumentation theory today”. I argue that this heterogeneity results from an epiphenomenal character of the notion of presumption. To this end, I first distinguish between three main classes of presumptions. Framework presumptions define the basic conditions of linguistic understanding and meaningful conversation. The “presumption of veracity” is their paradigm case. I argue that such presumptions are satisfactorily covered by the (...) Principle of Charity, or else Gricean maxims or satisfaction conditions for speech acts. Formal presumptions are general presumptive rules of argument, theorised as topoi or acceptable inference warrants, including institutional warrants. Material presumptions are acceptable outcomes of nested or outsourced arguments, which entitles arguers to use them as acceptable premises or opinions in further arguments without the typical burden of proof. If this is correct, then the study of presumption always collapses into the study of other, likely more fundamental, concepts. Does it render presumptions, by Occam’s Razor, altogether redundant in argumentation theory? I tentatively answer this question from a consistently conversational perspective on argumentation; I argue that the pragmatic grounds for presumptions are to be found in the conditions for speech act performance in the institutional social world, as developed by Searle. (shrink)

Moral language displays a characteristic duality. On the one hand, moral claims seem to be similar to descriptive claims: To say that an act is right seems to be a matter of making an assertion, thus indicating that the speaker has a moral belief about which she can be correct or mistaken. On the other hand, moral claims seem to be different from descriptive claims: There is a sense in which, by claiming that an act is right, a speaker indicates (...) that she is inclined to perform the act, to want others to perform it, and to react with praise towards those who do it. Hybrid theories maintain that utterances of moral sentences have both a descriptive and a practical linguistic function. In this thesis, I investigate how a hybrid theory can best accommodate the descriptive and the practical aspects of moral language. I evaluate and criticize the way that existing hybrid theories have proposed to explain the duality of moral language. The main arguments against these views are that they either: fail to accommodate the way that the practical or attitudinal import of moral claims vary across different contexts and linguistic environments; or that they fail to show how the practical or attitudinal import is reliably inferred by interlocutors in virtue of general communicative principles. I develop and defend a new hybrid theory called ‘dynamic descriptivism’. This theory accommodates the duality of moral language by appeal to the way that moral utterances affect a dimension of communication which consists of the shared assumptions that interlocutors mutually assume to mutually accept. Moreover, I discuss a problem which has affected a wide range of theories of moral language – including existing hybrid theories – which is the problem of explaining what it is that interlocutors disagree about when they disagree about matters of morality. I argue that that dynamic descriptivism offers new resources for solving this problem. (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)

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)

Self-praise has traditionally been interpreted as a potentially face threatening act, which infringes the ‘Modesty Maxim’ proposed by Leech. Certain discourse genres, however, like application letters, job interviews or the LinkedIn summaries which are the research object of this article serve, by definition, to promote the professional as skilful. Hence, the question arises to what extent these discourse genres take into account the risky nature of self-praise. On the basis of a corpus of some 90 French and US LinkedIn summaries, (...) this article shows, on one hand, that besides asserting explicitly which competent identity and skills one has, LinkedIn-members use a whole array of more or less subtle indirect strategies to express skilfulness, including strategies pertaining to the area of reported speech. On the other hand, the analysis reveals that downgrading devices are hardly attested, contrary to upgrading modifiers, which also exhibit a remarkable variation. (shrink)

This study looks into the hybridity of a particular political discourse format by exploring different sets of characteristics of the press release genre published by the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1996 and 2005. In an integrated approach preceded by a substantial contextualization of the problem, the genre is analyzed in terms of its activity, social relations and communication technology. Particular political communication strategies the genre is meant to accomplish, such as legitimization, coercion and representation, (...) are also anlayzed in terms of their linguistic realizations such as lexical and semantic content, metaphors, metapragmatic features, perlocution and construction of social hierarchy/distance towards recipients. (shrink)

The subject matter of the paper is an analysis of the semantic relations between sentence negation, performative negation, and declarations in reference to utterances which speech acts theory gives the label of representatives. Apart from linguistic-semantic analyses, empirical studies have been conducted on the manner in which sentence negation and performative negation are processed. The results of Study I demonstrate that the semantic relation between sentence negation and performative negation changes depend on the type of comment (positive vs. negative), and (...) contextual factors (type of expectations towards events being commented on). As it turned out, when the situational context suggests a negative comment by the sender, participants offer similar interpretations of utterances with sentence negation and performative negation. In Study II the participants assessed the likelihood of the occurrence of the facts spoken of by a sender who uses sentence negation or performative negation. In a context suggesting positive utterances by the sender, a clear difference emerged between sentence negation and performative negation. This difference was not present in respect of negative expectations. The results achieved confirm the assumptions of the model of conversational inference regarding the influence of context on interpretation of a message. The recorded results indicate the semantic relations between declarations, sentence negation, and performative negation, which change depending on the affective significance of the message and contextual factors. (shrink)

This article motivates a shift in certain strands of the debate over legitimate roles for nonepistemic values in scientific practice from investigating what is involved in taking cognitive attitudes like acceptance toward an empirical hypothesis to looking at a social understanding of assertion, the act of communicating that hypothesis. I argue that speech act theory’s account of assertion as a type of doing makes salient legitimate roles nonepistemic values can play in scientific practice. The article also shows how speech act (...) theory might provide a framework for fruitfully extending aspects of the social and pragmatic turns in the philosophy of science. (shrink)

In this article, I articulate and defend an account of corporations motivated by John Searle’s discussion of them in his Making the Social World. According to this account, corporations are abstract entities that are the products of status function Declarations. They are also connected with, though not reducible to, various people and certain of the power relations among them. Moreover, these connections are responsible for corporations having features that stereotypical abstract entities lack (e.g., the abilities to take actions and make (...) profits). (shrink)

It is a widely-held thesis that the content of intentions can be characterized in terms of the truth of a proposition. In this paper I try to reject this idea. First, I argue that, at least for ordinary cases of intention, there cannot be any proposition such that the intention is fulfilled if, and only if, such a proposition is true. After that, I propose an alternative account for the content of intentions. I argue that this content must ultimately involve (...) a particular acting by the agent. (shrink)