Abstract
In articles such as “Speech Acts without Propositions?” (2006), Marina Sbisà advocates a “strong” conception of speech acts as means by which speakers modify their own and others’ deontic statuses, including their rights, obligations, and commitments. On this basis Sbisà challenges an influential approach to speech acts as typically if not universally possessing propositional contents. Sbisà argues that such an approach leads to viewing speech acts as primarily aimed at communicating propositional attitudes rather than carrying out socially and normatively significant action. For this reason she advocates eschewing propositions from speech act theory’s conceptual toolkit; she also proposes a liberalization of the distinction between illocutionary force and semantic content, which are widely thought to be mutually exclusive. In this chapter we examine Sbisà’s reasoning and argue that while it does justify denying propositional attitudes a central role in communication, it does not justify dispensing with propositions or other contents in our theorizing about speech acts. In addition, we endorse Sbisà’s proposal for liberalizing the force/content distinction, and show a variety of ways in which force indicators may also possess semantic content.
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Notes
- 1.
My thanks to the editors of this volume, Laura Caponetto and Paolo Labinaz, for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.
- 2.
- 3.
Sbisà (2009) proposes a reading of Austin on which the conventional nature of speech acts is due to the conventionality of their effects, which are in turn characterized as coming into being by dint of an agreement between agents. (“A conventional effect is such insofar as it comes into being by being agreed upon by the relevant members of a social group” [Sbisà 2009, 49].) We may doubt that an agreement so described is sufficient for the institution of a convention, and I have raised such doubts in Green (2018b). See also Green (2021a) for further discussion of conventions.
- 4.
I here set aside the question whether Austin invoked propositions in his account of illocutionary acts; Sbisà makes a strong case that it’s doubtful that he did.
- 5.
The editors of this volume have suggested to me that by “cognitive effect,” Sbisà means not a perlocutionary effect, but instead merely the state of understanding what the speaker is attempting to say. If so, hers is a stronger claim than the one I shall be examining. It seems wiser to evaluate the weaker claim, since if it is found wanting, then the stronger claim will be as well.
- 6.
See the useful overview in Shapiro (2018).
- 7.
See Marsili and Green (2021) for further discussion and references.
- 8.
See van Elswyck (2021) for discussion and references.
- 9.
We may also observe that Bach and Harnish’s putative sufficient condition for promising is not in fact sufficient. The reason is that it builds in no requirement of addressee uptake. Yet in the absence of uptake, speakers are not committed to the future courses of action that their words describe.
- 10.
- 11.
The argument that follows is a condensed version of that given in Green (2021b).
- 12.
Here and in what follows we may remain neutral on the nature of propositions. For our purposes they may be sets of possibilia, structured entities, or abstractions from utterances.
- 13.
Green (2021b) uses the notion of verbal signal, as well as the related notion of verbal index, to reconstruct a line of reasoning analogous to that given in lines (1)–(4) in the text, and to show it to be valid. This reconstruction makes good on our earlier claim that verbal signaling is sufficient under certain conditions for the performance of a speech act.
- 14.
I have elsewhere (Green 2019b) imagined a linguistic community that only has a practice of “ur-assertion,” in which speakers undertake primitive forms of commitment to the contents that they express. (In a similar spirit, Witek (2021) discusses what he calls proto-assertion.) Also, the fact that a given society does adopt the practice of assertion although it might not have, does not make that practice conventional. One may see this by noting that a practice of, for example, cutting might, or might not, be adopted by a society. (Some societies might not cut their food or other items of interest, but instead tear or break them.) But if a society does adopt cutting, there need be nothing arbitrary about it. Accordingly, the premise that having a practice of assertion is not mandatory for the existence and continuation of a linguistic community, does not imply that that practice, or any of the effects it makes possible, is arbitrary in a way that is necessary for convention. See Green (2021a) for further discussion of convention.
- 15.
- 16.
Vanderveken (1990) provides tableaux for various families of forces that helps elucidate the sense in which one force may be stronger or weaker than another.
- 17.
The liberalization of the force/content distinction advocated here does not justify rejecting that distinction entirely. In Green (2018a) I have defended a liberalization of that distinction, while showing that recent attacks thereon are not cogent.
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Green, M. (2023). Should Speech Act Theory Eschew Propositions?. In: Caponetto, L., Labinaz, P. (eds) Sbisà on Speech as Action. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22528-4_2
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