The paper develops a speech act-based model of verbal irony. It argues, first, that ironic utterances are speech actions performed as conforming to a socially accepted procedure and, second, that they are best understood as so-called etiolated uses of language. The paper is organized into four parts. The first one elaborates on Austin's doctrine of the etiolations of language and distinguishes between the normal or serious mode of communication and its etiolated mode. The second part (...) discusses the dominant approaches to verbal irony and argues that the irony-as-a-trope theories can be viewed as attempts to describe ironic utterances as cases of normal speech, whereas the metalinguistic theories seem to treat them as etiolated uses of language. The third part proposes a set of felicity conditions for ironic acts and puts forth a hypothesis that echo and overt pretence are complementary techniques of linguistic etiolation used for ironizing. The fourth part uses the proposed model to discuss the social dimension of ironizing and argues that utterances intended as acts of ironizing may trigger the accommodating process of context-repair. The take-home message is that ironic utterances are essentially social actions: acts performed by invoking a socially accepted procedure. (shrink)

Abstract: One oft-cited feature of speech acts is their expressive character: Assertion expresses belief, apology regret, promise intention. Yet expression, or at least sincere expression, is as I argue a form of showing: A sincere expression shows whatever is the state that is the sincerity condition of the expressive act. How, then, can a speech act show a speaker's state of thought or feeling? To answer this question I consider three varieties of showing, and argue that (...) only one of them is suited to help us answer our question. I also argue that concepts from the evolutionary biology of communication provide one source of insight into how speech acts enable one to show, and thereby express, a psychological state. (shrink)

Compound figures are a rich, and under-explored area for tackling fundamental issues in philosophy of language. This paper explores new ideas about how to explain some features of such figures. We start with an observation from Stern that in ironic-metaphor, metaphor is logically prior to irony in the structure of what is communicated. Call this thesis Logical-MPT. We argue that a speech-act-based explanation of Logical-MPT is to be preferred to a content-based explanation. To create this explanation we draw (...) on Barker’s expressivist speech-act theory, in which speech-acts build on other speech-acts to achieve the desired communicative effects. In particular, we show how Barker’s general ideas explain metaphor as an assertive-act, and irony as a ridiculing-act. We use Barker’s notion of proto-illocutionary-acts to show how metaphorical-acts and ironic-acts can build one on the other. Finally, we show that while an ironic-act can build on a metaphorical-act, a metaphorical-act cannot build on an ironic-act. This restriction on how they can be composed establishes Logical-MPT via a different route. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, the author examines Mitchell Green’s account of the expressive power and score-changing function of speech acts; second, he develops an alternative, though also evolutionist approach to explaining these two hallmarks of verbal interaction. After discussing the central tenets of Green’s model, the author draws two distinctions – between externalist and internalist aspects of veracity, and between perlocutionary and illocutionary credibility – and argues that they constitute a natural refinement of Green’s (...) original conceptual framework. Finally, the author uses the refined framework to develop an alternative account of expressing thoughts with words. In particular, he argues that in theorising about expressing thoughts with words – as well as about using language to change context – we should adopt a Millikanian view on what can be called, following Green, acts of communication and an Austinian approach to speech or illocutionary acts. (shrink)

In the classic Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts,Kent Bach and Robert M. Harnish advocated the idea that to perform an illocutionary actoften just means to express certain attitudes. The underlying definition of attitudeexpression, however, gives rise to serious problems because it requires intentions of a peculiarkind. Recently, Wayne Davis has proposed a different analysis of attitude expression whichis not subject to these difficulties and thus promises a more plausible account of illocutions.It will be shown, however, that this (...) account is too weak since it does not exclude cases wherethe utterer merely pretends to perform an illocutionary act. Davis' analysis also callsinto question a weaker doctrine widely held among speech act theorists by suggesting that, inorder to perform an illocutionary act, it is not even necessary to express mental states. (shrink)

In this article I articulate the Theory of Affective Pragmatics, which combines insights from the Basic Emotion View and the Behavioral Ecology View of emotional expressions. My core thesis is that emotional expressions are ways of manifesting one’s emotions but also of representing states of affairs, directing other people’s behaviors, and committing to future courses of actions. Since these are some of the main things we can do with language, my article’s take home message is that, from a communicative (...) point of view, much of what we can do with language we can also do with nonverbal emotional expressions. (shrink)

Elephant 2000 is a proposed programming language good for writing and verifying programs that interact with people (eg. transaction processing) or interact with programs belonging to other organizations (eg. electronic data interchange) 1. Communication inputs and outputs are in an I-O language whose sentences are meaningful speech acts identified in the language as questions, answers, offers, acceptances, declinations, requests, permissions and promises. 2. The correctness of programs is partly defined in terms of proper performance of (...) the speech acts. Answers should be truthful and responsive, and promises should be kept. Sentences of logic expressing these forms of correctness can be generated automatically from the form of the program. 3. Elephant aource programs may not need data structures, because they can refer directly to the past. Thus a program can say that an airline passenger has a reservation if he has made one and hasn't cancelled it. 4. Elephant programs themselves can be represented as sentences of logic. Their extensional properties follow from this representation without an intervening theory of programming or anything like Hoare axioms. 5. Elephant programs that interact non-trivially with the outside world can have both input-output specification, relating the programs inputs and outputs, and accomplishment specifications concerning what the program accomplishes in the world. These concepts are respectively generalizations of the philosophers' illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts. 6. Programs that engage in commercial transactions assume obligations on behalf of their owners in exchange for obligations assumed by other entities. It may be part of the specification of an Elephant 2000 program that these obligations are exchanged as intended, and this too can be expressed by a logical sentence. 7. Human speech acts involve intelligence. Elephant 2000 is on the borderline of AI, but the article emphasizes the Elephant usages that do not require AI. (shrink)

Are there universal transcendent features that any natural language must possess in order to provide for its human speakers adequate means of expression and of communication of their conceptual thoughts? As Frege, Austin and Searle pointed out, complete speech acts of the type called illocutionary acts, and not isolated propositions, are the primary units of meaning in the use and comprehension of language. Thus it is in the very performance of illocutionary acts that speakers express and (...) communicate their thoughts. For this reason, speech act theory contributes to the theory of linguistic universals in formulating the necessary and universal laws governing the successful performance and satisfaction of illocutionary acts in language use and comprehension. I will argue that the logical form of illocutionary acts imposes certain formal constraints on the logical structure of a possible natural language as well as on the mind of competent speakers. In particular, certain syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features are universal because they are indispensable. Moreover, in order to perform and understand illocutionary acts, competent speakers and hearers must have certain mental states and abilities which are in general traditionally related to the faculty of reason.Há características transcendentes universais que qualquer linguagem natural tem que possuir para fornecer meios adequados de expressão e de comunicação de pensamentos conceituais aos seus falantes humanos? Como Frege, Austin e Searle mostraram, atos de fala completos do tipo denominado atos ilocucionários, e não proposições isoladas, são as unidades primárias de significado no uso e compreensão da linguagem. Assim, é no exato desempenho dos atos ilocucionários que os falantes expressam e comunicam os seus pensamentos. Por esta razão, a teoria dos atos de fala contribui para a teoria dos universais lingüísticos, formulando as leis necessárias e universais que governam o desempenho bem-sucedido e a satisfação dos atos ilocucionários no uso e compreensão da linguagem. Eu argumentarei que a forma lógica dos atos ilocucionários impõe certas restrições formais na estrutura lógica de uma possível linguagem natural como também na mente de falantes competentes. Em particular, certos aspectos sintáticos, semânticos e pragmáticos são universais porque eles são indispensáveis. Além disso, a fim de desempenhar e entender os atos ilocucionários, os falantes e ouvintes competentes têm que ter certos estados mentais e habilidades que estão, em geral, tradicionalmente relacionadas à faculdade de razão. (shrink)

Communication and interaction today happen in simply one mouse click away. Language and self-expression do not only develop as a recognized tool for oneself but is an avenue for others’ re-expression and identification. Through using Twitter, the elaboration of social interaction becomes easier and accessible. It becomes the primary method of doing things together and establishes a shared meaning that becomes the common ground of understanding by individuals and groups alike. The study aims to analyze the tweets of (...) Kris Aquino, known as the Philippines’ Queen of Multimedia using speech act categories of Searle and predict the meaning based on the speech acts committed. The study used content analysis for it represents systematic and objective means of describing and quantifying phenomena. The results showed that most tweets contained the ‘assertive’ label which refers to ‘those kinds of speech acts that state what the speaker believes to be the case or not’. Further, her influence as a public figure contributed to the forceful implication of realizing the speech act reflected by her readers. Since impression is reality and intention cannot be quantified, what the general audience perceives on a certain person serves to be the truth. Thus, misinterpretation develops due to poor judgment on the elucidation in the tweets of the posters, readers and vice-versa. Keywords - Sociolinguistics, speech act theory, Twitter, micro-blogging, SNS, qualitative, content analysis, Philippines. (shrink)

Slurs are derogatory words; they seem to express contempt and hatred toward marginalized groups. They are used to insult and derogate their victims. Moreover, slurs give rise to philosophical questions. In virtue of what is the word “chink,” unlike “Chinese,” a derogatory word? Does “chink” refer to the same group as “Chinese”? If “chink” is a derogatory word, how is it possible to use it in a non-derogatory way (e.g., by Chinese comedians or between Chinese friends)? Many theories of slurs (...) answer these questions by assuming that slurs communicate derogatory messages. However, little attention has been paid to the speech acts slurs are used to perform. In this dissertation, I argue that slurs are illocutionary force indicators: words to perform the speech acts of derogation. “Chink” is a derogatory word because its use is to derogate the Chinese, just like the phrase “I promise” has the use to make a promise. To derogate the Chinese is to enforce a norm which assigns to them an inferior normative status. Slurs are also propositional indicators: words that contribute to the truth-conditions. “Chink” has the same referent as “Chinese,” its neutral counterpart. Appealing to speech act theory enables my theory to answer questions about slurs, e.g., slurs can be used in non-derogatory ways because the felicity conditions of derogation are not met. To illustrate the advantage of my theory, I will explain how other theories of slurs fall short because they take positions opposite to mine on certain issues. For instance, Mark Richard’s theory, unlike mine, takes utterances of slurs to have no truth values. It follows from his theory, I will argue, that lying with “Chang is a chink” is impossible. Finally, I will defend the force indicator theory from common objections. My force indicator theory provides a case study of the use theory of meaning and a framework for political philosophers to study the harm of slurs. (shrink)

Irony and sarcasm are two quite different, sometimes morally dubious, linguistic tropes. We can draw a distinction between them if we identify irony as a speech act that calls what is bad good and, correspondingly, sarcasm calls good bad. This allows us to ask, which one is morally worse. My argument is based on the idea that the speaker can legitimately bypass what is good and call it bad, which is to say that she may literally mean what she (...) says. This is not true of the opposite case: one cannot bypass what is bad and, therefore, she paradoxically does not mean what she says. In other words, irony is a morally less guilty trope. What is bad has its faults and thus it can be ironized; what is good is without blemish and thus it is difficult to know how it could be called bad. Also, irony can be freely intended, or verbal, or it can be situational in social context. I also discuss dramatic irony in Classical context. Sarcasm does not allow such complexity. Instead, we speak of cynicism and even nihilism as moral attitudes that accompany sarcasm and give it its typical force; or sarcasm may lead to cynicism and nihilism, that is, to the denial of values. Irony does not entail any corresponding attitudes or moral positions. This paper is a philosophical contribution to the ethics of communication and language. (shrink)

Our thesis is that in order to be, truth must be uttered; that in order to exist, true sentences must be either uttered by speakers or read by readers or written by writers. if not uttered, truth disappears, but it can reappear. the view that truth is independent of being expressed is rejected as supposing platonism, mentalism, or idealism. the opposite view probably mistakes truth for reality, in that it is obvious that reality exists quite independently from people and their (...) language. truth is always communicated truth. in "ontological relativity" and in "philosophy of logic", quine seems to accept this view more than he does in "word and object". indications in favour of our point of view can be found in hacking and grice. (shrink)

Frege’s distinction between force and sense is a central pillar of modern thinking about meaning. This is the idea that a self-standing utterance of a sentence S can be divided into two components. One is the proposition P that S’s linguistic meaning and context associates with it. The other is S’s illocutionary force. The force/sense distinction is associated with another thesis, the embedding principle, that implies that the only content that embeds in compound sentences is propositional content. We argue that (...) both the Force/Sense distinction and the principle of embedding are seriously challenged by figurative language, and irony in particular. We conclude that theorists need to go back to the drawing board about the nature of illocutionary acts. (shrink)

This essay explores the speech act of dogwhistling (sometimes referred to as ‘using coded language’). Dogwhistles may be overt or covert, and within each of these categories may be intentional or unintentional. Dogwhistles are a powerful form of political speech, allowing people to be manipulated in ways they would resist if the manipulation was carried outmore openly—often drawing on racist attitudes that are consciously rejected. If philosophers focus only on content expressed or otherwise consciously conveyed they may (...) miss what is most powerful and pernicious in the speech of political culture. This essay is a call to start paying attention to these more covert speech acts, and a first attempt at beginning to theorize them. It argues that dogwhistles present a complex and interesting case for the philosopher of language, and explores their implications for democratic politics. (shrink)

Spoken language is an innate ability of the human being and represents the most widespread mode of social communication. The ability to share concepts, intentions and feelings, and also to respond to what others are feeling/saying is crucial during social interactions. A growing body of evidence suggests that language evolved from manual gestures, gradually incorporating motor acts with vocal elements. In this evolutionary context, the human mirror mechanism (MM) would permit the passage from “doing something” to “communicating (...) it to someone else.” In this perspective, the MM would mediate semantic processes being involved in both the execution and in the understanding of messages expressed by words or gestures. Thus, the recognition of action related words would activate somatosensory regions, reflecting the semantic grounding of these symbols in action information. Here, the role of the sensorimotor cortex and in general of the human MM on both language perception and understanding is addressed, focusing on recent studies on the integration between symbolic gestures and speech. We conclude documenting some evidence about MM in coding also the emotional aspects conveyed by manual, facial and body signals during communication, and how they act in concert with language to modulate other’s message comprehension and behavior, in line with an “embodied” and integrated view of social interaction. (shrink)

Thanking, as other speech acts such as apologizing or requesting, can be performed in numerous contexts and, for their analysis, many crucial variables must be taken into consideration, which often are difficult to control. Besides these variables, speech acts are carried out in different situations, taking into account the culture in which they are performed. For example, thanking might be performed after alighting a bus in the UK, the USA or Australia, but this might not necessarily happen in (...) Spain. The aim of the study on which this paper is based, in to explore thanking contrastively in British English and in Peninsular Spanish from a pragmatic viewpoint, by looking at specific independent variables: the context and situation in which this speech act is performed, the relationship between the interlocutors who perform it, which includes social power and distance, and the reason for expressing gratitude. For the purpose of this investigation, a corpus of 128 textbooks for the learning and teaching of Spanish and English as foreign languages was used. It is important to note that, although these corpora are built on prefabricated dialogues and these can be regarded as abstractions of reality, the communicative situations found in the textbooks are aimed at depicting exchanges and linguistic patterns representing what naturally occurs in real conversations in both cultures. (shrink)

The virtual community under consideration is called theNigerian Village Square, ‘…a marketplace of ideas’. As an online discussion forum, NVS combines the features of listservs and newsgroups with a more elegant and user-friendly interface. While computer-mediated communication technologies augment political discourse in established democracies, new media and mobile technologies create avenues for a virtual sphere among Nigerians. Therefore, the ideal virtual sphere guarantees equal access to all connected netizens, equal right for all languages in netizens’ linguistic repertoire, and it (...) fosters democratic deliberation through policy debates, public dialogues and ‘online polylogues’. By linguistic marketing is meant discourse as a vehicle for ‘promotional acts’ and for ‘selling’ particular cultures and ideologies to multicultural and multilingual readers/audiences. One interpretation of this is in terms of asserting language rights and linguistic equality. The use of Nigerian languages with Nigerian Pidgin online is promotional and forexistential negotiation. This results in language mixture which is an instantiation of freedom of speech, freedom of switch and freedom to switch. The underlying pragmatic motivation for top-down language mixture and alternation in Nigerian virtual discourse is attention-getting with the aim of inducing an interdiscursive writer-reader cognitive as well as communicative interaction. Other pragmatic functions of code switching discussed in the paper include allusive textuality, amusing phaticity, anticipated interactivity, affective expressivity and audience affiliation or alienation, among others. Thus, intertextuality is an explanatory technique for investigating previously unexplored phenomena in digital code switching. (shrink)

In this essay, I propose a novel hybrid metanormative theory. According to this theory, speakers making normative claims express both cognitive and motivational attitudes in virtue of the constitutive norms of the particular speech acts they perform. This view has four principal virtues: it is consistent with traditional semantic theories, it supports a form of motivational judgment internalism that does justice to externalist intuitions, it illuminates the connection between normative language and normative thought, and it explains how speakers (...) can express different conative states when speaking in different normative domains. In the first section, I discuss the theories of Stephen Finlay and David Copp. I show that they each come very close to having it both ways but ultimately fail. Understanding the shortcomings of these views is instrumental to a clear presentation of my own Hybrid Speech Act theory in section two. In the final section, I demonstrate how my view achieves its four advantages. (shrink)

This Handbook introduces key issues in the philosophy of language as currently practised. Topics include: the nature of language; the nature and role of semantic content; the dynamics of communication and speech acts; tense and modality; discourse dynamics; and the expressive, evaluative, subjective, and social aspects of language.

Attempts within sociolinguistics to model the African American speech community require a sound account of what a competent participant knows when they give correct interpretations of utterances made within such a community, a phenomenon any larger theory of language use ought to address. To provide this account, I reconstruct a line of argument from the philosophical history of discussions on African American speech communities. I give this history in terms of pragmatic arguments, that is, in terms of (...) the ability of vernacular speakers to manage the "slip" between speaker meaning and conventional meaning so as to effectively communicate, and thus be interpretable to competent auditors. ;In the writings of African American philosophers Alexander Crummell and Alain Locke especially, the general pragmatic strategy is to take the regulative background of speech acts to play a central role in vernacular interpretation, particularly as it relates language use to patterns of interpretation available to a speech community and to communicative aspects of the socialization of members of that community . In terms of meaning, interpretation is seen by Crummell as a function of publicly accessible meaning; he endorses the claim that the content which a word expresses is an idea in the mind of a speaker--what I call the Semantic Identity Thesis. Locke's insight, however, that cognitive meaning and content-bearing linguistic vehicles can be assessed independently provides him with the leverage to treat speaker meaning and symbol meaning as distinct components of a speaker's competence to successfully interpret utterances--what I call the Semantic Distance Thesis. ;Using these accounts to model inferences in communication, I argue that a complete account of interpretation will show how a speaker accesses inferential, conventional and social knowledge. These sorts of knowledge are tied to the prevailing norms emerging from a regulative background for communication within the language use of a speech community. In this way, the slip between conventional meaning and speaker meaning can be understood as structuring the communicative context of vernacular speech, in that social knowledge plays a central role in effective interpretive inference. (shrink)

The paper addresses the question how descriptive language is used to express legal norms. Sentences we find in legislative acts, i.e. statutes, constitutions and regulations, express legal norms. Linguistically speaking, there are various grammatical and lexical ways of expressing norms, such as imperative mood, modal verbs, deontic verbs, etc. However, norms may also be expressed by descriptive sentences, namely sentences in present or future tense and indicative (declarative) mood (i.e. _The minister determines the tax rate_). In many civil law (...) countries (including Poland), this is a very common, if not the default, form of expressing norms in legislative texts. Often presented as a legal peculiarity, this phenomenon has yet to draw much academic attention. The normative meaning of descriptive sentences is usually attributed to purely pragmatic factors stemming from our shared assumptions about the legal system. However, a closer look reveals that similar grammatical constructions are ubiquitous in everyday communication and in different languages. We tend to utter various sorts of directives using descriptive sentences (_Now we add a spoon of salt to the sauce_; _credit cards are not accepted_). This suggests the possibility for a linguistic (as opposed to exclusively legal) explanation. This paper aims to offer such an explanation. Rather than resorting to formal semantics, so prevalent in legal theory, it borrows from Cognitive Linguistics to reveal the cognitive underpinnings of our surprising tendency to express normativity in descriptive terms. This involves four different, yet complementary, theories. Firstly, the theory of conceptual metaphor by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson which explains the phenomenon in question in terms of the metaphor “ ought is is ”; with “ ought ” as the more abstract target domain and “ is ” as the more concrete, cognitively simpler source domain. Secondly, the theory of speech act metonymy by Panther and Thornburg which presents descriptive legal sentences as referring to various components of the underlying cognitive scenario of obligation. Thirdly, Ronald Langacker’s notion of the virtuality of language as the explanation for non-present, including future, perpetual and directive, uses of the present tense. Fourtly, the notion of normative generics which points to the nominal, as opposed to verbal, structure of descriptive legal sentences as the source of their normativity. (shrink)

It Is My Pleasure To Introduce this discussion of Naoko Saito's American Philosophy in Translation. We have contributions from three experts in American philosophy, all of whom have been in conversation with the author for many years: Jim Garrison, Vincent Colapietro, and Steven Fesmire. Prior to their contributions, I would like to set the scene with some brief remarks to introduce the book and to explain something of its background.Over the past two decades, I have worked closely with Saito on (...) a number of projects, and I have been familiar with her ideas for this book since its inception. In some respects, the book is the product of studies in American philosophy that go back to her time as an undergraduate in Tokyo in the 1980s, ideas that were advanced considerably when she did an MA at Harvard, taking classes with Stanley Cavell and Hilary Putnam, and subsequently when she completed her PhD at Teachers College, with René Arcilla as her advisor and Cavell as a member of her committee. It was against this background that, in 2006, Saito published her first singly authored book, The Gleam of Light: Moral Perfectionism and Education in Dewey and Emerson. As that title indicates, she was already exploring the relation between Dewey and pragmatism, on the one hand, and American transcendentalism, on the other. Her sense back then of some separation between these traditions of thought, and of the nature of the tensions between them, has been refined and, for the most part, strengthened in the years since that earlier publication. No doubt she has been influenced in this by Cavell, who, in one essay, for example, asks: “What's the use of calling Emerson a pragmatist?” In any case, her account of this relationship is extended and altered significantly in American Philosophy in Translation.Through the course of her research, Saito has been conscious of the fact that she is studying American philosophy from a distance—a distance that is geographical, cultural, and linguistic—and she retains a thoughtful humility in relation to this. But she also sees here a possible opening to the perception and release of untapped aspects of these traditions of thought, in ways that might fertilize and extend the ground in which the inheritance of American philosophy has flourished. This is very much the line that she pursues in this book. In the light of this, and as the book's title indicates, there is a particular focus on language and translation. It is important that the latter term is understood not merely as an attractive metaphor for change and transformation: crucial to her developing argument is the experience of translating between languages and the reality of the experience in the lives of so many today, within the academy and without. In the course of this experience, one is sometimes confronted, quite self-consciously, with a word or phrase that resists translation. But sometimes—more often in the life of the accomplished or habituated speaker of the foreign language in question—the experience persists as an undercurrent, subtly opening a world that is other in some respects from the one that comes to light in the mother tongue.By contrast, to the many (especially Anglophone) monolingually minded, the need for translation can appear as an unwanted barrier, something of a nuisance, a problem to be solved. This is by no means a response confined, however, to the uneducated (or the Anglophone or the monolingual). There is also a sophisticated variant of this narrowness of outlook where faith is placed in an artificial or technical language with the power, the fantasy runs, to overcome the vagaries of natural language. Hilary Putnam recalls how Rudolf Carnap, whose stature as a thinker and as a human being he does not doubt, felt strongly that “for all x, planned x is better than unplanned x” and was drawn to the idea of a common world language: Thus the idea of a socialist world in which everyone spoke Esperanto (except scientists, who, for their technical work, would employ notations from symbolic logic) was one which would have delighted him. And I recently had a conversation with a student who remarked quite casually that it would not be a bad idea if there were only one language and one literature: “We would get used to it, and it might help to prevent war.” (Putnam 185)Putnam does not deign to respond to the latter assertion. What is foregrounded in his discussion is that monolingualism is likely to hide the plurality of goods that is realized in different cultures. The importance of that plurality is surely something that the luminaries of American philosophy bring to light. Indeed, Putnam's key point of reference in making these remarks is William James.The undercurrent of translation in the experience of the more accomplished speaker of a foreign language can act then as a sensitization to cultural difference, to different possibilities of thought and being. But in fact, this shifting of thought can apply within any language itself, not just inter- but intra-lingually, opening an insight that is close to the heart of American philosophy. If one can hear the cry of the rooster, then one may be wakened also by Thoreau's turn of expression in the idea of the “father tongue”: through a maturing experience of the language we are brought up with, we come to “a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak” (Thoreau 69). This renewed investment in language, this continual return to our words, is what opens them to new thought and gives them interest. It is first an inheritance from the culture we are brought up in, but it dies in our speech and thinking if we do not turn it to something new. To build, we must begin by borrowing an axe, but we can return it sharper than when we borrowed it.If translation is operative in our language as a whole, as Saito's argument shows, this points to the many little rebirths within ourselves and in our interactions with one another. In fact, the point becomes political in that democracy depends upon this renewal of our words. This renewal resists not only the allure of ideology but also the now familiar etiolated rhetoric of “political realism.” Moreover, it points beyond the reliance, within the politics of recognition, on the defining of groups and categories toward a politics of acknowledgment.In this vein, Saito's outsider perspective is in tune with what Richard Bernstein has called the “global resurgence of American pragmatism.” The borderline or outsider perspective can have a powerful effect on thought, in relation to which Saito invites the reader to recall that America's past was itself an outsider-past: it was outside Europe, a relation with which it was bound to struggle, but it was also ready, as Emerson and Thoreau demonstrate, to draw from greater cultural distances, where it found congenial aspects in East Asian thought.Saito stresses the anti-foundationalist character of American philosophy as of critical importance for both philosophy and politics, and again her discussion of language is crucial to this. Dewey's emphasis on communication, with his relatively flat style of prose, is contrasted with the stylistic experiment and invention that she finds in Emerson, Thoreau, and Cavell. She sees the style of these writers, in some contrast to that of Dewey, as having a salutary, destabilizing effect. She wants to destabilize Dewey. It is entirely consonant with her position, furthermore, that she raises doubts about the bland acceptance of a politics of inclusion. Not only can this become a surreptitious form of discipline and control: it can engender the conformism that Emerson worked so hard to prevent.The book finishes on a more aesthetic note, taking up lines of thought in Dewey's aesthetics but turning this toward the more extravagant elision, in Thoreau, of the functional and the beautiful. The thematization of the aesthetic in this way is, she tries to show, crucial to our (political) world. (shrink)

John Searle's Speech Acts made a highly original contribution to work in the philosophy of language. Expression and Meaning is a direct successor, concerned to develop and refine the account presented in Searle's earlier work, and to extend its application to other modes of discourse such as metaphor, fiction, reference, and indirect speech arts. Searle also presents a rational taxonomy of types of speech acts and explores the relation between the meanings of sentences and the contexts (...) of their utterance. The book points forward to a larger theme implicit in these problems - the basis certain features of speech have in the intentionality of mind, and even more generally, the relation of the philosophy of language to the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Whereas the relationship between truth and propositional content has already been intensively investigated, there are only very few studies devoted to the task of illuminating the relationship between truth and illocutionary acts. This book fills that gap. This innovative collection addresses such themes as: the relation between the concept of truth and the success conditions of assertions and kindred speech acts the linguistic devices of expressing the truth of a proposition the relation between predication and truth.

My aim in this paper is to examine Mitchell S. Green’s notion of self-expression and the role it plays in his model of illocutionary communication. The paper is organized into three parts. In Section 2, after discussing Green’s notions of illocutionary speaker meaning and self-expression, I consider the contribution that self-expression makes to the mechanisms of intentional communication; in particular, I introduce the notion of proto-illocutionary speaker meaning and argue that it is necessary to account for acts overtly (...) showing general commitments that are not ‘marked’ as being specific to one or another illocutionary force. In Section 3, I focus on Green’s account of expressive norms and argue that their function is to stabilize rather than constitute the structure of illocutionary signaling systems; moreover, I examine critically Green’s idea according to which expressive norms enable us to indicate the force of our speech acts and suggest that they play a key role in the mechanisms for epistemic vigilance. Finally, in Section 4, I elaborate on the idea of discourse-constituted thoughts—or, in other words, thoughts that ex- ist in virtue of being expressed in making certain conversation-bound speech acts—and use it to develop a more comprehensive model of the expressive dimension of speech acts. (shrink)

Speech act theory seems to provide a promising avenue for the analysis of the functional organization of argument. The theory, however, might be taken to suggest that arguments are a homogenous class of speech act with a specifiable illocutionary force and a single set of felicity conditions. This suggestion confuses the analysis of the meaning of speech act verbs with the analysis of the pragmatic structure of actual language use. Suggesting that arguments are conveyed through a (...) homogeneous class of linguistic action overlooks the way in which the context of activity and the form of expression organize the argumentative functions performed in using language. An alternative speech act analysis would treat folk terminology as a heuristic entry point into the development of a technical analysis of the myriad argumentative functions and structures to be found in natural language use. This would lead to a thorough-going pragmatic analysis of the rational and functional design of speech acts in argumentation. (shrink)

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

continent. 1.1 (2011): 60-67. At the beginning of Martin Heidegger’s lecture “Time and Being,” presented to the University of Freiburg in 1962, he cautions against, it would seem, the requirement that philosophy make sense, or be necessarily responsible (Stambaugh, 1972). At that time Heidegger's project focused on thinking as thinking and in order to elucidate his ideas he drew comparisons between his project and two paintings by Paul Klee as well with a poem by Georg Trakl. In front of Klee's (...) Saints from the Window and Death of Fire —though we wouldn’t absolutely understand what we were seeing—he writes, “we should want to stand…a long while.” In a similar manner, of Trakl’s poem “Septet of Death”—although it is likely we are unsure in what we hear—Heidegger states that, “we should want to hear…[it] often.” Heidegger further states that in appreciating these, “we “should abandon any claim that [they] be immediately intelligible” (1). So also we must we approach, Heidegger continues, the realm of theoretical physics, in which the difficult work of Werner Heisenberg, be listened to “without protest” and without “any claim that he be immediately understood.” These works, like his own project, merit the time they take to be originally (mis)understood. But this is not necessarily true for philosophy, Heidegger advises, because, “That thinking is supposed to offer ‘worldly wisdom’ and perhaps even a ‘way to a blessed life’” (1). Philosophy is in the unique position of being both abstract (what do we talk about when we talk?) and at the same moment, useful. There are demands that it make sense, that it be, grounded, immediate, and most importantly, rational. Heidegger draws these comparisons between the works of Klee and Trakl and Heisenberg not to claim that philosophy is totally irresponsible. He does not claim that the poet, the painter, nor the physicist have acted irresponsibly. Rather, he would say, they are rising to the highest levels of intelligibility, though it is perhaps an intelligibility that is commonly unavailable to us. In Trakl’s case, as we shall see, mastery is the end result of difficult words. Instead, Heidegger seems be making pleas: for a period of uninterrupted unintelligibility (pure unintelligibility); and that there is a time (that time is now) when, “thinking is…placed in a position which demands of it reflections that are far removed from any useful, practical wisdom” (1-2). Heidegger argues that philosophy requires a period of time in which, instead of focusing on the practical—or even on the worldly—the discipline draw its “determination” instead from the place of painting and poetry and physics. In doing so, “we should have to abandon any claims to immediate intelligibility” (2). But Heidegger doesn’t offer this as a way out. We still have to turn up, we “still have to listen, because we must think what is inevitable, but preliminary” (2). The point for Heidegger, is not to listen to a series of propositions, but instead to “follow the movement of showing” (2). I. … Maybe we're here only to say: house, bridge, well, gate, jug, olive tree, window— at most: pillar, tower … but to say them, remember, oh, to say them in a way that the things themselves never dreamed of existing so intensely.… Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Ninth Elegy” There is little more fundamental, preliminary, in the world than language. We use language, in the form of speech, constantly, whether we are saying anything or not. “Man speaks,” Heidegger writes, and goes on to describe in his essay “Language” (2001) the constant speaking that we do. “We are always speaking, even when we do not utter a single word aloud, but merely listen or read, and even when we are not particularly speaking or listening but are attending to some work or taking a rest” (187). Speaking is expression, an utterance of something internal. It is a recognition of a world. It is a way of communicating thought and it is an activity that we all do, inevitably. Speaking separates the human from the animal world, and despite advances in primatology that seek to give ‘voice’ to primates and other non-human animals, it can safely be said that our form of communication—what we call speech and know as language—is the most advanced, the most complicated. We use it to present and represent the world around us; through actual utterances (vocalization) or through the written word or through ‘unvoiced thoughts’ and dreams. We use language, but more specifically speech—naming—to transmit moods, thoughts, desires, aversions, and feelings. These expressions, mere utterances, nearly always find a source in words, whether spoken or not. Heidegger writes that this common view of language means “that only speech enables man to be the living being he is as man. It is as the one who speaks that man is—man” (187). Speaking then—utterance—surrounds us constantly, whether in the form of careful thought—in the form of an academic paper, say—or in the half mutterings and forgotten thoughts of a nearly remembered dream. Like scaffolding, the apparatus of speech sustains and explains the world, making, in a sense, the world rational, making it apparent. When we speak, we describe, and in doing so, name the world. We use words, through this process of naming, to interpret and sustain the world we see, and the world we imagine. Like Rilke’s naming of jug, and bridge, and window, and stream, we describe—and inscribe upon—the world through an activity of naming. Are we here, perhaps, to name? Is it possible not to name? Is it possible to regard and to view and to look around without naming what we see? Is it possible to feel—to experience—world without giving utterance to that feeling, that process? Sadness, grief, joy, ecstasy, hunger, thirst. Desk, light, room, pen, book, world. White, black, tomorrow, today. Each of these words is a name given to a thing I see in front of me, or a concept that I imagine (in the case of tomorrow or world). What arises in my mind has already existed. If I imagine it, it is named. The word for ‘tomorrow’ and ‘desk’ and ‘light’ precedes me, and precedes my concept of it. The idea of it is already pre-informed, and I must, in a certain sense, bend my ideas to it. When I imagine a table, I imagine my own table (or I imagine an idea of table) but that imagining must follow certain general rules; while, perhaps, it might not always require four legs and a horizontal surface, it must, at least not be, say, a pool of water, or a pile of excrement. It must have some tableness to it to be a table. It must, with Heidegger, table. Otherwise, speech is reduced to gibberish. For Heidegger however, the discussion of language points to something deeper than its “scientific and analytic” study as a communicative device. Indeed, Heidegger seeks to understand language not in reference to man or woman, not as an utterance of humanity, but in reference to itself. In doing so he abandons the conversation—that is, he casts away the traditional arguments surrounding philosophy of language; that it is a means of expression; that it is a human activity; and that it is somehow a representation of something that is—in order to seek to understand language as language, on its own terms. Heidegger is not a philosopher of language, but a philosopher of world, of being. Despite these “correct ideas” holding sway “over the whole field of the varied scientific perspectives on language…they ignore completely the oldest natural cast of language” (191). What is this “oldest natural cast of language? It is the act of language itself. Language is language and language speaks. “Most often,” Heidegger writes, “and too often, we encounter what is spoken only as the residue of a speaking long past” (195). Speech, as we normally encounter it, is like Echo herself calling out to Narcissus, doomed to repeat what has already been said, a mere remnant of what was once language, a trace left behind in the gathering silence of becoming. In both the essay “Language” and in his three lecture course “The Nature of Language” (1982), Heidegger attempts to unpack the seeming tautology of language as language. In each, he focuses on poetry as a way out, or into, a true discussion of the oldest natural cast of language. Poetry is pure speech. In poetry, language is brought to language and language speaks ( Die Sprach spricht ). In the act of poetry, the act of pure speech, the poet names (on the surface not different from how I name this table, this computer) but in the poet naming, the naming does not “hand out titles,” “apply terms,” but rather the naming is a call, a calling forth of entities that bring them into their own, allow them to take their place purely, without compromise. This calling, Heidegger (2001) states, “here calls into a nearness. But even so the call does not wrest what it calls away from the remoteness, in which it is kept by the calling there. The calling calls into itself and therefor always here and there—here into presence, there into absence” (196). II. Window with falling snow is arrayed, Long tolls the vesper bell, The house is provided well, The table is for many laid. Wandering ones, more than a few, Come to the door on darksome courses. Golden blooms the tree of graces Drawing up the earth’s cool dew. Wanderer quietly steps within; Pain has turned the threshold to stone. There lie, in limpid brightness shown, Upon the table bread and wine. Georg Trakl “A Winter Evening” Heidegger is often given short shrift as an abysmally difficult writer, as one that makes no sense and is needlessly difficult. In doing this though, we forget sometimes his eloquence, his simple beauty in writing. Of the above opening stanza, “Window with falling snow is arrayed/ Long tolls the vesper bell.” he writes (2001), This speaking names the snow that soundlessly strikes the window late in the waning day, while the vesper bell rings. In such a snowfall, everything lasts longer. Therefore the vesper bell, which daily rings for a strictly fixed time, tolls long. The speaking names the winter evening time (197). The speaking names the winter evening time. It is almost impossible to comment on that one line by Heidegger. It is as though it must exist on its own completely, without elucidation—as though in front of it we must stand as we do in front of a painting by Klee, that is, we must abandon any claim . Silent and devoted. The speaking of the poem here is not clearly different from common speech ( rede ) yet there is, via Heidegger, an invitation to experience that auracular quality of light and stillness that a gentle, dusk tinged snowfall gives; words evoking a quality so clear, so poignant that, in a sense, Heidegger’s work, at this moment, has been done. But what does this naming accomplish? What does the call call? Remember, it is not the poet that calls, but the naming which calls. The poet has only brought the words forward; it is now the words— snow, vesper bell, window— that take new life in the pure language of the poem. Entities are called forth into presence, like the speaking that names the winter evening time. Not to be present amongst us now, however; naming ‘table’ in the poem does not place it in front of us in this room. Rather, the naming places entities into a gathering which is also a sheltering. The naming brings them to be. In an act of appropriation, things come to be purely as their own, unimpeded by a predetermined expectation. They are called to themselves into an arrival. In Being and Time (1962), Heidegger famously describes the movement between present-at-hand and ready-to-hand in his analysis of the hammer, and of equipment in general. This analysis is already known, if not always clear, to most readers of Heidegger. Briefly, a hammer is ordinarily zuhanden or ready-to-hand; it is part of the background of the world, equipment used and never thought about, like this desk, this sheet of paper, this room. Our interaction with it is temporary and it is historically different for each entity and each relation. We need a hammer, we use a hammer. If all goes according to plan, the hammer remains ready-to-hand; it remains, in a sense, undisclosed and certainly unobtrusive. Our world is undisturbed by the hammer. Only when the hammer or the car or the computer is broken (or sometimes unused or unrecognized or missing) does it intrude into our world, become conspicuous as an object present-at-hand, or vorhanden . In this case, we reach for the hammer, it is broken and we suddenly notice it’s being, broken though it is. The thing which was always ready to hand—handy—is suddenly abstract, something to be examined, if only in its absence or disfunction. This can be exhibited for all entities, and it is important to note that in this analysis the zuhanden / vorhanden split is not restricted to a specific form of constructed material; zuhanden does not refer to the car, and vorhanden the sunset. No entity is ever exclusively ready-to-hand or present-at-hand; they are instead, interpenetrated with each others mode of being, one informing the other in a way that both brings things forth into the world—discloses is the word Heidegger chooses—and at the same time conceals them. As one mode is coming to be so another mode is withdrawing. This flux and movement between modes is precisely what brings the world forward, and what makes it manifest. It exists beyond where we tread and before man took dubious control of the world. We go to find a book or turn on the computer and it is missing or broken and we become aware of the object, as though for the first time. We walk to the water to glimpse the sunset and miss it, or it is less than stellar; in the sunset’s grayness, we become aware of it’s being sunset. The thing is disclosed in its withdrawal. Echoing Heraclitus, we can say that as something is coming to be, it is already becoming something other. Of similar importance to the fact that things are never all of one, or all of the other, they are also never alone. The hammer is never a single object, but is in relation always to the whole. Heidegger (1962) states, Equipment—in accordance with its equipmentality—always is in terms of its belonging to other equipment: ink-stand, pen, ink, paper, blotting pad, table, lamp, furniture, windows, doors, room. These ‘Things’ never show themselves proximally as they are for themselves…What we encounter as closest to us…is the room; and we encounter it not as something ‘between four walls’ in a geometrical, spatial sense, but as equipment for residing…it is in this that any ‘individual’ item of equipment shows itself. Before its does so, a totality of equipment has already been discovered (97). Equipment resides—dwells—in its relations, in its proximal being to other beings. Within the structure of totality, a series of relations is always occurring. The hammer is on the workbench in the carpenter’s hand in the workshop in the village under the sky and under the sun. It doesn’t stop there. Equipment surrounds us and the focus is not on what it does, or what one does with it—the carpenter with the hammer, the writer with laptop—but with the fact that it is. Equipment occurs in relation and is always occurring around us overhead, underfoot, by the stream and in the city. There is a constant exchange of relations happening, and as this occurs, so the world occurs, so the world both discloses and withdraws, into and out of itself. In a very real sense, language is also equipment. It is the thing that we use most often without thought, it is ready-to-hand (except when it’s not.) As we re- cognize the world around us, as we offer names for things and make lists, we are using language much like we might use a hammer, that is, bluntly. Most of the time it is invisible and we draw on it without wondering how we are going to say something. When language does intrude, it does so in an awkward moment, that moment when we can’t remember the right word, when we forget a phrase. At that second, it “speaks itself as language,” it reveals itself as malfunctioning equipment, and we “undergo” an experience with language, in Heidegger’s famous formulation. Language is not a tool anymore that we use to bludgeon an object, but something instead that we submit to, that we experience. In “The Nature of Language,” Heidegger (1982) writes, But when does language speak to us as language? Curiously enough, when we cannot find the right word for something that concerns us, carries us away, oppresses or encourages us. Then we leave unspoken what we have in mind and, without rightly giving it a thought, undergo moments in which language itself has distantly and fleetingly touched us with its essential being (59). The poet’s words become themselves, become appropriate, only when they no longer function in the prosaic world; they instead intrude as they come to be. Language itself brings itself to language. Names, like the entities they indicate, are always becoming something else. As noted above, language, through the poet, has brought forth entities from words previously “known.” I thought that I knew snow, but through Trakl’s re- presentation of the word, language calls forth a new image of snow, indeed calls forth snow itself. The vesper bell tolls longer, the table is for many laid. In bringing forth things , language has brought the world to presence. In everyday naming, word occludes world, preventing, in its everydayness, its coming forth, its disclosing. But what is this world that word has been brought forth into? In the same way that language speaks, world worlds. World, left alone, un-interfered with, comes into itself. It worlds. Again, this sounds like a tautology, but it is essential to Heidegger’s thought (and in my mind is more of a “god killer” than Nietzsche.) One of the most overlooked (and under-appreciated) aspects of Heidegger is his later examination and enthusiasm for the “fourfold,” or the system through which things come to be, through which things thing in a world worlding. The fourfold is the interaction of earth and sky, mortals and gods. Things come to be in the interstices and gathering of the fourfold. The fourfold provides both a place of being, and a sheltering, a place to dwell. Heidegger writes that “the things that were named, thus called, gather to themselves sky and earth, mortals and divinities. The four are united primally in being toward one another, a fourfold.” The poet has called, through the act of pure naming, things to come forth. In the purity of the fourfold—that is, when that is all that there is, when there are no other distractions, definitions, things—entities themselves can come to be. It is important to note that Heidegger is not saying that there are four formal things in the world, autonomous entities unto themselves. He is not evoking a pre-Socratic formula as to what makes up the world; instead, the four mirror each other constantly. (Heidegger calls this the ‘mirror-play.’) They interpenetrate in the same way that the modes of being of things interpenetrate themselves. There is no discrete exclusivity in being or the fourfold. What makes up things is not a precise recipe of the four main components; what makes up things is the action of the fourfold coming together, the movement of the fourfold which is a becoming. Heidegger (2001) writes that “this gathering, assembling, letting stay is the thinging of things.” And he later adds that “thinging, things are things. Thinging, they gesture—gestate—world” (197). Language brings the world to be. It works not again as a recipe added to things, but instead it is a bridge, or more precisely, a relation. Language relates world to thing, brings world to thing. In a sense, it does not say anything; rather it allows, or calls in its movement. Heidegger (2001) writes that, The intimacy of world and thing is not a fusion. Intimacy obtains only where the intimate—world and thing—divides itself cleanly and remains separated. In the midst of the two, in the between of world and thing, in their inter, division prevails: a dif-ference (199). It is in this inter that language prevails. Language is difference, it is the differential aspect between world and thing that brings world to thing. In the final stanza of Trakl’s poem “The Winter Evening,” Trakl evokes this difference in the second line when he writes, “Pain has turned the threshold to stone.” Christopher Fynsk, in his essay “Noise at the Threshold,” draws attention to this point when he writes “it is the figure of the threshold that is language itself, inasmuch as language is defined as the articulation of difference by which difference comes about” (25). Language, as used in the pure language of the poem, draws together world and thing, bridging relation between entity and world. The calling of language calls world to thing, world to being. Heidegger (2001) describes this difference as unique; “of itself, it holds apart the middle in and through which world and things are at one with each other” (200). III. Neither reading nor writing, nor speaking—and yet it is by those paths that we escape what has been said already, and knowledge, and reciprocity, and enter the unknown space, the space of distress where what is given is perhaps not received by anyone (99). Maurice Blanchot The Writing of Disaster So far, we have allowed Heidegger to put forward what language does, how it functions as a relation and how it operates as a threshold, as a bridge. What interests me is what happens beyond language, beyond the relation. What happens to the thing without the naming, without the poet, or even without the everyday chatter—Fynsk calls this ‘noise’—intruding on being? If language allows things to become by bringing thing to world, what happens when we remove this bringing, this threshold turned to pain? In “The Nature of Language,” Heidegger examines the work of the poet Stefan George, specifically “The Word”: Wonder or dream from distant land I carried to my county’s strand And waited till the twilight norn Had found the name within her bourn— Then I could grasp it close and strong It blooms and shines now the front along… Once I returned from happy sail, I had a prize so rich and frail, She sought for long and tidings told: “No like of these depths unfold.” And straight it vanished from my hand, The treasure never graced my land… So I renounced and sadly see: Where word breaks off no thing may be. That final line, “Where word breaks off no thing may be” is evoked on nearly every page of Heidegger’s essay. It is the line to which he returns over and over and bears repeating. Where word breaks off no thing may be. Where naming ends, no thing. We can interpret this in two ways (at least.) Where word—naming—breaks off, then there is nothing . Or, as I choose to read it, where word breaks off no thing may be. In this I see a hint forward, a marker left behind by Heidegger. What could this look like? What does no thing look like? Like a zen koan ( there is no mirror ) it is as thrilling and horrifying as contemplating what preceded the Big Bang. Because language as naming wasn’t always here; we weren’t always here. One or maybe two aspects of the fourfold (depending on your view of gods) were not always here, and there is no guarantee that we will always be around. What then? Heidegger (1982) describes the landscape that the poet finds, “It names the realm into which the renunciation must enter: it names the call to enter into that relation between thing and word which has now been experienced” (65). The poet, in renouncing, allows for the “may be” of “where word breaks off no thing may be.” This “may be” becomes “a kind of imperative, a command which the poet follows, to keep it from then on.” No thing is lacking. Where word breaks off, there may be, a totality, a completion. If we place the emphasis on may be , we make it affirmative, make it positive. One allows it. No thing is where the word, that is the name, is lacking. If we remove then (if we can remove) the word, the name, than that is where no thing is, that is where no thing may blossom, enrich, belong, become. What is no thing? Heidegger writes that “thing is anything that in any way is.” And just after this he writes that the “world alone gives being to the thing.” But what happens if there is no word? Word, in this formulation can be seen as an enframing, a challenging of language. By naming, by drawing a perimeter around an object, we hold it, by its definition (that is a brick) to an ordered future. If we borrow from Heidegger’s essay “The Question Concerning Technology” (1993) the idea of this standing-reserve of an ordered future, we see that “everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately on hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering” (322). What happens if there is no naming of the thing? Silence perhaps. Stillness. We can name—and do name—that which we know. We equate knowledge with knowing the name of something. A brick is a brick, a hammer is a hammer, the universe is the universe. By naming a thing, we create, and draw its parameters, the parameters of the thing, not as thing thinging in the fourfold, but as blunt object apparent. In the four dimensions relatively available to us, we observe (and name) that the brick takes up possibly six by four by two inches and is, in the sense that it currently occupies this time slot. It fulfills its destiny, its being, its brickness, it bricks . But what happens when we remove the name for this brick. We no longer know what to call this no-thing (if indeed we can even arrive at the point of uncalled calling.) In fact the it (this brick) is no longer a thing in the sense that by not naming—by removing the name—it still occupies the same dimension but is indiscernible from the world. It simply is , un-reliant, un- needed by me. By removing the subject (me) from it (the brick) do I not then also remove the object—or at least the duality objectifying it? Why is this important? Why does this matter? I have not really removed anything. I have not changed any thing , per se . The brick still occupies the same space in geographic and temporal dimensions. I have literally not even touched the brick sitting on my desk. But what I have done is removed the name, removed the word (the bridge, according to Heidegger) and in this (again, if this is even possible) there is something vertiginously liberating, not only for me (and my way of thinking) but also for the brick itself. Like the poet who calls the thing forward, by refusing to name, by avoiding any thing that demands me to name it, I release the thing into the fourfold. I am no longer challenging the thing to be there for me ; I do not en frame it through language. Rather I, in an act of extreme responsibility, am refusing the challenge. By refusing the name (refusing to name) one allows, (or no one allows no thing) the brick to be all things , to manifest its manifold being, to incorporate all things into its thinging . It becomes, quite literally, every thing . Because, in its infinite manifestness, it incorporates everything; the mud that gave it its current being, the water that formed the mud, the sun, the stars, the universe and it also allows it to become mud again, to become landfill, to become again, water and sun and stars and universe in an endless, infinite cycle of coming to be some thing (else). Perhaps this is what Heidegger is suggesting when he talks about the stillness at the end of his essay, “Language” (2001): The dif-ference stills particularly in two ways: it stills the things in thinging and the world in worlding. Thus stilled, thing and world never escape from the dif-ference. Rather, they rescue it in the stilling, where the dif-ference is itself the stillness (206). It is in this stillness that I can imagine a gellasenheit (here I mean both “releasement in the Heideggarean sense, as well as Meister Eckhart’s use of the term meaning “letting the world go and giving oneself to God”) of thing and world, a releasing into the stillness and silence of no thing beyond where word breaks off. It is here where I may no longer be, and yet no thing is, but may be. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal ExpressionSarah K. Burgess and Stuart J. MurrayFor More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression. Adriana Cavarero. Trans. Paul A. Kottman. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Pp. 262. $65.00, hardcover; $24.95, paperback.Adriana Cavarero's most recent book, For More than One Voice, offers the reader a critique of Western metaphysics that challenges the hegemony of speech's (...) relation to thought within politics. Revisiting Aristotle's Politics, Cavarero examines the famous definition of man as "zoon logon echon"—usually translated as "rational animal." She is critical of the tradition that renders logos here as "reason" or "rationality," modeled on the abstract and disembodied Platonic idea. Reading the Politics alongside the Poetics, she brings politics into a distinctly rhetorical sphere, and therefore figures logos as "phone semantike." In this light, man is a "speaking animal," an animal who speaks with a voice (phone) that is meaningful (semantike—an adjectival form that qualifies the voice itself). Cavarero's argument is that voice and meaning—phonic and semantic—must be sharply distinguished. The history of Western philosophy, she contends, has effaced this vital difference and focused instead on speech as a unitary phenomenon in which the vocalic and the semantic are always already joined as meaningful signification. In this way, the singularity of the vocalic itself has been elided in favor of speech that strongly privileges meaning. She therefore wishes to deliver us from language, as it were, through a recuperation of the force of the vocalic, the acoustic, the resonant and sonorous auditory quality of phone.Absent in the history of Western philosophy, this sonorous aspect of the vocalic stands as a corrective to our logocentric metaphysical tradition that singularly values the visual over the acoustic, semantic content over vocal utterances, and an abstract, anonymous "what" over a particular, embodied "who." Cavarero claims that the vocalic is an "anti-metaphysical" force that exceeds and challenges signification. In other words, the vocalic immediately communicates the uniqueness of the speaker without recourse to the signifying content of his or her speech. The voice is essentially relational—a relation that is described as "the condition of every communication.... the communicability of the communicable, or the significance of signification" (29). Indeed, for Cavarero the voice is that which "precedes, generates, and exceeds verbal communication" [End Page 166] (29–30). In this way, remarkably, Cavarero refigures the voice as a presymbolic origin that is both temporally and ontologically prior to signification, as that which is a condition of possibility for signification, and as that which is never exhausted by any signifying speech act as such.The voice is the expression of one unique, embodied individual to another. This expression, a "reciprocal invocation" founded in the sonorous, rhythmic, and resonant materiality of the voice, constitutes a "duet," a musical exchange of voices in and through which individuals mutually invoke one another. Cavarero resists inscribing such a relation within the symbolic realm; yet for her this relation is a "wordless language" that takes place in the paradigmatic scene between mother and infant. Here, in this originary scene, there is not yet the movement of language or speech as such, but the rhythm and cadence of demand and response—the voices of mother and infant that invoke one another. Drawing on Hélène Cixous's and Julia Kristeva's well-known work on the maternal chora, Cavarero demonstrates that the cadence of the "la-la melody" exchanged between mother and infant "configure[s] a reciprocal dependence" (170) that takes a structural form in the movement between demand and response.For Cavarero, the "scene of infancy" enjoys a primacy: it is both ontologically and chronologically prior to the institution of language and law. The maternal chora is figured as that which invisibly underwrites what will be understood as the law of the father—a law that is said to mark the inauguration of language. But if the law of the father is rational and semantic, the maternal should not be conceived as simply irrational and pure sound. For Cavarero, the maternal vocalic demonstrates its own reason through its rhythmic and musical resonance... (shrink)

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)

In the verse (2:31) of the Qur’ān, it is mentioned that all names were taught to Adam (PBUH). This verse indicates that revelation is decisively the source of language. On the other hand, it is a common fact that people have been constantly producing symbols to express new ideas and concepts. This situation makes it necessary to associate the utterance (muṭlaq) and static with the relative (al-muqayyah) and dynamic between language and reality in religious thought. In the historical (...) process, Mutakallims have undertaken the responsibility of understanding and interpretation between the transcendent dimension of the religion (ad-Dīn) indicated in the Qur’ān and the innovative and dynamic dimension of life. The Mutakallims’ responsibility continues today. However, to establish the relationship among language, thought, and existence in today’s kalâm, it is necessary to identify the roots of this subject in kalām’s classical sources. In our study designed for this purpose, the truth and value of naming divine meanings in the context of ta‘līm al-asmā’ are examined. On the other hand, since dealing with such a large subject in a limited study is not possible, it is just focused on the research of linguistic theories, the relationship between language and thought, and the issue of whether the names used in the main sources to indicate the meanings are divinely determined (tawqīfī). In fact, it has been determined that the subject of ta'līm al-asmā’ is overshadowed by the vehement debates over the createdness of the Qur’ān (Khalq al-Qur’ān) and the relationship between Allāh’s essence and His attributes, although it is a Qur’ān-centered issue. As can be seen in the study, the approach of the Mutakallims to the issue of ta‘līm al-asmā’ is parallel to their understanding of Allāh’s essence and His attributes. As stated in this research, if the divine names were determined by Allāh, then Allāh’s names will be eternal. Besides, if the names expressed in human languages are the same as the essence of Allāh, this will lead to the problem of eternality. If it is said that the names are separated and unrelated from Allāh’s essence, there will be also more than one independent and eternal being. The idea of multiple eternal beings is against the principle of tawḥīd. However, in cases where the distinction between attributes and essence of Allāh is separated from each other in the mind, it causes attributes to be considered as something existing independently of the essence of Allāh. Therefore, as stated in the study, Mu‘tazilite theologians, who were very sensitive about this issue, attached great importance to the concept of eternity (qadīm) while transcending the essence of Allāh from the attributes of the created. As they appealed to tanzīh by which they transcend Him from all the originated things in time, they were focused on His eternality (qidam). In this regard, all His actions concerning the universe are regarded as temporal, in other words, originated in time (ḥādith). From this point of view, according to them, Allāh’s names specified in the Qur’ān are created just like the Qur’ān itself. Although their meanings are within the boundaries of the Divine Knowledge, their wordings (lafiẓ) belong to humans. Therefore, these names (asmâ’) that people use to describe Allāh in their speech, as Abū ‘Alī al-Jubbā’ī argues, are determined by the convention of the human. It has been determined by people via consensus, like other words of the language, to indicate the essence and attributes of Allāh in a language because of communication. Then, Allāh has sent down His message to people with these words. The conclusion that Mu‘tazilite theologians have regarded the connection of names with the meanings in Allāh’s knowledge as a linguistic use, while Sunnī theologians have addressed this issue based on the creative act (Khalq) of Allāh. There is another explanation which is known as the theory of faculty or habitus as an alternative way. Some Ash‘arî and Māturīdī theologians supported this theory. Today, the importance of this new perspective is clear, which appears another association of both ideas. In this context, it has been determined that the views of Māturīdī, who attributes the content (or meaning) of revelation (waḥy) to Allāh while arguing that its wordings belong to humans, are more appropriate to the theory of the faculty (malakah). (shrink)

Book synopsis: The thirteen specially-commissioned essays in this volume are written by philosophers at the forefront of feminist scholarship, and are designed to provide an accessible and stimulating guide to a philosophical literature that has seen massive expansion in recent years. Ranging from history of philosophy through metaphysics to philosophy of science, they encompass all the core subject areas commonly taught in anglophone undergraduate and graduate philosophy courses, offering both an overview of and a contribution to the relevant debates. Together (...) they testify to the intellectual value of feminism as a radicalizing energy internal to philosophical inquiry. This volume will be essential reading for any student or teacher of philosophy who is curious about the place of feminism in their subject. (shrink)

In the last twenty years, recorded messages and written notes have become a significant test and an intriguing puzzle for the semantics of indexical expressions (see Smith 1989, Predelli 1996, 1998a,1998b, 2002, Corazza et al. 2002, Romdenh-Romluc 2002). In particular, the intention-based approach proposed by Stefano Predelli has proven to bear interesting relations to several major questions in philosophy of language. In a recent paper (Saul 2006), Jennifer Saul draws on the literature on indexicals and recorded messages in order (...) to criticize Rae Langton's claim that works of pornography can be understood as illocutionary acts – in particular acts of subordinating women or acts of silencing women. Saul argues that it does not make sense to understand works of pornography as speech acts, because only utterances in contexts can be speech acts. More precisely, works of pornography such as a film may be seen as recordings that can be used in many different contexts – exactly like a written note or an answering machine message. According to Saul, bringing contexts into the picture undermines Langton's radical thesis – which must be reformulated in much weaker terms. In this paper, I accept Saul's claim that only utterances in contexts can be speech acts, and that therefore only works of pornography in contexts may be seen as illocutionary acts of silencing women. I will, nonetheless, show that Saul's reformulation doesn't undermine Langton's thesis. To this aim, I will use the distinction Predelli proposes in order to account for the semantic behaviour of indexical expressions in recorded messages – namely the distinction between context of utterance and context of interpretation. (shrink)

First published in 1992, this book evokes Pandora and Occam as metaphoric corner posts in an argument about language as discourse and in doing so, brings analytic philosophy to bear on issues of Continental philosophy, with attention to linguistic, semiological, and semiotic concerns. Instead of regarding meanings as guaranteed by definitions, the author argues that linguistic expressions are schemata directing us more or less loosely toward the activation of nonlinguistic sign systems. Ruthrof draws up a heuristic hierarchy of discourses, (...) with literary expression at the top, descending through communication-reduced reference and speech acts to formal logic and digital communication at the bottom. The book offers multiple perspectives from which to review traditional theories of meaning, working from a wide variety of theorists, including Peirce, Frege, Husserl, Derrida, Lyotard, Davidson, and Searle. In Ruthrof's analysis, Pandora and Occam illustrate the opposition between the suppressed rich materiality of culturally saturated discourse and the stark ideality of formal sign systems. This book will be of interest to those studying linguistics, literature and philosophy. (shrink)

John Searle's Speech Acts made a highly original contribution to work in the philosophy of language. Expression and Meaning is a direct successor, concerned to develop and refine the account presented in Searle's earlier work, and to extend its application to other modes of discourse such as metaphor, fiction, reference, and indirect speech arts. Searle also presents a rational taxonomy of types of speech acts and explores the relation between the meanings of sentences and the contexts (...) of their utterance. The book points forward to a larger theme implicit in these problems - the basis certain features of speech have in the intentionality of mind, and even more generally, the relation of the philosophy of language to the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Speech acts have sometimes been considered as unembeddable, for principled reasons. In this paper, I argue that speech acts can be embedded under certain circumstances. In particular, I consider denegation and conjunction of speech acts, quantification into speech acts, conditionalization of speech acts, the embedding of speech acts by verbs like say and wonder, speechact-modifying adverbials like frankly, clauses commenting on speech acts, like certain uses of because-clauses, parentheticals, and appositive relative clauses. A (...) crucial distinction is made between speech acts and speech act potentials, linguistic objects that can be used to perform speech acts when applied in a specific communicative situation. I develop a semantic theory in which speech act potentials are captured as semantic functions that change a world-time index, reflecting the nature of speech acts as events that happen in the world. As index changers, speech act potentials become nearly regular semantic objects, with a proper semantic type on which other semantic objects can operate on. In this way, speech acts (or rather, speech-act potentials) become part of the recursive structure of language. (shrink)

forthcoming in S. L. Tsohatzidis (ed.) John Searle’s Philosophy of Language: Force, Meaning and Mind (Cambridge).

Language is nothing but human subjects in as much as they speak, say and know. Language is something coming from the inside of the speaking subject manifest in the intentional meaningful purpose of the individual speaker. A language, on the contrary, is something coming from the outside, from the speech community, something offered to the speaking subject from the tradition in the technique of speaking. The speech act is the performance of an intuition by the (...) subject, both individual and social. (shrink)

Not every speech act can be a lie. A good definition of lying should be able to draw the right distinctions between speech acts that can be lies and speech acts that under no circumstances are lies. This paper shows that no extant account of lying is able to draw the required distinctions. It argues that a definition of lying based on the notion of ‘assertoric commitment’ can succeed where other accounts have failed. Assertoric commitment is analysed (...) in terms of two normative components: ‘accountability’ and ‘discursive responsibility’. The resulting definition of lying draws all the desired distinctions, providing an intensionally adequate analysis of the concept of lying. (shrink)

This paper argues for a reorientation of speech act theory towards an Austin-inspired conception of speech acts as context-changing social actions. After an overview of the role assigned to context by Austin, Searle, and other authors in pragmatics, it is argued that the context of a speech act should be considered as constructed as opposed to merely given, limited as opposed to extensible in any direction, and objective as opposed to cognitive. The compatibility of such claims with (...) each other is discussed. Finally, the context-changing role of speech acts is analyzed differentiating between the illocutionary and the perlocutionary dimension. (shrink)

This book develops an alternative approach to sentence- and word-meaning, which I dub the speech-act theoretic approach, or STA. Instead of employing the syntactic and semantic forms of modern logic–principally, quantification theory–to construct semantic theories, STA employs speech-act structures. The structures it employs are those postulated by a novel theory of speech-acts. STA develops a compositional semantics in which surface grammar is integrated with semantic interpretation in a way not allowed by standard quantification-based theories. It provides a (...) pragmatic theory of truth, a treatment of logically complex discourse as expressive cognitive states, and a background metaphysics in which the world is a totality of logically simple states of affairs. The book also puts forward an account of how intentional states provide the simple, representational foundation for a superstructure of speech-act structures–a system of thoughts–that far outruns the expressive power of the intentional foundation. In short, it provides an account of cognitive foundations of a language and a naturalistic reduction of semantics through an expressive theory of semantic norms. (shrink)

This paper clarifies Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between speaking and spoken speech, and the relation between the two, in his Phenomenology of Perception. Against a common interpretation, I argue on exegetical and philosophical grounds that the distinction should not be understood as one between two kinds of speech, but rather between two internally related dimensions present in all speech. This suggests an interdependence between speaking and spoken aspects of speech, and some commentators have critiqued Merleau-Ponty for claiming a (...) priority of speaking over spoken speech. However, there is a sense in which Merleau-Ponty is right to emphasize the priority, namely, in terms of the ontological priority of the speaking subject with respect to language understood as a constituted cultural ideality. The latter only maintains its ontological status insofar as it is taken up by a language community. I favorably contrast Merleau-Ponty’s views on this question to those of the late Heidegger and de Saussure, and suggest potential applications of this clarified position for contemporary discussions in philosophy of language. (shrink)

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)

How do Language communities generate rules and norms of behavior? How do those norms and rules impact on interpersonal communication and on the Construction of organisations? Such communication implies the testing and comparison of narratives seen as relevant for problem solving in organisations. The Research suggests that reflection rooms are created when persons come together to find responses to Challenges (Called gaps in decision making in Searles Rationality in Action from 2001). The book investigates struggles of narratives (...) over time in the Development of Norwegian fisheries in the 20th Century, testing the relation between the horisontal institution of Language against the hierarchical organization of practical collective activities, in general and in practice in fisheries. (shrink)

Language is nothing but human subjects in as much as they speak, say and know. Language is something coming from the inside of the speaking subject manifest in the meaningful intentional purpose of the individual speaker. A language, on the contrary, is something coming from the outside, from the speech community, something offered to the speaking subject from the tradition in the technique of speaking. The speech act is nothing but the development of an intuition (...) by the subject thus transforming it in words of a language. It is both individual and social. Since human subjects are free and historical, the study of speech acts is hermeneutics, that is, interpreting speech acts with knowing and the human reality. (shrink)

Systematic theology regards revelation as a divine discourse between God and us. However, it seems that it does not fully explain how God’s divine discourse transforms our life and what implications it has. Therefore, this article suggests investigating ‘revelation as a discourse of language’ in the light of speech act theory. If we illuminate revelation as a discourse of language as a SAT, the following three hermeneutical contributions to revelation are expected: firstly, revelation is a ‘communicative act’ (...) between God and believer as a ‘discourse of language’ of God; secondly, it shows how the language of revelation bridges the gap between ‘divine language’ and ‘human language’ in terms of revelation as a discourse of language, and thirdly, it confirms how God’s Word is real in the lives of believers.Contribution: While this article engages the traditional theological notion of revelation as a discourse of language between God and humans, it argues that reconsidering this notion in the light of speech act theory. It can explain God’s language discourse transforms the lives of believers and the Word is fulfilled in their lives. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Performative Utterances Locutionary, Illocutionary, and Perlocutionary Acts Classifying Illocutionary Acts Communicative Speech Acts and Intentions Conversational Implicature and Impliciture Conventional Implicature The Semantic‐Pragmatic Distinction Applications of the Semantic‐Pragmatic Distinction.

Art viewers and critics talk as if visual artworks say things, express messages, or have meanings. For instance, Picasso’s 'Guernica' has been described as a “generic plea against the barbarity and terror of war”, forming a “powerful anti-war statement”. One way of understanding meaning in art is to draw analogies with language. My thesis explores how the notion of a speech act – an utterance with a performative aspect – can illuminate art’s power to ‘speak’. In recent years, (...) philosophers of art have explored speech act theory in relation to literary art, though barely at all in relation to visual art. Given the way we talk about painting, sculpture, installation, film, and photography, and given that artists have investigated performativity through their art, this neglect is surprising. My thesis develops two main arguments. First, artwork meaning is active. I argue that visual artworks, under certain conditions, are speech acts. They have propositional content, and they have a certain force: they can do things such as assert, protest, and criticise – things we would normally do with words. I defend these contested claims against several dissenters, and explore some consequences: in particular, I explore how art can lie, a hitherto neglected question. Second, artwork meaning is flexible. I argue that what an artwork says and does is affected by the context in which it’s displayed, and in particular, by its curation. As a result, an artwork’s content and force can vary from context to context. This goes against a dominant view in the philosophy of art – what I call ‘Originalism’ – that the meaning of an artwork is fixed by factors which held at the time of the work’s creation, and so cannot change across time. I argue that this is mistaken: artworks can change in meaning. Curatorial factors can affect an artwork’s content and force, and consequently its social effects. It is known that our verbal speech has the power to oppress and liberate people in a society. My thesis aims to show that art also has this power to shape society; through what it says, and through what it does. (shrink)

Successful language use requires accurate intention recognition. However, sometimes this can be undermined because communication occurs within an interpersonal context. In this research, I used a relatively large set of speech acts (n = 32) and explored how variability in their inherent face‐threat influences the extent to which they are successfully recognized by a recipient, as well as the confidence of senders and receivers in their communicative success. Participants in two experiments either created text messages (senders) designed (...) to perform a specific speech act (e.g., agree) or interpreted those text messages (receivers) in terms of the specific speech act being performed. The speech acts were scaled in terms of their degree of face threat. In both experiments, speech acts that were more threatening were less likely to be correctly recognized than those that were less threatening. Additionally, the messages of the more threatening speech acts were longer and lower in clout than the less threatening speech acts. Senders displayed greater confidence in communicative success than receivers, but judgments of communicative success (for both senders and receivers) were unrelated to actual communicative success. The implications of these results for our understanding of actual communicative episodes are discussed. (shrink)