Illocutionary Force and Its Relation to Mood: Comparative Methodology Reconsidered

It is sometimes argued that the study of grammar is irrelevant or unimportant in the business of comparative philosophy, or that it ought to be avoided in favor of methods that presuppose a strongly pragmatic point of view. In this regard, some philosophers have expressed skepticism about whether facts about grammar have anything to offer in the adjudication of competing theories of interpretation or translation. This essay argues that a strongly pragmatic orientation in comparative philosophy invariably overlooks an important role that the study of grammar can play in shedding light on the nature of intention and communicative practice, and that an essential part of the methodology of comparative philosophy should involve a grammatical approach to interpretation and translation. These points are supported by a semantical analysis of passages from Confucius’ Analects that clarifies the relationship between illocutionary force and grammatical mood.     

Slurs under quotation

Philosophical Studies - Against content theories of slurs, according to which slurs have some kind of derogatory content, Anderson and Lepore have objected that they cannot explain that even slurs...     

Illocutionary harm

Philosophical Studies - A number of philosophers have become interested in the ways that individuals are subject to harm as the performers of illocutionary acts. This paper offers an account of the...     

Illocutionary Silencing

Rae Langton and Jennifer Hornsby have argued that pornography might create a climate whereby a woman's ability to refuse sex is literally silenced or removed. Their central argument is that a failure of 'uptake' of the woman's intention means that the illocutionary speech act of refusal has not taken place. In this paper, I challenge the claims from the Austinian philosophy of language which feature in this argument. I argue that uptake is not in general required for illocution, nor is it required for refusal in particular. I conclude with remarks on the relationship between illocutionary and perlocutionary speech-acts.     

Slurs and Redundancy

According to nearly all theorists writing on the subject, a certain derogatory content is regularly and systematically communicated by slurs. So united, the theorists disagree sharply on the elements of this content, on its provenance, and on its mechanism. I argue that the basic premiss of all these views, that there is any such derogatory content conveyed with the use of slurs, is highly dubious.

     

Slurs,roles and power

Slurring is a kind of hate speech that has various effects. Notable among these is variable offence. Slurs vary in offence across words, uses, and the reactions of audience members. Patterns of offence aren’t adequately explained by current theories. We propose an explanation based on the unjust power imbalance that a slur seeks to achieve. Our starting observation is that in discourse participants take on discourse roles. These are typically inherited from social roles, but only exist during a discourse. A slurring act is a speech-act that alters the discourse roles of the target and speaker. By assigning discourse roles the speaker unjustly changes the power balance in the dialogue. This has a variety of effects on the target and audience. We show how these notions explain all three types of offence variation. We also briefly sketch how a role and power theory can help explain silencing and appropriation. Explanatory power lies in the fact that offence is correlated with the perceived unjustness of the power imbalance created.     

Slurs and Semantic Indeterminacy

Philosophia - The analysis of the derogatory aspect of slurs has recently aroused interest among philosophers of language. A puzzling element of it is its erratic behaviour in embeddings, for...     

The Pragmatics of Slurs

I argue that the offense generation pattern of slurring terms parallels that of impoliteness behaviors, and is best explained by appeal to similar purely pragmatic mechanisms. In choosing to use a slurring term rather than its neutral counterpart, the speaker signals that she endorses the term (and its associations). Such an endorsement warrants offense, and consequently slurs generate offense whenever a speaker's use demonstrates a contrastive preference for the slurring term. Since this explanation comes at low theoretical cost and imposes few constraints on an account of the semantics of slurs, this suggests that we should not require semantic accounts to provide an independent explanation of the offense profile.     

A Partial Defense of Illocutionary Silencing

Catharine MacKinnon has pioneered a new brand of anti‐pornography argument. In particular, MacKinnon claims that pornography silences women in a way that violates their right to free speech. In what follows, we focus on a certain account of silencing put forward by Jennifer Hornsby and Rae Langton, and we defend that account against two important objections. The first objection contends that this account makes a crucial but false assumption about the necessary role of hearer recognition in successful speech acts. In response, we argue that, as silencing primarily concerns communication, Hornsby and Langton are perfectly correct to treat hearer recognition as they do. The second objection contends that their particular account of silencing has the unacceptable result of undermining the responsibility of rapists. We here argue that no such result follows from their account.     

The Mode of Existence of Illocutionary Negation

This paper examines a recent attempt to provide anegative answer to the question of the existence of illocutionary negations. It argues that the attempt is unsuccessful both because it presupposes amisinterpretation of the question's theoretical import and because, even granting that misinterpretation, it bases its proposed answer on certain assumptions that can independently be shown to be untenable.     

An Illocutionary Logical Explanation of the Surprise Execution

This paper further develops the system of illocutionary logic presented in ‘Propositional logic of supposition and assertion’ (Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 1997, 38, 325-349) to accommodate an ‘I believe that’ operator and resolve Moore's Paradox. This resolution is accomplished by providing both a truth-conditional and a commitment-based semantics. An important feature of the logical system is that the correctness of some arguments depends on who it is that makes the argument. The paper then shows that the logical system can be expanded to resolve the surprise execution paradox puzzle. The prisoner's argument showing that he can't be executed by surprise is correct but his beliefs are incoherent. The judge's beliefs (and our beliefs) about this situation are not incoherent.     

Demographic Indicators as Predictors of Future Time Perspective

The present investigation examined the relationships between five demographic variables (age, sex, income, marital status, and education) and future time perspective. From a theoretical perspective, these demographic indicators were conceptualized as proxy measures for the social forces that influence the adult expression of this personality dimension. Data were drawn from six investigations in which a brief measure of future time perspective (Hershey and Mowen in The Gerontologist 40:687–697, 2000) had been administered to one thousand four hundred and ninety eight individuals. Higher future time perspective scores (i.e., longer future orientations) were associated with being male, increased age, income, and educational level. These main effects, however, were mitigated by a significant three-way interaction among sex, age, and level of education. These findings suggest that a complex interplay of variables is responsible for the expression of personality traits at the individual level.     

Demographic Indicators as Predictors of Future Time Perspective

The present investigation examined the relationships between five demographic variables (age, sex, income, marital status, and education) and future time perspective. From a theoretical perspective, these demographic indicators were conceptualized as proxy measures for the social forces that influence the adult expression of this personality dimension. Data were drawn from six investigations in which a brief measure of future time perspective (Hershey and Mowen in The Gerontologist 40:687–697, 2000) had been administered to one thousand four hundred and ninety eight individuals. Higher future time perspective scores (i.e., longer future orientations) were associated with being male, increased age, income, and educational level. These main effects, however, were mitigated by a significant three-way interaction among sex, age, and level of education. These findings suggest that a complex interplay of variables is responsible for the expression of personality traits at the individual level.     

以言行事观念下的句法学、语义学和语用学

语力逻辑系统既包括本体层面,与真及成真条件有关,也包括认知层面,与以言行事的语力和行为有关。语力逻辑系统可以通过往标准的逻辑系统中添加施事性算子而得到。通过提供一个联系着以言行事的行为的理性承诺的解释,并且通过形成以旅事性行为为前提和结论的自然演绎的推理系统,这类算子标示了以言行事的语力。本文利用一个简单的处理了断言、否定、假设的语力逻辑系统,证明经过恰当的考虑,对以言行事的语力和理性承诺的研究属于语义学,而不属于语用学。这一论证依赖于这样的事实,即表达式的赋值函项可被同时用于处理语力逻辑系统的本体和认知层面,在这两种情况下,这些函项都为建立恰当性和完全性的结果提供了基础。句法学研究的是表达式的结构,而语义学关心的则是语言使用者的意义,无论这些意义是不是习规上的意义。剩下的第三项研究,即所谓语用学,考察的是语言行为的意义是如何被说话者传达给听者的。