SELF-EXPRESSION IN SPEECH ACTS

• Authors: Witek Maciej
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Inn this paper my aim 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 signalling 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 exist 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.

Keywords

EN

EXPRESSIVE NORMS; ILLOCUTIONARY COMMUNICATION; SELF-EXPRESSION; SPEAKER MEANING; SPEECH ACT; GREEN MITCHELL

• Publisher: Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences and Institute of Philosophy of Academy of Sciences of Czech Republic
• Journal: Organon F. medzinárodný časopis pre analytickú filozofiu
• Year: 2021
• Volume: 28
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 326 – 359

Contributors

author

Witek Maciej

• University of Szczecin, Institute of Philosophy and Cognitive Science, Krakowska 71-79, 71-017 Szczecin, Poland

Identifiers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2021.28204