Abstract
The theory of document acts is an extension of the more traditional theory of speech acts advanced by Austin and Searle. It is designed to do justice to the ways in which documents can be used to bring about a variety of effects in virtue of the fact that, where speech is evanescent, documents are continuant entities. This means that documents can be preserved in such a way that they can be inspected and modified at successive points in time and grouped together into enduring document complexes. We outline some components of a theory of document acts, and show how it can throw light on certain problems in Searleās ontology of social reality.
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Acknowledgements
With thanks to Guglielmo Feis, Ludger Jansen, Ingvar Johansson, Kevin Mulligan and Leo Zaibert for helpful comments.
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Smith, B. (2014). Document Acts. In: Konzelmann Ziv, A., Schmid, H. (eds) Institutions, Emotions, and Group Agents. Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6934-2_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6934-2_2
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