Abstract
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 underlying structure of such harms: I argue that speakers are the subjects of illocutionary harm when there is interference in the entitlement structure of their linguistic activities. This interference comes in two forms: denial and incapacitation. In cases of denial, a speaker is prevented from achieving the outcomes to which they are entitled by their speech (where such entitlements are based on their meeting certain conditions). In cases of incapacitation, a speaker’s standing to expect certain outcomes is itself undermined. I also discuss how individual speakers are subject to interference along two dimensions: as exercisers of certain non-linguistic capacities (such as knowledge and authority), and as producers of meaningful speech.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Thanks to Josh Dever for putting this question to me.
By contrast, locutionary acts are productions of meaningful speech; perlocutionary effects are the “consequential effects” of illocutionary acts (Austin 1962: 101). Austin claims that to perform a locutionary act “is in general ... also and eo ipso to perform an illocutionary act” (98).
I assume a standard conception of speaker meaning on which to speaker mean that p is to perform an action with a certain sort of communicative intention (Grice 1957). None of the substantial points in this paper turns on an intentionalist conception of speech acts (or, for that matter, on any specific account of communicative intentions).
This is what Searle (1975) call the ‘illocutionary point’ of an utterance.
Reference to strictly delineated act types is not crucial here: it may simply be that token acts entitle a speaker to the expectation of token outcomes, and that speech acts are governed by variable norms.
‘Uptake’ is used in a variety of different ways in the literature, sometimes just to mean that a hearer recognizes a speaker’s intention. But here I use it in the procedural sense of Kukla (2014), referring to “enacted recognition” of a speech act’s communicative force (p. 5). I use the term ‘recognition’ to refer to the weaker, epistemic notion.
Yalcin (2018) puts this distinction as follows: “[The] mutually understood proximal rational aim of speech acts generally is to effect some change in the common ground of the conversation—to update the conversational scoreboard. Our more distal communicative objectives—of transferring knowledge, raising questions, convincing, misleading, and so forth—are generally achieved by way of changing the common ground” (Yalcin 2018: 130) (emphasis mine).
At different levels of description, it is plausible that different normative conditions come into play regarding some speech act: if my assertion consists in me talking out of turn in a classroom, or shouting across a crowded bus station, then other norms (like a norm of discretion) might be in effect. In general, because illocutionary acts are situated in a norms-governed social space, these acts only entitle us to certain achievements given that certain socially salient conditions are met. Thanks to David Beaver for some helpful discussion on this point.
The relation of authority required to direct someone else’s actions can be socially significant (such as the authority that a king has over his subjects) or it can be instrumental (such as the authority you might have if I am helping you prepare a meal).
Some of the contours of this case are quite complicated. On the one hand, we get explicit recognition that B recognizes A’s intention. But the following line complicates things: “A intends that B believe that she is refusing. B does not believe that A intends that B believe that she is refusing, although B recognizes A’s intention to refuse.” This almost looks contradictory, but it is not. Consider that I may recognize your intention to assert without thinking that you actually want me to believe the thing asserted.
Many cases of epistemic injustice are thus going to be kinds of illocutionary frustration (Fricker 2007).
This is not so dissimilar to how Langton describes the case: she holds that the inability to recognize a speaker’s communicative intention is the product of widespread assumptions about what someone is likely to mean by ‘no’ in a situation like the one described. These widespread assumptions undermine our ability to recognize someone’s standing in the discursive sense I have elaborated.
Of course, realizing (in the epistemic sense) what someone’s intentions are is an important step towards the more procedural recognition associated with conversational contexts, but updating the conversational context is the immediate aim. I think we would be reluctant to distinguish Refusal 2 from a case in which A’s desires/etc. are known, but not acknowledged in B’s behavior.
See Camp (2018) for discussion of a wide range of cases in which updating (or failing to update) a discourse has some practical consequence not tracked by any non-discursive achievement.
Langton is explicit that blocking is a kind of silencing in her 2018, throughout.
“When you block something, you don’t ‘accommodate’ it—you don’t adjust to it, or help it along” (Langton 2018: 3).
See Camp (2013) for additional discussion on the ways in which radically different perspectives than our own influence illocutionary standing (Camp frames her discussion around slurs).
It is in the absence of the possibility of refusal that consent is rendered impossible.
On the framework that Schaffer and Szabo (2014) propose, one’s knowledge amounts to being able to rule out contextually salient alternatives.
Categorically denying someone the right to discursive participation when they have the right to their rational communicative plans being acknowledged constitute a very obvious kind of discursive incapacitation. Here I will discuss some subtler mechanisms of incapacitation.
If, pace Stalnaker (2014) and Yalcin (2018), we think of conversational contexts as a kind of game whose state of play gets updated by our linguistic moves, and is then utilized to bring about non-discursive changes, then we might think of this as a case where individuals are structurally disadvantaged so as to be prevented from engaging and deploying these contexts effectively.
See McGowan (2009) for a similar discussion of how an individual’s social status can affect what is permissible for them in a discourse.
Hesni considers this (Hesni 2018: 963).
One of the complications is that we often accommodate speech that is made inappropriately with respect to a discourse.
From the 2004 film Mean Girls.
Another reading of the case is that Regina proposes a discourse contribution where there is the following norm of either rejecting that contribution or agreeing to its truth. By letting the contribution slide, Cady tacitly endorses something that she had no intention of endorsing.
For a relatively recent example of the trend I'm alluding to, see Elise Wien’s ‘When “Finance” Becomes a Code Word for Jewish’ published in the online magazine Tablet.
Kat Hintikka (‘Demeaning and Use’, Unpublished Manuscript) has convinced me that harms of this sort can occur even absent things actually going worse for the person harmed.
Though we need not hold that the ability to have such thoughts in the first place requires access to the linguistic concepts (see some discussion in Fodor 1994).
This is related to cases of what Fricker (2007) calls hermeneutical injustice, where impoverished conceptual resources prevent individuals from forming and communicating intentional attitudes that are relevant to their situation as agents.
References
Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Camp, E. (2013). Slurring perspectives. Analytic Philosophy, 54(3), 330–349.
Camp, E. (2018). Insinuation, common ground, and the conversational record. In D. Fogal, D. W. Harris, & M. Moss (Eds.), New work on speech acts (Vol. 40). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cumming, S. (2014). Discourse content. In A. Burgess & B. Sherman (Eds.), Metasemantics: New essays on the foundations of meaning (pp. 214–230). Oxford: Oxford University of Press.
Davidson, D. (1984). Communication and convention. Synthese, 59, 3–17.
Dotson, K. (2011). Tracking epistemic violence, tracking practices of silencing. Hypatia, 26(2), 236–257.
Fodor, J. A. (1994). The elm and the expert: Mentalese and its semantics. Cambridge: MIT press.
Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Green, M. (2017). Speech acts. In N. Z. Edward (ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University winter 2017 edn.
Grice, H. P. (1957). Meaning. Philosophical Review, 66(3), 377–388. https://doi.org/10.2307/2182440.
Grice, P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. Morgan (Eds.), Speech acts (pp. 41–58). Leiden: Brill.
Hesni, S. (2018). Illocutionary frustration. Mind, 127(508), 947–976. https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzy033.
Karttunen, L. (1976). Discourse referents. In J. McCawley (Ed.), Syntax and semantics: Notes from the linguistic underground (Vol. 7, pp. 363–386). New York: Academic Press.
Kukla, R. (2014). Performative force, convention, and discursive injustice. Hypatia, 29(2), 440–457. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2012.01316.x.
Kukla, R., & Lance, M. N. (2009). ’yo!’and’lo!’: The pragmatic topography of the space of reasons. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Langton, R. (1993). Speech acts and unspeakable acts. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 22(4), 293–330.
Langton, R. (2018). Blocking as counter-speech. New Work on Speech Acts, 144, 64.
Langton, R., & Hornsby, J. (1998). Free speech and illocution. Legal Theory, 4(1), 21–37. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1352325200000902.
Lewis, D. (1979). Scorekeeping in a language game. In R. Bäuerle, U. Egli, & A. Stechow (Eds.), Semantics from different points of view (pp. 172–187). Berlin: Springer.
Lewis, D. (1996). Elusive knowledge. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 74(4), 549–567.
Maitra, I. (2009). Silencing speech. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 39(2), 309–338.
McGowan, M. K. (2004). Conversational exercitives: Something else we do with our words. Linguistics and Philosophy, 27(1), 93–111.
McGowan, M. K. (2009). Oppressive speech. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 87(3), 389–407. https://doi.org/10.1080/00048400802370334.
Murray, S. E. (2014). Varieties of update. Semantics and Pragmatics, 7, 2-1.
Roberts, C. (1996). Information structure in discourse: Toward a unified theory of formal pragmatics. Ohio State University Working Papers in Linguistics (Vol. 49, pp. 91–136).
Roberts, C. (2015). Accommodation in a language game. A companion to David Lewis, pp. 345–65.
Schaffer, J., & Szabo, Z. G. (2014). Epistemic comparativism: A contextualist semantics for knowledge ascriptions. Philosophical Studies, 168(2), 491–543. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0141-7.
Searle, JR. (1975). A taxonomy of illocutionary acts. In K. Günderson (Ed.), Language, mind, and knowledge. Minnesota studies in the philosophy of science (Vol. 7, pp. 344–369).
Siebel, M. (2002). What is an illocutionary point? In G. Grewendorf & G. Meggle (Eds.), Speech acts, mind, and social reality (pp. 125–139). Berlin: Springer.
Stalnaker, R. (2014). Context. Oxford: OUP.
Unnsteinsson, E. (2019). Silencing without convention. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 100(2), 573–598. https://doi.org/10.1111/papq.12260.
Williamson, T. (1996). Knowing and asserting. The Philosophical Review, 105(4), 489–523.
Yalcin, S. (2018). Expressivism by force. In D. Fogal, D. W. Harris, & M. Moss (Eds.), New Work on Speech Acts (pp. 400–426). Oxford: OUP.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to David Beaver, Josh Dever, and an anonymous referee for this journal for helpful feedback on several different versions of the paper. Thanks to Ian Becker and Hannah Spector for some last-minute help with editing. I would also like to thank Bryce Dalbey, Amelia Kahn, Hans Kamp, Brian Pollex, Anne Quaranto, Roy Sorensen, and others who participated in presentations of this material at the University of Texas in the fall of 2019.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Schiller, H.I. Illocutionary harm. Philos Stud 178, 1631–1646 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01504-0
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01504-0