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Logical dynamics of some speech acts that affect obligations and preferences

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Abstract

In this paper, illocutionary acts of commanding will be differentiated from perlocutionary acts that affect preferences of addressees in a new dynamic logic which combines the preference upgrade introduced in DEUL (dynamic epistemic upgrade logic) by van Benthem and Liu with the deontic update introduced in ECL II (eliminative command logic II) by Yamada. The resulting logic will incorporate J. L. Austin’s distinction between illocutionary acts as acts having mere conventional effects and perlocutionary acts as acts having real effects upon attitudes and actions of agents, and help us understand why saying so can make it so in explicit performative utterances. We will also discuss how acts of commanding give rise to so-called “deontic dilemmas” and how we can accommodate most deontic dilemmas without triggering so-called “deontic explosion”.

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  1. Graduate School of Letters, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan

    Tomoyuki Yamada

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  1. Tomoyuki Yamada
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Correspondence to Tomoyuki Yamada.

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Yamada, T. Logical dynamics of some speech acts that affect obligations and preferences. Synthese 165, 295–315 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-008-9368-9

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