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Illocutionary relativism

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Abstract

In this paper I explain and defend a version of illocutionary pluralism called illocutionary relativism. I use this position to explain Rae Langton’s now-famous example of a woman who is illocutionarily disabled in her attempt to refuse sex. Illocutionary relativism gives us the tools to explain both why the woman refused and why she is illocutionarily disabled. I base my explanation of illocutionary relativism in background literature in speech act theory from Austin and Sbisa. Finally, I close by pointing out some implications for how we should understand consent.

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Notes

  1. And, if Langton is not right about this particular case, there will be cases in which there are diverging conventions around consent and other speech acts. Illocutionary relativism will be able to help in those cases too. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for helping me make this clear.

  2. Or gestures. Sign Language is one way to make speech acts without making sounds and other kinds of gestures can have content and can be conversational moves.

  3. ‘Profile’ is my term, not a term that Austin uses.

  4. This method of classification draws inspiration from Ruth Millikan’s work (Millikan 2017).

  5. Sometimes this is about authority—for some institutionalized speech acts like commands in the military, or pronouncing people married some institutionalized authority is needed. What Austin says about this is, “the particular persons and circumstances in a given case must be appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked” (Austin 1975).

  6. I think the conventionally determined period for greetings this is highly variable. If I run into an acquaintance in the morning at work and then in the evening at the post office there wouldn’t be anything particularly odd about greeting them twice. If I see them twice in an hour, though, we might imagine making a little “hi again” joke out of it. This suggests that this double-greeter is doing something unconventional—they are playing with the convention to make the joke. Further, if you wait until after your acquaintance has been in the room with you for more than a few minutes and then greet them, you are, again, doing something unconventional.

  7. HTW is How to Do Things with Words (Austin 1975).

  8. For more on conversations and how utterances change norms see (McGowan 2019).

  9. It is trivial to think of cases in which this string of words could have almost any force. Evelyn and I might have an inside joke according to which this is an insult. It could be a command that her date be prompt. People are really very creative and facile with these conventions.

  10. See (Kukla and Lance 2009), (Green 2013), and (Marsili and Green 2021) for more on these points.

  11. These effects will be predictable in many, but not all cases—conventions can always be ammended, exploited (as with Gricean implicature (Grice 1957)) or abandonned.

  12. At least it is in some of mine. If your community is different, please imagine these conventions holding.

  13. We can imagine communities where these are parts of the conventional reaction to apology (or something apology-like). Communities can adapt to or create many different kinds of conventions and conventionalized actions.

  14. About this dependency on future uptake Sbisà says, “Such retrospective definitions of the deontic modal attributes of the speaker may merely confirm them, but they can also refine or alter them” (Sbisà 2001) pg 1801.

  15. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.

  16. I discuss the differences between these two pluralisms at more length in (Johnson 2023).

  17. I’m not too committed to the details, here. I think something like this is correct, but that there is quite a bit of room for community-based differences. I’m also sure that these rough profiles could be made more precise. What matters is that something like this is the profile that distinguishes a complaint from a request, etc.

  18. I’m borrowing heavily from (Sbisà 1987) here.

  19. I point out something similar, though regarding assertion in (Johnson 2020).

  20. Thank you to an anonymous reviewer for helping me get clear on this point.

  21. Liberto’s work on epistemic responsibility and consent is also relevant here (Liberto 2021). McDonald’s paper also has a similar example (McDonald 2022).

  22. Keiser uses the * “to avoid the misleading impression of begging the question by presupposing that either of these conceptions is, in fact, consent—rather, we will treat them as candidates to be evaluated.” (Keiser 2022).

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Acknowledgements

Work for this project was funded by the Kurt O. Olsson Early Career Research Fellowship award. I am also grateful to Rachel McKinney, Gretchen Ellefson, Nicole Wyatt, Mary Kate McGowan, Sally Haslanger, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback.

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  1. Department of Politics and Philosophy, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID, USA

    Casey Rebecca Johnson

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Johnson, C.R. Illocutionary relativism. Synthese 202, 64 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04289-x

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