Philosophical Speech Acts

Bibliographic Data

ID21371338
AuthorsMatthew Shields (0000-0003-0142-0464, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume95
Issue4
Pages497-521
Publication date2020-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePhilosophy (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0031-8191 • E-ISSN: 1469-817X
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0031819120000194
OpenAlexW3048486580
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited13

The prevailing view among contemporary analytic philosophers seems to be that, as philosophers, we primarily issue assertions. Following certain suggestions from the work of Rudolf Carnap and Sally Haslanger, I argue that the non-assertoric speech act of stipulation plays a key role in philosophical inquiry. I give a detailed account of the pragmatic structure of stipulations and argue that they are best analyzed as generating a shared inferential entitlement for speaker and audience, a license to censure those who give uptake to the stipulation but do not abide by this entitlement, and as justified on the basis of the speaker and audience's shared ends. In presenting this account, I develop a novel taxonomy for making sense of criticisms of speech act performances generally and clarify the notions of successful speech act performance and uptake. To demonstrate the fruitfulness of this view of stipulation for recasting and advancing philosophical disputes, I apply my account to two case studies – the first concerns Iris Marion Young's analysis of the concept of oppression and the second involves Saul Kripke's and Hilary Putnam's accounts of the concept of reference

Entitlement (fair division) · Epistemology · Equivocation · Linguistics · Political science · Sociology · Speech act · Stipulation · Computer Science · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics · Law · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Philosophy · Philosophy and Theoretical Science

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