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Philosophy Work in Progress - Andy Egan (Rutgers) / Retraction, Assertion, and Communication

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Philosophy Work in Progress - Andy Egan (Rutgers) / Retraction, Assertion, and Communication

Linguistics Friday, April 21, 2023 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm Skinner Building, 1116

Friday April 21, the Philosophy Department's Work in Progress series has a visit from Rutgers University's Andy Egan, who will be talking about speech acts and their disavowal, in ways abstracted below.

Retraction, Assertion, and Communication

Sometimes our speech acts go really well. They’re in good normative order when we make them, and our relationship with them remains happy ever after. We continue to endorse them, continue to be content to stand by them, continue to endorse our conversation’s being in whatever state they put it in to, and continue to be content to bear whatever commitments we undertook by making them. But sometimes not. Sometimes we want to disavow a previous speech act. Maybe because we’ve learned that it wasn’t in good normative order when we made it. Maybe because we no longer endorse the change in conversational state that it brought about, or because we want to get out from under some commitment that the speech act saddled us with. When this happens, we’re liable to retract the speech act. We’ll use one of a variety of locutions – “never mind”, “scratch that”, “I take it back”, “I guess I was wrong”, “wait, that’s not right”, for example – to, somehow or other, do something that’s aptly described as retracting or taking back or disavowing our previous speech act. Retraction is something that definitely happens, and the process(es) by which it happens are something that any completed account of linguistic communication will need to include an account of. (And that any partial account will need to leave room for). What’s not a sure thing is the correct theoretical characterization of what we’re doing when we retract. In this paper I’ll take up three questions about retraction: The first is the question of reductionism vs. anti-reductionism about retraction – is there a special, sui generis speech act of retraction, or does retraction always proceed by way of some speech act of a familiar type? (Asserting the negation, apologizing, etc.) The second is the question of what kind of theoretical framework for thinking about speech acts provides the most natural home for anti-reductionism about retraction – a framework that puts the speaker-side norms governing the use of speech acts on the theoretical ground floor, or one that puts audience- or context- side effects on the ground floor? (Spoiler: Effects-first views are better.) Finally, I argue that thinking about retraction gives us some helpful leverage in thinking about the effects of assertion, motivating a view according to which assertions are best thought of as endorsements of forward-looking constraints on the conversational context, and that this view of assertion is independently attractive.

Add to Calendar 04/21/23 15:00:00 04/21/23 16:00:00 America/New_York Philosophy Work in Progress - Andy Egan (Rutgers) / Retraction, Assertion, and Communication

Friday April 21, the Philosophy Department's Work in Progress series has a visit from Rutgers University's Andy Egan, who will be talking about speech acts and their disavowal, in ways abstracted below.

Retraction, Assertion, and Communication

Sometimes our speech acts go really well. They’re in good normative order when we make them, and our relationship with them remains happy ever after. We continue to endorse them, continue to be content to stand by them, continue to endorse our conversation’s being in whatever state they put it in to, and continue to be content to bear whatever commitments we undertook by making them. But sometimes not. Sometimes we want to disavow a previous speech act. Maybe because we’ve learned that it wasn’t in good normative order when we made it. Maybe because we no longer endorse the change in conversational state that it brought about, or because we want to get out from under some commitment that the speech act saddled us with. When this happens, we’re liable to retract the speech act. We’ll use one of a variety of locutions – “never mind”, “scratch that”, “I take it back”, “I guess I was wrong”, “wait, that’s not right”, for example – to, somehow or other, do something that’s aptly described as retracting or taking back or disavowing our previous speech act. Retraction is something that definitely happens, and the process(es) by which it happens are something that any completed account of linguistic communication will need to include an account of. (And that any partial account will need to leave room for). What’s not a sure thing is the correct theoretical characterization of what we’re doing when we retract. In this paper I’ll take up three questions about retraction: The first is the question of reductionism vs. anti-reductionism about retraction – is there a special, sui generis speech act of retraction, or does retraction always proceed by way of some speech act of a familiar type? (Asserting the negation, apologizing, etc.) The second is the question of what kind of theoretical framework for thinking about speech acts provides the most natural home for anti-reductionism about retraction – a framework that puts the speaker-side norms governing the use of speech acts on the theoretical ground floor, or one that puts audience- or context- side effects on the ground floor? (Spoiler: Effects-first views are better.) Finally, I argue that thinking about retraction gives us some helpful leverage in thinking about the effects of assertion, motivating a view according to which assertions are best thought of as endorsements of forward-looking constraints on the conversational context, and that this view of assertion is independently attractive.

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