Lenny Clapp

Asher and Lascarides maintain that speech act types, the sorts of linguistic actions described and categorized, most influentially, by Austin and Searle are rhetorical relations. This relational account of speech acts is problematic for two reasons: Despite Asher and Lascarides ingenious appeal to dot type speech acts, the relational account is incompatible with the widespread phenomenon of indirect speech; only some speech acts are plausibly identified with rhetorical relations. These problems can be solved if a distinction between two kinds of speech act is recognized: Discourse-structuring speech acts are performed upon utterances and thus are plausibly identified with rhetorical relations, while non-discourse-structuring speech acts are performed upon conversational participants and thus are not plausibly identified with such relations. The typologies for these two kinds of speech acts cut across one another, and this suggests a promising approach to the phenomenon of indirect speech acts.

Several of the better essays in On Quine are critical of Quine’s views. In “Against Naturalized Epistemology,” Bas Van Fraassen challenges empiricists to provide a self-consistent statement of their view; if empiricism is the view that “experience is our one and only source of information,” then that piece of information must itself have experience only as its source. Van Fraassen argues that Quine’s naturalized epistemology cannot meet this challenge and thus “is itself a metaphysics of the sort which empiricists disdain”. Barry Stroud argues in “Quine on Exile and Acquiescence” that there is a tension between Quine’s thesis of “immanence”—that we can work only from within our language and/or conceptual scheme—and Quine’s doctrine of the indeterminacy of translation. And in “Quine’s Experiment with Intensional Objects and His Existentialist Quantified Modal Logic,” Hector-Neri Castañeda explores how “pseudo-Quine,” the Quine who experimented with modal logic in his 1947, might respond to the attack on quantified modal logic presented in his 1961.