Antonio Monaco

Insinuations are indirect speech acts done for various reasons: a speaker S may insinuate P (i) because an insinuation is more polite, and S can save face by non-explicitly saying P (Brown, Levinson, 1987; Searle, 1975), (ii) because S can deny having insinuated P and avoid the responsibility of explicitly stating P, or (iii) because S perceives herself to be in a competitive rather than cooperative conversation, and she wants to pursue her interests strategically (Asher, Lascarides, 2013; Camp, 2018; Lee, Pinker, 2010; Pinker et al., 2008). These views assume that to insinuate P, S must also intend to use the deniability of P for dealing with a possible non-cooperative hearer. I argue that this requirement is too strong and falls short of accounting for cases in which S intentionally performs a deniable indirect speech act, but S has no intention to use that deniability.

Competition and cooperation are often perceived as opposites, but there is a middle ground in which they come together: competitive games like chess or soccer. Leading accounts of joint action theory fail to explain games of this sort. I propose a definition of cooperative competitions as joint events in which agents possess a joint competitive intention. An agent has a joint competitive intention when a) she has the goal to win or snatch an advantage over her opponent, b) she agrees to act in an uncoerced way, and c) she has the intention to follow the norms governing the activity in question. Finally, I defend my definition from objections and show how my account can helpfully reframe our understanding of what a cooperation is to make room for agonistic aims.