Gretchen Ellefson

The “Authority Problem” is the problem that arises when speakers who lack authority successfully perform speech acts that require speaker authority in order to be felicitous. One solution that has been offered to the Authority Problem holds that the non-authoritative speaker of a successful authoritative illocution comes to have authority through a process of presupposition accommodation. I call this solution the Authority Accommodation Analysis, or AAA. In this paper, I argue that there is no Authority Problem, and thus, no need for an AAA. The appearance of the problem relies on a conflation between the _felicity_ of speech acts and their _success_. Yet a speech act can be successfully performed even in the absence of felicity. While authority is often a felicity condition for certain speech acts, I argue that it need not be a success condition. Ultimately, the consequence of my argument is that I must reject conventionalism about illocutionary success.

It is commonly accepted that conversation is, in some sense, cooperative. This is due in part to Paul Grice’s articulation of the Cooperative Principle, which states that participants should “make [their] conversational contributions such as is required...” (1989, 26). Yet the significance of this principle, as well as the notion of cooperation that is entailed, is up for interpretation. For example, there are several ways of understanding what kind of force the Cooperative Principle is supposed to have: it could be meant as a requirement on the behavior of speakers, a description of the way speakers behave, or an articulation of what speakers assume of one another’s contributions. I consider each of these options, and I argue that the first, which is often seen as a naïve interpretation, is worth considering. Although I ultimately reject the prescriptive interpretation of the Cooperative Principle, it offers a jumping off point for exploring other prescriptions on conversational behavior, such as the Requirement of Interlocutor Responsiveness, which I offer as an explicitly prescriptive conversational principle.