•  7
    Midway through How to Do Things With Words, J.L. Austin’s announces a “fresh start” in his efforts to characterize the ways in which speech is action, and introduces a new conceptual framework from the one he has been using up to that point. Against a common reading that portrays this move as simply abandoning the framework so far developed, Marina Sbisà contends that the text takes the argumentative form of a proof by contradiction, such that the initial framework plays an instrumental role as …Read more
  •  24
    Illocution by example
    Synthese 202 (1): 1-22. 2023.
    According to a dominant understanding, the illocutionary domain is a bifurcated one, an amalgam containing both communicative speech acts (such as requesting and promising) and ceremonial speech acts (such as saying ‘I do’ in a marriage ceremony and naming a ship). Bifurcating the domain in this manner is commonly taken to be a primary lesson of Austin’s “How To Do Things With Words’, alongside that of according communicative speech acts a far greater prominence in terms of our core understandin…Read more
  •  20
    An empirical investigation of intuitions about uptake
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. 2023.
    Since Austin’s introduction of the locutionary-illocutionary-perlocutionary distinction, it has been a matter of debate within speech act theory whether illocutionary acts like promising, warning, refusing and telling require audience ‘uptake’ in order to be performed. Philosophers on different sides of this debate have tried to support their positions by appealing to hypothetical scenarios, designed to elicit intuitive judgements about the role of uptake. However, philosophers’ intuitions appea…Read more
  •  37
    Representation and Epistemic Violence
    with Dina Lupin
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 29 (4): 577-594. 2021.
    Sometimes an individual gets taken as speaking for a wider group without laying claim to any such authority – they are thrust unwillingly, and sometimes even unknowingly, into the role of that grou...
  •  127
    Introduction: Themes in the Study of Human Cognition as a Social Phenomenon
    In Leo Townsend, Hans Bernhard Schmid & Preston Stovall (eds.), The Social Institution of Discursive Norms, Routledge. pp. 1-21. 2021.
    Anglophone philosophy in the last three decades has seen a growing interest in the way participation in human society—as characterized by our doing things that count as taking up and conferring norm-governed roles within institutions like language, the law, social custom, and education—is part of what explains our existence as rational (to whatever extent we are) animals. Using the label discursive norms to refer to the standards of evaluation that attend the exercise of rational thought and age…Read more
  •  37
    Discursive paternalism
    Ratio 34 (4): 334-344. 2021.
    Ratio, Volume 34, Issue 4, Page 334-344, December 2021.
  •  29
    The essays in this collection explore the idea that discursive norms--the norms governing our thought and talk--are profoundly social. Not only do these norms govern and structure of social interactions, but they are sustained by a variety of social and institutional structures. The chapters are divided into three thematic sections. The first offers historical perspectives on discursive norms, including a chapter by Robert Brandom on the way Hegel transformed Kant's normativist approach to repre…Read more
  •  355
    Discursive Injustice and the Speech of Indigenous Communities
    In Leo Townsend, Preston Stovall & Hans Bernhard Schmid (eds.), The Social Institution of Discursive Norms. pp. 248-263. forthcoming.
    Recent feminist philosophy of language has highlighted the ways that the speech of women can be unjustly impeded, because of the way their gender affects the uptake their speech receives. In this chapter, I explore how similar processes can undermine the speech of a different sort of speaker: Indigenous communities. This involves focusing on Indigeneity rather than gender as the salient social identity, and looking at the ways that group speech, rather than only individual speech, can be unjustl…Read more
  •  370
    The Epistemology of Collective Testimony
    Journal of Social Ontology. 2021.
    In this paper, I explore what gives collective testimony its epistemic credentials, through a critical discussion of three competing accounts of the epistemology of collective testimony. According to the first view, collective testimony inherits its epistemic credentials from the beliefs the testimony expresses— where this can be seen either as the beliefs of all or some of the group’s members, or as the beliefs of group itself. The second view denies any necessary connection to belief, claimin…Read more
  •  333
    Trust and commitment in collective testimony
    In Ladislav Koreň, Hans Bernhard Schmid, Preston Stovall & Leo Townsend (eds.), Groups, Norms and Practices: Essays on Inferentialism and Collective Intentionality, Springer. pp. 39-58. 2021.
    In this paper I critically discuss Miranda Fricker’s ‘trust-based’ view of collective testimony—that is, testimony that comes from a group speaker. At the heart of Fricker’s account is the idea that testimony involves an ‘interpersonal deal of trust’, to which the speaker contributes a commitment to ‘second-personal epistemic trustworthiness’. Appropriating Margaret Gilbert’s concept of joint commitment, Fricker suggests that groups too can make such commitments, and hence that they, like indivi…Read more
  •  17
    This edited volume examines the relationship between collective intentionality and inferential theories of meaning. The book consists of three main sections. The first part contains essays demonstrating how researchers working on inferentialism and collective intentionality can learn from one another. The essays in the second part examine the dimensions along which philosophical and empirical research on human reasoning and collective intentionality can benefit from more cross-pollination. T…Read more
  •  56
    In this paper we examine the epistemic treatment of Indigenous peoples by the Inter-American Court and Commission on Human Rights, two institutions that have sought to affirm the rights of Indigeno...
  •  455
    Consultation, Consent, and the Silencing of Indigenous Communities
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 37 (5): 781-798. 2020.
    Over the past few decades, Indigenous communities have successfully campaigned for greater inclusion in decision-making processes that directly affect their lands and livelihoods. As a result, two important participatory rights for Indigenous peoples have now been widely recognized: the right to consultation and the right to free, prior and informed consent (FPIC). Although these participatory rights are meant to empower the speech of these communities—to give them a proper say in the decisions …Read more
  •  640
    Group assertion and group silencing
    Language & Communication 1 (70): 28-37. 2020.
    Jennifer Lackey (2018) has developed an account of the primary form of group assertion, according to which groups assert when a suitably authorized spokesperson speaks for the group. In this paper I pose a challenge for Lackey's account, arguing that her account obscures the phenomenon of group silencing. This is because, in contrast to alternative approaches that view assertions (and speech acts generally) as social acts, Lackey's account implies that speakers can successfully assert regardless…Read more
  •  429
    Groups with Minds of Their Own Making
    Journal of Social Philosophy 51 (1): 129-151. 2019.
    According Philip Pettit, suitably organised groups not only possess ‘minds of their own’ but can also ‘make up their minds’ and 'speak for themselves'--where these two capacities enable them to perform as conversable subjects or 'persons'. In this paper I critically examine Pettit's case for group personhood. My first step is to reconstruct his account, explaining first how he understands the two capacities he considers central to personhood – the capacity to ‘make up one’s mind’, and the capaci…Read more
  •  778
    I explore the possibility and rationality of interpersonal mechanisms of doxastic self-control, that is, ways in which individuals can make use of other people in order to get themselves to stick to their beliefs. I look, in particular, at two ways in which people can make interpersonal epistemic commitments, and thereby willingly undertake accountability to others, in order to get themselves to maintain their beliefs in the face of anticipated “epistemic temptations”. The first way is through t…Read more
  •  279
    Joint Commitment and Collective Belief
    Phenomenology and Mind 9 (9): 46-53. 2015.
    According to Margaret Gilbert, two or more people collectively believe that p if and only if they are jointly committed to believe that p as a body. But the way she construes joint commitment in her account – as a commitment of and by the several parties to “doing something as a body” – encourages the thought that the phenomenon accounted for is not that of genuine belief. I explain why this concern arises and explore a different way of construing joint commitment, in order to avoid the concern.…Read more
  •  59
    Article Title: ‘Being and Becoming in the Theory of Group Agency’This paper explores a bootstrapping puzzle which appears to afflict Philip Pettit’s theory of group agency. Pettit claims that the corporate persons recognised by his theory come about when a set of individuals ‘gets its act together’ by undertaking to reason at the collective level. But this is puzzling, because it is hard to see how the step such a collective must take to become a group agent – the collectivisation of reason – ca…Read more
  •  89
    Is it Rational to Trust?
    Philosophy Compass 8 (1): 1-14. 2013.
    It is common in popular depictions to portray the attitude of trusting and the norms associated with rationality as standing in some kind of tension. In this article, we suggest a way of capturing this tension, and explore some recent attempts at resolving it.