Mitchell Green

In articles such as “Speech Acts without Propositions?” (2006), Marina Sbisà advocates a “strong” conception of speech acts as means by which speakers modify their own and others’ deontic statuses, including their rights, obligations, and commitments. On this basis Sbisà challenges an influential approach to speech acts as typically if not universally possessing propositional contents. Sbisà argues that such an approach leads to viewing speech acts as primarily aimed at communicating propositional attitudes rather than carrying out socially and normatively significant action. For this reason she advocates eschewing propositions from speech act theory’s conceptual toolkit; she also proposes a liberalization of the distinction between illocutionary force and semantic content, which are widely thought to be mutually exclusive. In this chapter we examine Sbisà’s reasoning and argue that while it does justify denying propositional attitudes a central role in communication, it does not justify dispensing with propositions or other contents in our theorizing about speech acts. In addition, we endorse Sbisà’s proposal for liberalizing the force/content distinction, and show a variety of ways in which force indicators may also possess semantic content.

This chapter examines Davidson's treatment of emotions as complexly bound up with cognitive states such as belief, rather than as being essentially opposed to such states. Emotions on Davidson's view can be justified, and can be both causes of and reasons for action. We also consider Davidson's elucidation and defense of David Hume's analysis of pride and similar affective states. Objections to that elucidation and defense are discussed, and it is explained how Davidson could rebut those objections. Davidson's theory is then discussed in light of unconscious emotions, irrational emotions, and the possibility of nonhuman animals possessing emotions.

I argue that it is possible literally to perceive the emotions of others. This account depends upon the possibility of perceiving a whole by perceiving one or more of its parts, and upon the view that emotions are complexes. After developing this account, I expound and reply to Rowland Stout's challenge to it. Stout is nevertheless sympathetic with the perceivability-of-emotions view. I thus scrutinize Stout's suggestion for a better defence of that view than I have provided, and offer a refinement of my own proposal that incorporates some of his insights.

After briefly laying out a cultural-evolutionary approach to speech acts (Sects. 1–2), I argue that the notion of commitment at play in assertion and related speech acts comprises multiple dimensions (Sect. 3). Distinguishing such dimensions enables us to hypothesize evolutionary precursors to the modern practice of assertion, and facilitates a new way of posing the question whether, and if so to what extent, speech acts are conventional (Sect. 4). Our perspective also equips us to consider how a modern speaker might employ an illocutionary analogue of A.N. Prior’s “runabout-inference ticket”, in which the pragmatic “introduction rules” for utterances correspond to evolutionary precursors of modern speech acts, but in which the “elimination rules” correspond to their modern descendants (Sect. 5). Such behavior would be abusive, though not in a way readily discernible without an evolutionary perspective on speech acts that attends to the dimensions of commitment that they encompass. Such behavior also raises the question how we may safeguard against it in public discourse, and I close (Sect. 6) with some suggestions for doing so.

We critically survey prominent recent scholarship on the question of whether fiction can be a source of epistemic value for those who engage with it fully and appropriately. Such epistemic value might take the form of knowledge (for ‘cognitivists’) or understanding (for ‘neo-cognitivists’). Both camps may be sorted according to a further distinction between views explaining fiction’s epistemic value either in terms of the author’s engaging in a form of telling, or instead via their showing some state of affairs to obtain, a special case of which is the provision of self-knowledge. Fictional works that show rather than tell often employ thought experiments. The epistemic value of some fictional works is indicated by their enabling of empathy, itself illuminated via the psychological process of experience-taking. Whether a fictional work offers epistemic value by telling or showing, there is, in principle, no bar to its being able to deliver on what it offers, and consumers of fiction who exercise epistemic vigilance may gain either knowledge or some degree of understanding from their engagement with it.

This essay addresses the question whether artificial speakers can perform speech acts in the technical sense of that term common in the philosophy of language. We here argue that under certain conditions artificial speakers can perform speech acts so understood. After explaining some of the issues at stake in these questions, we elucidate a relatively uncontroversial way in which machines can communicate, namely through what we call verbal signaling. But verbal signaling is not sufficient for the performance of a speech act. To explain the difference, we elucidate the notion of a speech act developed by Austin in the mid-twentieth century and then discuss Strawson’s influential proposal for how that notion may be related to Grice’s conception of speaker meaning. We then refine Strawson’s synthesis in light of Armstrong’s reconceptualization of speaker meaning in terms of objectives rather than intentions. We next extend this conception of speech acts to the cases of recorded, proxy, and conditional speech acts. On this basis, we propose that a characteristic role for artificial speakers is as proxies in the performance of speech acts on behalf of their human creators. We also consider two objections to our position, and compare our approach with others: while other authors appeal to notions such as “quasi-assertion,” we offer a sharp characterization of what artificial speakers can do that does not impute intentions or similarly controversial powers to them. We conclude by raising doubts that our strategy can be applied to speech acts generally.

In a series of articles (Pagin, 2004, 2009), Peter Pagin has argued that assertion is not a social speech act, introducing a method (which we baptize ‘the P-test’) designed to refute any account that defines assertion in terms of its social effects. This paper contends that Pagin's method fails to rebut the thesis that assertion is social. We show that the P-test is both unreliable (because it overgenerates counterexamples) and counterproductive (because it ultimately provides evidence in favor of some social accounts). Nonetheless, we contend that assertion is not fully social. We defend an intermediate view according to which assertion is only a partly social speech act: assertions both commit the speaker to a proposition (a social component) and present their propositional content as true (a non-social component). The upshot is that assertion is in some important respect social, although it cannot be defined solely in terms of its social effects.

This essay ties together some main strands of the author’s research spanning the last quarter-century. Because of its broad scope and space limitations, he prescinds from detailed arguments and instead intuitively motivates the general points which are supported more fully in other publications to which he provides references. After an initial delineation of several distinct notions of meaning, the author considers such a notion deriving from the evolutionary biology of communication that he terms ‘organic meaning’, and places it in the context of evolutionary game theory. That provides a framework for a special type of organic meaning found in the phenomenon of expression, of which the author here offers an updated characterization while highlighting its wide philosophical interest. Expression in turn generalizes to a paradigmatic form of human communication—conversation—and section 4 provides a taxonomy of conversation-types while arguing that attention to such types helps to sharpen predictions of what speakers say rather than conversationally implicate. We close with a view of fictional discourse on which authors of fictional works are engaged in conversation with their readers, and can provide them with knowledge in spite of the fictional character of their conversation. Such knowledge includes knowledge of how an emotion feels and is thus a route to empathy.

1. On at least one usage of ‘mean’, performing an action that leads someone else to think that P, is not, on its own, sufficient for meaning that P. Nor is performing an action that is intended to get someone to think this. Instead one must make one’s intention overt. Grice’s way of developing this overtness requirement requires audience-directed intentions: for an agent, on this approach, to mean that P, she must perform a publicly accessible action with the intention of producing in an addressee the belief that P, while further intending that her addressee enter that state at least in part by recognition of her intention. 11 Different types of intended cognitive state and content correspond to different illocutionary forces. Thus an imperatival utterance might be made with the aim of producing an intention to do something; and one might mean P as a conjecture rather than as an assertion by intending to produce in an addressee not a belief but some less committal cognitive state such as tentative acceptance.

Slote has argued that empathy plays a crucial role in such speech acts as questions and assertions. After clarifying some of the aims and limitations of speech act theory, providing an account of empathy and its potential epistemic value, and sketching the role that some speech acts play in expressing psychological states, we consider Slote’s argument for the place of empathy in questions and assertions. We show that the most that Slote has established is that some cases of questioning and asserting depend upon on empathetic engagement between speaker and addressee. That, however, is no basis for concluding that empathy plays a crucial role in either of these illocutions.

Thinking is a convention-involving process in that just as there are certain activities that count as touchdowns or checkmates, so too there are certain activities that count as presuming or supposing for the sake of argument. The activities that are constitutive of mental states are often overt acts of speech, and thus felicitous utterance of a sentence such as 'I presume that A' is, to borrow a term from J. L. Austin, a performative. The performativity of attitude avowals in turn implies that an individual's cognitive status does not supervene just upon the physical goings within her skin, for it implies that whether a person $\phi$'s that A or $\Psi$'s that A, where $\phi$ and $\Psi$ are distinct psychological attitudes, can vary just with variations in that person's social milieu. More broadly, the performativity of psychological-attitude avowals implies the conventionality of psychological attitudes. ;This line of reasoning draws heavily upon the notion of the illocution, or speech act, and a new theory of illocutions is developed. Illocutions are here seen as, centrally, means of engendering commitments to various types of content. We allow for distinctions along the dimension of mode of commitment to countenance the difference between, say, commitment to a content as a supposition and commitment to that content as an assertion. We also allow for variation along the dimension of degree of commitment, and, to distinguish among commitment to questions, propositions, and plans of action, for differences in the kind of content to which commitment is had. The theory is applied to the interaction of speech acts and time, and to the laying of a new foundation for the account of conversational implicature.

The relation between two systems of attitude ascription that capture all the empirically significant aspects of an agents thought and speech may be analogous to that between two systems of magnitude ascription that are equivalent relative to a transformation of scale. If so, just as an objects weighing eight pounds doesnt relate that object to the number eight (for a different but equally good scale would use a different number), similarly an agents believing that P need not relate her to P (for a different but equally adequate interpretive scheme could use a different proposition). In either case the only reality picked out by any system of ascription is what is common to all equivalent rivals. By emphasizing some contrasts between decision theory and belief-desire psychology, it is argued that if attitude ascription is appropriately analogous to measurement then not only is being related to a proposition an artifact of the system of representation chosen, so are belief and desire.

Speech acts are a staple of everyday communicative life, but only became a topic of sustained investigation, at least in the English-speaking world, in the middle of the Twentieth Century.[1] Since that time “speech act theory” has been influential not only within philosophy, but also in linguistics, psychology, legal theory, artificial intelligence, literary theory and many other scholarly disciplines.[2] Recognition of the importance of speech acts has illuminated the ability of language to do other things than describe reality. In the process the boundaries among the philosophy of language, the philosophy of action, the philosophy of mind and even ethics have become less sharp. In addition, an appreciation of speech acts has helped lay bare an implicit normative structure within linguistic practice, including even that part of this practice concerned with describing reality. Much recent research aims at an accurate characterization of this normative structure underlying linguistic practice

I argue that it is possible literally to perceive the emotions of others. This account depends upon the possibility of perceiving a whole by perceiving one or more of its parts, and upon the view that emotions are complexes. After developing this account, I expound and reply to Rowland Stout's challenge to it. Stout is nevertheless sympathetic with the perceivability-of-emotions view. I thus scrutinize Stout's suggestion for a better defence of that view than I have provided, and offer a refinement of my own proposal that incorporates some of his insights

Know Thyself: The Value and Limits of Self-Knowledge takes the reader on tour of the nature, value, and limits of self-knowledge. Mitchell S. Green calls on classical sources like Plato and Descartes, 20th-century thinkers like Freud, recent developments in neuroscience and experimental psychology, and even Buddhist philosophy to explore topics at the heart of who we are. The result is an unvarnished look at both the achievements and drawbacks of the many attempts to better know one's own self. Key topics in this volume include: Knowledge - what it means to know, the link between wisdom and knowledge, and the value of living an "examined life" Personal identity - questions of dualism, bodily continuity, and personhood The unconscious - including the kind posited by psychoanalysis as well as the form proposed by recent research on the so-called adaptive unconscious Free will - if we have it, and the recent arguments from neuroscience challenging it Self-misleading - the ways we willfully deceive ourselves, and how this relates to empathy, peer disagreement, implicit bias, and intellectual humility Experimental psychology - considerations on the automaticity of emotion and other cognitive processes, and how they shape us This book is designed to be used in conjunction with the free 'Know Thyself' MOOC created through collaboration of the University of Connecticut's Project on Humility and Conviction in Public Life, and the University of Edinburgh's Eidyn research centre, and hosted on the Coursera platform. The book is also suitable as a text for interdisciplinary courses in the philosophy of mind or self-knowledge, and is highly recommended for anyone looking for a short overview of this fascinating topic.

Angle Grinder Man removes wheel locks from cars in London. He is something of a folk hero, saving drivers from enormous parking and towing fines, and has succeeded thus far in eluding the authorities. In spite of his cape and lamé tights, he is no fiction; he's a real person. By contrast, Pegasus, Zeus and the like are fictions. None of them is real. In fact, not only is each of them different from the others, all differ from Angle Grinder Man. After all, Zeus throws thunderbolts but doesn't remove boots from cars; unlike Superman, Angle Grinder Man couldn't leap over a parked Mini, and all sightings suggest that he is a human being, not a horse.

According to many forms of Externalism now popular in the Philosophy of Mind, the contents of our thoughts depend in part upon our physical or social milieu.1 These forms of Externalism leave unchallenged the thesis that the ~non-factive! attitudes we bear towards these contents are independent of physical or social milieu. This paper challenges that thesis. It is argued here that publicly forwarding a content as a supposition for the sake of argument is, under conditions not themselves guaranteeing the existence of that state, sufficient for occupancy of the intentional state of supposing that content. Because a saying may literally create an intentional state, whether one is in such a state does not depend solely upon how things are within one’s skin. Rather, even leaving content fixed, the attitude borne toward that content depends in part upon what norms are in force in one’s milieu.