Illocutionary_actions_in_speech_act_comp.pptx

Illocutionary Actions In Speech Act Complexes
(The Case of Deliberative Speech Acts)
Workshop Perspectives on Speech as Action
Trieste, 8-9 Nov. 2018
Cristina Corredor
University of Valladolid (Spain)
corredor@fyl.uva.es

Plan
• Introduction
• Illocutionary entailment and dialectical norms in assertion
• Proposal: an Austinian approach
• Speech act complexes in deliberation
• Conclusion

1. Introduction. The problem of speech act complexes
• Many speech acts seem to draw on, and even have a direct connection with other
speech acts.
• For example, the act of answering can only make sense if motivated by a preceding
act of questioning; an act of raising doubts and objections seems to only be
performable as subsequent to an act of claiming, proposing, arguing and the like;
acts of correcting or retracting a previous speech act impinge upon it.
• A standard criticism against classical Speech Act Theory is that it typifies and
analyses individuated acts of speech, but cannot account for the dynamics of real
conversations.
• Austin, commenting on expositives, says: “An enormous number, such as
'question', 'ask', 'deny', &c., seem naturally to refer to conversational interchange:
but this is no longer necessarily so, and all, of course, have reference to the
communicational situation.” (1975, p. 162).
• Notwithstanding this view, I take it that certain speech acts are connected with
others in ways that seem to impinge on essential propieties of these illocutions -
beyond a mere reference to the communicational situation.

Some available theoretical treatments:
• Adjacency pairs and turn-taking (Conversation Analysis)
Question/Answer, Offer/Acceptance or Rejection, Proposal/Agreement,
Complaint/Apology
– Occurrence pairs with preferred/dispreferred responses
– Sequential progression of interaction: Iniciation-Interpretation-Evaluation
– Context created in talk
• Dynamic semantics
• Other treatments, within speech act theory: embedded speech acts (Barker
2003), second order speech acts (Bermejo-Luque 2011), conventionalised
patterns of interaction (Witek 2015)

• My interest lies on other types of relational speech acts, namely, those relations
as are established in argumentative dialogues and, particularly, in deliberation.
• Here, a proposed action of the form “We ought to do A” or “A ought to be done”
is discussed. In my view, whenever the participants reach a joint decision (for the
reasons advanced and the doubts and objections dismissed in the course of the
dialogue), an initial verdictive speech act (subjected to assessment) leads the way
to a second speech act, a commissive.
• Moreover, as the dialogue goes on, other close relations among speech acts
organise the interaction: acts of assertions may be followed by acts of doubting
and objecting, followed in their turn by acts of arguing and concluding, followed
by a joint commissive from the participants.
• How can those relational complexes of speech acts (in what follows, speech act
complexes) be accounted for?

2. Illocutionary entailment and dialectical norms in assertion
• Searle and Vanderveken (1985) develop a logic of illocutionary forces.
They define the relation of illocutionary entailment as follows:
“Certain pairs of illocutionary force F1, F2 are such that it is not possible for a
speaker to perform an illocutionary act of the form F1(P) without also performing
an act of the form F2(P). In such a case, we say that F1 Illocutionarily entails F2”
(pp. 129-130)
The illocutionary entailment relation is a relation of strong commitment. A weak
notion of commitment can be defined, according to which “the speaker is
committed to an illocutionary act F(P) by way of performing certain illocutionary
acts F1(P1), …, Fn(Pn) although he does not perform F(P) and is not committed to
its performance.” (p. 24).

• Objections:
1. It is worth noticing that here Searle and Vanderveken are referring to an individual
speaker, and thus they do not intend illocutionary entailment to be an interactional
relation between two speakers’ speech acts.
Moreover, they take illocutionary force to be associated with individual speech acts.
2. Asher and Lascarides (2003) consider the following (Searle’s) example,
(16a) A: Let’s go to the movies tonight.
(16b) B: I have to study for an exam.
They say,
“Understanding that (16b) is a rejection is essential to understanding the content
of the dialogue and why it’s coherent. But a rejection is better thought of as a
relation between the utterance and some antecedent proposal (in this case,
(16a)), than as a property of the utterance (16b) itself, because successful
performance of this speech act is logically dependent on this prior contribution.”
(p. 305)

• Green (1999) considers the case of assertion within the framework of inquiries and
debates. In such cases, he says,
“where S and H are conforming to the cooperative principle, and if S, addressing
H, asserts that A, then
a. H is obliged to indicate her acceptance or non-acceptance of A […]
b. S is committed to giving reasons for A if presented by H with a legitimate
challenge.
c. If no legitimate challenge to A has been raised and gone unmet, then A is
entered into the conversational record;
d. If a legitimate challenge has been raised and gone unmet, then S is obliged to
retract A.”

• To my understanding, Green is identifying and explicating here the kind of
dialectical obligations and liabilities (and I would add, rights) that acts of asserting
institute in an argumentative dialogue.
• Nevertheless, he explicitly acknowledges that his emphasis is “on the conveyance
of information”. The very notions of common ground and conversational record are
defined in terms of the propositional contents to which participants are
committed.
• In my light, those obligations and rights become in force in the debate (or any
argumentative dialogue) to the extend that the participants recognise them and
assign each other.

3. Proposal: an Austinian approach
• My suggestion is to take as a point of departure the view I consider most
appropriate to account for speech actions, namely, Marina Sbisà’s Austinian
approach (see e.g. Sbisà 2002, 2006, 2014; see also Witek 2015 for a nice
presentation of the approach).
• She has focused on the deontic dimension of interpersonal relations, to contend
that Austin (1975)’s notion of illocutionary effect can be seen as an effect on what
the participants are authorised, or allowed, or obliged, or committed to do.
• Moreover, this effect on the participants’ deontic stances is conventional, in that it
is grounded on the social and/or interpersonal agreement of the interactants that
such effect has taken place.

• Following Sbisà’s conception of illocution, I would suggest that it is possible to
extend this framework in order to account for the intimate connection between
certain types of speech act.
• In the cases above mentioned (i.e. speech act complexes), I take it that the second
act is performed in virtue of a (possibly tacit) acknowledgement that the previous
one has taken place. The second act impinges on (and draws upon) the normative
positions to which the former has given effect, and takes these positions as a
point of departure for the new action.

• In the particular case of deliberation, whenever an agreement is reached on a
particular course of action A, the participants’ resulting commitment is grounded
on their acknowledgement that the corresponding claim (as a verdictive) has
proven to be correct.
• Their joint deliberation has redeemed their commitment to support the practical
correctness of the judgement put forward, before they can endorse it, and their
final agreement authorises them (qua addressees) to act upon it.
• My aim is to further advance this outlined analysis.

4. Speech act complexes in deliberation
A notion of deliberation
• Walton and Krabbe (1995): the cooperative goal of a deliberative dialogue is to
reach a joint decision on a course of action. It departures from a situation in
which a practical problem calls for a decision on the best course of action. The
participants orientate their efforts to find the best solution for implementation,
and not towards their individual interests and goals.
• McBurney, Hitchcock and Parsons (2007): In their Deliberation Dialogue Model
(DDM), different types of locutions (utterances) may take place within the
different stages of the deliberation.
• In my light, those locutions are semantic representations of the different types of
speech act that may take place in deliberative dialogues.

Speech acts in deliberative dialogues (from McBurney, Hitchcock and Parsons 2007,
pp. 8-9)
• opening the deliberation dialogue
• proposing
• making an assertion
• preferring a particular option for action
• asking the other party to justify an assertion
• asking the participants to pronounce themselves on whether a proposal for action
should be accepted or rejected
• rejecting a previous proposal for action
• retracting a previous locution
• entering/withdrawing from the deliberation dialogue

• McBurney, Hitchcock and Parsons’s list does not include the act of giving reasons,
or acts of arguing as a component part of deliberation. In my view, acts of arguing
should be included explicitly as a core part of deliberation.
• They seem to rely on the locution ‘assert(.)’, i.e. the act of making an assertion, as
the type of speech act that allows the participants to accomplish this.
• Following Toulmin (2003), I endorse the view that an argument comprises,
together with the reasons that are laid down and with the claim so supported
(conclusion), an inferential license that authorises the step from reasons to
conclusion, making it an appropriate and legitimate one. Toulmin called this
inferential license ‘warrant’ and observed that it is usually left implicit.
• For the present discussion, this view should entail that giving reasons is part of a
complex speech act that is connected not only with the target claim but also with
another speech act, a warranting claim authorising the inferential step from
premises to conclusion.

• In terms of speech acts, giving a reason may be seen as a sub-type of assertion,
where an anaphoric relation to another assertion is present, which in virtue of this
relation acquires the status of the concluded claim.
• Moreover, the inferential license (“Data such as D entitle one to draw conclusions,
or make claims, such as C”, Toulmin 2003, p. 91) should be seen as an exercitive
speech act.
• These components of deliberation may be added to the list below, tentatively, in
the following form:
Making an assertion
i. giving a reason
ii. concluding a claim
iii. … (other subtypes of assertion: information, commentary, etc.)
Licensing the inference form a given reason (an assertion) to a claim (another
assertion)

• Additionally, I suggest completing McBurney, Hitchcock and Parsons’ list with two
further speech acts subsequent to the request that the participants pronounce
themselves on a proposal:
These are the speech acts of rejecting and accepting, which usually can be seen as
verdictives of a certain kind.
• My suggested list of deliberative speech acts would be the following:

1) opening the deliberative dialogue
2) making an assertion
a) presenting a proposal for action
b) giving a reason
c) concluding a target-claim
d) other possible assertions (information, commentary, etc.)
3) licensing the inference from an assertion (a given reason) to another
assertion (a claim)
4) preferring a particular option for action
5) asking the other party to justify an assertion
6) pronouncing on whether a proposal for action should be accepted or rejected
7) accepting/rejecting a proposal for action
8) retracting a previous locution
9) entering/withdrawing from the deliberation dialogue

• Now, coming back to the group of speech acts listed, it may be noticed that many
of them are relational complexes in the sense above seen.
• The speech acts of making a proposal qua target-claim, giving a reason (in support
of the former), licensing the step from the reason given to the target claim and
concluding it are relational, as seen above. Also asking for justification
presupposes a former speech act, not necessarily of the assertive type. (N.B.:
Notice that non-assertive speech acts are susceptible of justification and may
appear as conclusion of an argument, whereas the other direction of the arrow is
not true: a non-assertive speech act cannot appear as a reason in an act of arguing
(see Barker 2003)
• My aim is to outline an analysis of these speech act relations that takes into
account the normative positions of the participants, together with the effect that
these positions have on the illocutionary force of their utterances.

Presenting a proposal for action (‘We ought to do A’, ‘Action A ought to be done)
• Whereas self-standing proposals are to be seen as exercitives (in Austin’s original
classification this illocution does not appear explicitly), whenever a proposal is put
forward in deliberation, it gives way to another speech act, a verdictive, that as
such may be subjected to arguments for and against.
• Proposals qua verdictives are not put forward “to commit the speaker to a certain
course of action”, but purport to be “correct or incorrect, right or wrong, justifiable
or unjustifiable on the evidence” (cf. Austin, 1975, p. 157, 154).
• To the extent that sentences of this form are submitted for critical evaluation, it is
not the proponent’s authority or influence what makes of the speech act an act of
a certain type. Instead, a condition on verdictive speech acts is that they are issued
on the basis of some findings (data, evidence, reasons, etc.), hence they are
assessable on this very basis.

• Moreover, whenever deliberation ends up in a common agreement on a proposal
of the form “We ought to do A” or “Action A ought to be done”, the former
verdictive gives way to a commissive illocution.
i. We ought to do A (verdictive subjected to critical examination, as in
deliberation)
ii. We ought to do A (commissive)
• In virtue of what the verdictive in (i) gives way to the commissive in (ii)?

• After the verdictive has been argumentatively assessed, the proponent’s obligation
to justify may be taken to have been redeemed and the correctness of the speech
act duly supported.
• In my light, it is the participants’ joint endorsement of the correctness of (i) what
institutes a joint commitment with (ii). This step assigns them an obligation that
did not exist before, since (i) only committed them with a critical examination,
including the giving of reasons and the evaluation of those reasons. It is their
agreement that (ii) has been duly justified what leads them to take the verdictive
as correct.
• In virtue of the deliberation carried out, the participants can see themselves as
epistemically competent on their joint endorsement of the verdictive. Only then is
a new joint commitment assumable, which takes the form of a commissive speech
act.

• Notice that the epistemic competence resulting from deliberation is different from
the presupposed capacity to carry out the commitment, which accompanies the
commissive as such.
• Nevertheless, since deliberation discusses an action proposal for implementation,
it also can be presupposed that the effective implementability of the action has
been critically examined.
• Thus, it can be said that the confirmed epistemic value of the proposal, its
correctness qua concluded target-claim, gives rise to a joint commitment.

Giving a reason
• Making an assertion that is the giving of a reason for (or against) a previous
proposal for action presupposes that the proposal has been put forward as a
target claim (a verdictive).
• Moreover, it introduces the following changes in the participants’ normative
positions: it redeems a previous obligation from the proponent, and it may
institute a further obligation to answer doubts and objections, if they are raised.
The other participants are assigned a right to raise doubts and objections, as well
as a right to contribute to giving further support to the verdictive, in case they also
endorse it.
• Notice that here, the locutionary acts that will be taking place do not need to be
identical to the initial one, although it is to be expected that they be related in a
relevant form.

Giving a reason
• Interestingly, Austin lists ‘argue’ among expositives, together with other
performative verbs like ‘postulate’ and ‘deduce’. Of these, he writes, “Expositives
are used in acts of exposition involving the expounding of views, the conducting of
arguments, and the clarifying of usages and of references.” (1975, p. 161). In
acknowledging that they may be seen also as speech acts of some other type, he
adds ‘argue’ among those which “may well be taken as exercitive”, since they
“involve exertion of influence or exercise of powers” (ibid.)
• Provided that ‘argue’ here may be taken in the sense of giving reasons or
arguments, Austin’s commentary seems to consider the act of giving a reason from
a rhetorical point of view. Dialectically, however, giving a reason accomplishes a
justificatory function and the act belongs to the realm of epistemic practices. To
that extent, acts of giving a reason should be taken to primarily be acts of
judgement and, as such, belong to the verdictive type.

Licensing the inference from an assertion (a given reason) to another assertion (a
target-claim)
• Giving a reason for a proposal presupposes also the corresponding inferential
license. The implicit speech act that takes effect should be seen as an exercitive.
The speaker presents him or herself as authorized to make the step, and as
authorizing the other participants to make it themselves. It presupposes that the
proponent is capable of sustaining the legitimacy of the license with further
reasons and creates the proponent’s obligation to do so whenever this move is
appropriate (e.g. due to the raising of a rebuttal by another participant).
Therefore, giving a reason also institutes an obligation to justify, and an obligation
to retract the argument if a rebuttal is presented that the proponent cannot
answer back. If the step from reason to proposal remains unchallenged, then it
assigns the participants a right to take the argument as good and to draw other
inferences on it. Notice also that, whenever the inferential license becomes
questioned and has to be justified, the former license gives way to a verdictive (a
judgement critically assessable)

Concluding a target-claim
• It is the proposal qua verdictive that is drawn as a conclusion, after it has received
due argumentative support.
• It creates a mutual obligation from the participants to act in a consistent way. In
virtue of their joint agreement that the proposal (as a verdictive) is correct, they
become obliged to it qua commissive.
• It also brings about a legitimate expectation that the other participants will
conduct themselves in a consistent way, instituting at the same time the
participants’ right to hold the breaching party accountable.

Preferring a particular option for action
• It presupposes that at least two proposals for action are available and have been
put forward by the participants. Within deliberation, the speech act should be
taken to be a commissive. It institutes an obligation to give reasons for the
preferred option and the other participants’ right to ask for it. Moreover, it
institutes an obligation to renounce to the preferred option, whenever this option
is defeated in the course of the dialogue.
• To manifest preference for an option might be seen as a behabitive (since it
manifests a stand towards a previous proposal and in this sense is “the adopting of
an attitude”, p. 163); however, Austin remarks that this type of speech act includes
the “expressions of attitudes to someone else's past conduct or imminent
conduct” (p. 160), which does not seem to be the general case here.

Preferring a particular option for action
• Notwithstanding this, in their original DDM, McBurney, Hitchcock and Parsons
(2007) stipulate that a preference for action can only be issued after a previous
evaluation of the available options has taken place. If this were the case, then
manifesting preference would become a behabitive in the above mentioned sense,
without a further obligation to justify it. In such a case, no obligation to justify
would be assigned nor a corresponding right to ask for it.
• In a more general case, another possibility would be to associate this speech act
with the expositive type, in line with illocutions like ‘accept’ and ‘adhere to’; yet
expressing preference in the course of a deliberative dialogue institutes obligations
(and assigns rights) that go beyond a mere expounding or clarifying of a
standpoint.

Asking the other party to clarify an assertion
• In the course of a deliberative dialogue this speech act is akin to requesting or
urging. It amounts to exercising the right to do so and has the effect of exercising
an influence on the addressed participant, who has to give a response.
• Asking for clarification thus presupposes that some other participant has made an
assertion and is under the dialectical obligation to answer to doubts.
• The participant that asks for clarification is committed to withdraw their doubt,
whenever the response is satisfactory, and in another case has a right to keep
asking for clarification (reiteration or reformulation).

Asking the other participants to pronounce themselves on whether a proposal for
action should be accepted or rejected
• The speech act is an exercitive. It presupposes a previous speech act, a proposal
qua verdictive. It presupposes also that the participants are epistemically
competent to pronounce themselves on the matter, together with the speaker’s
authority (or authoritativeness) to issue the request. The exercitive assigns the
participants an obligation to respond.
• In formal contexts this point can be regulated, but in informal ones not necessarily
so. In the latter case, when a participant explicitly asks for such pronouncement, it
is the participants’ joint agreement that this move is correct what makes of the
move an exercitive, conferring the speaker the required authority (authorisation)
to do so.

Accepting/Rejecting a proposal for action
• Accept and reject can be seen primarily as behabitives, since they manifests a
stand towards a previous proposal and in this sense are to be seen as “the
adopting of an attitude”, Austin 1975, p. 163)
• Again, both speech acts presuppose a previous proposal, as well as the
participants’ epistemic competence to adopt a stance on it. (This competence may
have been attained in the course of the discussion, but not necessarily so).
• A proposal institutes, together with the proponent’s obligation to justify it, the
addressees’ right to adopt a stance on it. Nevertheless, if the pros and cons of the
proposal have not been discussed before (or not sufficiently), then accepting or
rejecting entails an obligation to justify one own’s stance, if this is requested by
another participant.

Accepting/Rejecting a proposal for action
• Accepting the proposal creates also a commitment to it, and this in two different
ways:
– Within deliberation, this move obliges the participant to further justify the
proposal, if this is needed.
– When a joint agreement on the proposal closes the dialogue, however, the
former verdictive gives way to a commissive in the sense above seen.
• In its turn, rejecting the proposal, which is the exercise of a right, institutes the
obligation to justify the rejection whenever another participant asks for it.
• Whenever a participant justifies their acceptance or rejection of a proposal, they
make their reasons available in such a way as to allow other participants to
become epistemically competent to consider adopting the same stance.

Retracting a previous speech act
• Retracting belongs to the group of exercitives, since it can be seen as the exercise
of a right. It presupposes a previous speech act by the same speaker. The previous
speech act can be a proposal, a reason, and also a pronouncement (of acceptance
or rejection) on a previous proposal. It also can be a retraction of a previous
request (for justification or pronouncement), or a previous commissive (e.g. to
provide additional reasons).
• Whenever the other participants accept the retraction, the former speech act
becomes annulled.

• Recent views on assertion have contended that the speech act of asserting is
connected to a commitment to retract the assertion, if in later contexts it proofs to
be incorrect or inappropriate.
• In McFarlane (2005)’s relativist framework, e.g., the idea is that the evaluation of
an assertion must be judged with respect to both the original context of use and a
separate context of assessment. According to this framework, in asserting that p at
C1, one commits oneself to withdrawing (later retracting) the assertion in any
future context C2 if p is shown to be untrue relative to context of use C1 and
context of assessment C2.
• This view has been call into question (cf. e.g. Marques, 2018).

• Notwithstanding this debate, I take it that in the particular case of a deliberative
dialogue, and even if a commitment to retract oneself (in the appropriate
circumstances) cannot be seen as a necessary condition of assertion, the act of
retracting is directly connected to that of asserting in the relational way here
considered.
• To that extend, retracting oneself of a previous speech act (not only an act of
asserting), provided that the retraction is accepted by the other participants, can
be seen as an annulment of former obligations, as the obligation to justify. Also,
the agreement annuls the participants’ right to draw conclusions on the former
speech act, as well as their right to ask the speaker for justification.
• The act of annulling a former speech act is an exercitive, which can be seen as
relationally connected to both speech acts, the retracted one and the act of
retracting itself.

Entering/Withdrawing from dialogue
• Declaring that one enters or withdraws from dialogue may be taken to be
expositive speech acts. Expositives state or clarify the way in which the speaker’s
speech is intended or should be taken. They may be taken to be, at the same time,
speech acts of some other type. (s. Sbisà 2018). Entering and withdrawing from
dialogue are connected to each other. Both can be taken to be also as behavitives,
in that they involve taking an attitude.
• Yet entering dialogue puts in force the dialectical obligations (and recognition of
rights) that are characteristic of it, whereas withdrawing from dialogue annuls
those obligations (and recognition of rights). In the former case, although not in
the latter, it is possible that certain conditions should be fulfilled for the candidates
to enter dialogue (e.g., that they occupy a certain position, or that they may be
perceived as affected by the decision and thus as having a legitimate interest in it).
In both cases, however, a conjoint recognition of the new comer as participant,
and a license by the other participants to withdraw seems to be required for the
declaration to be seen as legitimate and thus as a correct illocution.

5. Conclusion
• Here I have adopted the term speech act complexes in reference to complexes of
speech acts that may be seen as related to one another in an essential way, to the
extent that the illocutionary force of each of them cannot be properly understood
without taking into account the relating illocution (or illocutions).
• Focusing on the case of deliberative speech acts, I have tried to show that these
complexes can be characterized by saying, firstly, how they institute dialectical
obligations and rights; and secondly, how these obligations and rights may give
way to other illocutions, characterized by dialectical obligations and rights that are
to be seen as instituted on the previous ones.
• A pending task would be to try and systematize other types of dialogue and the
concurring complexes characterizing them.

• Asher, Nicholas and Alex Lascarides. 2003. Logics of conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Austin, John L. 1975. How to do things with words. Oxford: Clarendon Press [Orig. 1962]
• Barker, Stephen J. 2003. Renewing meaning: a speech-act theoretic account. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Marques, Teresa. 2018. Retractions. Synthese 195/8: 3335-3359.
• MacFarlane, John. 2005. Making sense of relative truth. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 105/3:
321–8211.
• McBurney, Peter, David Hitchcock and Simons Parsons. 2007. The eightfold way of deliberation dialogue.
International Journal of Intelligence Systems 22/1: 95-132.
• Sbisà, Marina. 2006. Communicating citizenship in verbal interaction: Principles of a speech act oriented
discourse analysis. In: Heiko Hausendorf and Alfons Bora (Eds.), Analysing Citizenship Talk, 151-180.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Sbisà, Marina. 2014. The Austinian conception of illocution and its implications for value judgments and
social ontology. Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics 16/2: 619-631.
• Searle, John R. and Daniel Vanderveken. 1985. Foundations of illocutionary logic. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
• Toulmin, Stephen. 2003. The uses of argument. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [Orig. 1958]
• Walton, Douglas and Erik C. W. Krabbe. 1995. Commitment in dialogue: Basic concepts of interpersonal
reasoning. Albany, New York: SUNY Press.
• Walton, Douglas, Alice Toniolo and Timothy J. Norman. 2014. Missing phases of deliberation dialogue for
real applications. Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Argumentation in Multi-Agent
Systems, 1-20. https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/crrarpub/23
• Witek, Maciej. 2015. An interactional account of illocutionary practices. Language Sciences 47: 43-55.
References

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