Who Decides What We Do with Words? Remarks on the Power of Exercitive Illocutionary Acts, Their Recognition, and Their Authority
Ambroise, Bruno
Who Decides What We Do with Words? Remarks on the Power of Exercitive Illocutionary Acts, Their Recognition, and Their Authority - 2025.
22
The question of the role of uptake in the efficiency of speech acts has become central to debates in feminist-inspired philosophy of language, as a way of considering both the possibility of the silencing effected by sexist speech and that of its subversion. Giving a more or less decisive agency to the interlocutor in the speaker’s ability to do things with his words, this conception makes the illocutionary action the result of an interaction conditioned by the social context and capable of modifying it by virtue of its normative efficiency (when it is successful). This article considers the logic of illocutionary efficiency in this dialogical and conflictual mode, focusing on exercitive acts as addressed by the normative pragmatics developed in the recent work of R. Q. Kukla. Confronting Kukla’s thinking with that of J. L. Austin and contemporary feminist philosophers of language, this article raises a problem encountered by this revival of pragmatic analysis, informed by recent pragmatist philosophy, when it sets out to explain the way in which uptake conditions the efficiency of the act. It suggests that this problem is the symptom of an overly individualistic conception of illocutionary efficiency, even while it insists on its social inscription.
Who Decides What We Do with Words? Remarks on the Power of Exercitive Illocutionary Acts, Their Recognition, and Their Authority - 2025.
22
The question of the role of uptake in the efficiency of speech acts has become central to debates in feminist-inspired philosophy of language, as a way of considering both the possibility of the silencing effected by sexist speech and that of its subversion. Giving a more or less decisive agency to the interlocutor in the speaker’s ability to do things with his words, this conception makes the illocutionary action the result of an interaction conditioned by the social context and capable of modifying it by virtue of its normative efficiency (when it is successful). This article considers the logic of illocutionary efficiency in this dialogical and conflictual mode, focusing on exercitive acts as addressed by the normative pragmatics developed in the recent work of R. Q. Kukla. Confronting Kukla’s thinking with that of J. L. Austin and contemporary feminist philosophers of language, this article raises a problem encountered by this revival of pragmatic analysis, informed by recent pragmatist philosophy, when it sets out to explain the way in which uptake conditions the efficiency of the act. It suggests that this problem is the symptom of an overly individualistic conception of illocutionary efficiency, even while it insists on its social inscription.
Réseaux sociaux