ArgLab Open Seminar
How to Fix Illocutionary Force
Marcin Lewiński (IFILNOVA) & Amalia Haro Marchal (IFILNOVA)
Thursday, 11 June
16:00 – 18:00
NOVA FCSH – Tower B, Room B201
What is the “proper” illocutionary force to be attributed in communicative exchanges? Three types of responses have recently been produced (McDonald 2021, 2022; Bianchi 2021, 2023; Witek 2023) within ongoing discussions on the role of speaker’s intentions, hearer’s uptake, and applicable conventions in phenomena such as “illocutionary silencing” (Langton 1993), “discursive injustice” (Kukla 2014), and “illocutionary harm” (Schiller 2021): (1) Force is determined by the Speaker, whether the Hearer “ratifies” it or not; (2) Force is determined by the Hearer’s uptake, whose response “constitutes” the illocution; (3) Force is fixed through collaborative negotiation between both.
In our view, these accounts provide partial responses tied to a simplified Speaker-Act-Hearer ontology of communication. We aim to unify them in a single, dynamic, socially embedded, externalistic, and pluralistic account of the determination of illocutionary force based on the notion of presumptive defaults towards which the dynamics of speech act exchanges are oriented, but by which they are not permanently “fixed”.
Speech acts, as intentional actions, initially belong to the Speaker, who projects a certain illocutionary force that has a status of presumption: it stands unless and until it’s defeated (Ullmann-Margalit 1983; Lewiński 2017; Witek 2021). However, as inter-actions, speech acts inherently involve the Hearer whose uptake does not always align with Speaker’s intentions. If the Hearer challenges the presumptive force by appealing to recognizable conventions, it might be accepted by the Speaker or contested, requiring further negotiation. Once resolved, the speech act “counts as” having force x or y. Thus, our scenario incorporates the three competing approaches (Speaker-oriented “ratification,” Hearer-oriented “constitution,” and negotiation-based “collaboration”) into one dynamic view. Moreover, we show how an illocutionary force, even when collaboratively negotiated, can be further affected or overruled by third parties (Lewiński 2021): a point constantly overlooked in classic speech act theory tied to a dyadic, Speaker-Hearer view of speech exchanges (but see Harrison & Tanter 2025).
We discuss three benefits of our account. First, intelligible speech acts always have some presumptively standing force, even if underdetermined or contested: there are no perfectly void acts (cf. McDonald 2022; Johnson 2023). Second, various accounts of illocutionary silencing and injustice struggle with de-coupled normative and descriptive considerations: a woman who should be (counted as) refusing, in fact isn’t (cf. Langton 1993; Kukla 2014; Hesni 2018; Johnson 2023). We re-couple these considerations: the presumptive result is always normatively grounded in the rules and conventions that justify the presumptive ascription of force. Third, we argue that various forms of counter-speech function precisely within our presumptive view of illocutionary force: they are part and parcel of the temporally extended activity of “fixing” the force (cf. Caponetto & Cepollaro 2022; Kukla 2023).
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