The Nature of the Objects of Thought and Assertion seminar series Event

The propositional contents of speech acts play two different roles:

• Evaluative role: the propositional content of a speech act, along with its force, determines its satisfaction conditions.
• Communicative role for content: the propositional content of a speech act, along with its force, determines what a speaker says in performing that speech act, and what a competent hearer grasps by hearing it.

This distinction extends to the sub-propositional level. For example, the content of the use of a proper name makes a contribution to the satisfaction conditions of the speech act in which it occurs (evaluative role), and it contributes to what a speaker says and what a hearer grasps (communicative role). Usually these two roles for content line up with each other.

The use of a name in an assertion, for example, contributes an object to its truth-condition, and that object figures in what is said and grasped. Here I want to consider cases in which these two roles come apart.

There are many speech acts that play an important role in communication but lack satisfaction conditions, for example greetings, apologies, thank-yous, congratulations, admonishments, and many expressives.

Uses of names in these speech acts serve no evaluative role but still contribute to what is communicated.

Acts of Address

In this talk Peter Hanks will focus on another kind of example that He calls acts of address.

In an act of address a speaker uses a linguistic expression to get or maintain the attention of an addressee. For example, the use of the name “Charles” in “Charles, the guests have arrived” is an act of address. This use of “Charles” makes no contribution to the truth-conditions of this assertion, but it clearly has a communicative function.

Furthermore, this communicative function is quite different from a referential use of “Charles” in an utterance of, e.g., “Charles is in Scotland”. Competent hearers grasp different things upon hearing the name “Charles” in an utterance of “Charles, the guests have arrived” versus “Charles is in Scotland”.

Given the communicative role for content, these two uses of “Charles” must have different contents. To capture this difference we have to build acts into content. The content of “Charles” in an utterance of “Charles, the guests have arrived” is an act of addressing Charles, whereas in “Charles is in Scotland” it is an act of referring to Charles. The contents of uses of names are types of actions. Propositional contents must therefore also be types of actions. This reinforces the act-type theory of propositions that I have defended elsewhere (Hanks 2015).

If you would like to participate, please write to g.felappi@soton.ac.uk, who will send you the Microsoft Teams link.