Organon F
Volume 28, May 2021, Issue 2, Pages 326–359
ISSN 2585-7150 (online) ISSN 1335-0668 (print)
Research Article
Self-Expression in Speech Act
Maciej Witek
https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2021.28204
My aim in this paper is to examine Mitchell S. Green’s notion of self-expression and the role it plays in his model of illocutionary communication. The paper is organized into three parts. In Section 2, after discussing Green’s notions of illocutionary speaker meaning and self-expression, I consider the contribution that self-expression makes to the mechanisms of intentional communication; in particular, I introduce the notion of proto-illocutionary speaker meaning and argue that it is necessary to account for acts overtly showing general commitments that are not ‘marked’ as being specific to one or another illocutionary force. In Section 3, I focus on Green’s account of expressive norms and argue that their function is to stabilize rather than constitute the structure of illocutionary signaling systems; moreover, I examine critically Green’s idea according to which expressive norms enable us to indicate the force of our speech acts and suggest that they play a key role in the mechanisms for epistemic vigilance. Finally, in Section 4, I elaborate on the idea of discourse-constituted thoughts—or, in other words, thoughts that ex- ist in virtue of being expressed in making certain conversation-bound speech acts—and use it to develop a more comprehensive model of the expressive dimension of speech acts.
Expressive norms; illocutionary communication; self-expression; speaker meaning; speech acts.
Author
Maciej Witek 
Affiliation
University of Szczecin
Address
Institute of Philosophy and Cognitive Science, University of Szczecin ul. Krakowska 71-79, 71-017 Szczecin, Poland.
Received
23 July 2019
Revised
8 June 2020
Accepted
12 December 2020
Published online
17 March 2021
Publishers
Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences
Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences
APA
Witek, M. (2021). Self-Expression in Speech Acts. Organon F, 28(2), 326–359. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2021.28204
Chicago
Witek, Maciej. 2021. "Self-Expression in Speech Acts." Organon F 28 (2): 326–359. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2021.28204
Harvard
Witek, M. (2021). Self-Expression in Speech Acts. Organon F, 28(2), pp. 326–359. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2021.28204
© Maciej Witek
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