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Speech Acts: Natural or Normative Kinds? The Case of Assertion
Author(s) -
BALL BRIAN
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
mind and language
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.905
H-Index - 68
eISSN - 1468-0017
pISSN - 0268-1064
DOI - 10.1111/mila.12054
Subject(s) - assertion , normative , natural (archaeology) , norm (philosophy) , epistemology , speech act , term (time) , psychology , computer science , philosophy , linguistics , history , archaeology , programming language , physics , quantum mechanics
There are two views of the essences of speech acts: according to one view, they are natural kinds ; according to the other, they are what I call normative kinds —kinds in the (possibly non‐reductive) definition of which some normative term occurs. In this article I show that speech acts can be normative but also natural kinds by deriving Williamson's account of assertion, on which it is an act individuated, and constitutively governed, by a norm (the knowledge rule), from a consideration of the natural characteristics of normal cases of its performance.