Intention and responsibility in speech acts

Abstract

I have argued elsewhere (Navarro-Reyes 2010) that the kind of excuses that appeal to a lack of intention in the performance of a speech act do not, in general, try to deny that the deed itself took place (i.e., in cases where we say that the act is performed unintentionally, we would not imply that the act was not performed at all, but that it was performed in a particular way). If this is correct, speech acts token performances ought to be defined independently of the speaker’s putative illocutionary intentions. In this paper I will pursue this idea by discussing the views of Alston (2000), a prominent champion of the intentionalistic account, who defines speech acts in terms of the notion of “taking responsibility”. Unlike Alston, I will claim that ‘unheard speech acts’ are not a legitimate category within speech acts, whereas cases of ‘unintended speech acts’ might be correctly considered as legitimate cases of speech acts, since they do effectively change the normative context.