180011 PS Speech Acts (2020S)

This course will cover some of the most notable texts and discussions on the topic of speech acts. We start by reading J.L. Austin's "How to do things with words" - his seminal William James lectures, held in 1955 in Harvard University. This work is seen as a reaction to earlier philosophy of language that focused on studying the meaning of expressions with the notions of truth and reference. Austin proposes that in order to account for meaning, we should also be looking at what we can do with words. As a simple example, when in the right circumstances, I utter the words "I will pick you up from the airport", then my utterance constitutes an action - namely the act of promising to pick someone up at the airport. By doing so, I am taking on an obligation and that allows for the hearer to hold me responsible for picking her up. In analyzing promises and other speech acts in this way, we describe the meanings of our utterances more precisely than we would by just describing when the sentence is true and what the expressions used refer to.
We will continue by reading work which criticises specific aspects of Austin's initial proposal, and proposes alternative analyses. In the final weeks of the course we will turn to social issues to which speech act theory has been fruitfully applied. One prominent strand of discussion is about whether pornography (defined in a specific way) should be restricted by using the free speech law because it renders some people unable to make certain kinds of speech acts.
For each session, there is an obligatory assigned reading, and on occasion optional background readings. In the seminar sessions, we will mostly try to understand what the author is claiming, how he/she defends her claims, why he/she is doing that, and to assess, how successful the arguments are. Students have to write short summaries (about 0,5-1 A4 page) of the assigned reading each time. During the course, the students will also have to write two short essays (max 1000 words), on which they receive feedback. The topics for the essays will be assigned. In the end of the course, the students write a longer essay which should incorporate the lessons learned from the feedback.