An Austinian alternative to the Gricean perspective on meaning and communication

Witek, Maciej

doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2022.09.010

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 33 publications

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“…Philosophers' catching-up game with what "ordinary language" actually means and how to best theorise it thus continues and, recently, picks up speed. Benefitting from inspiring insights from, broadly speaking, sociolinguists such as Herbert Clark, Erving Goffman, and Stephen Levinson, philosophers have turned their attention to group speech acts (Hughes 1984;Lackey 2018;Ludwig 2020;Townsend 2020); complex "polylogical" exchanges (Lewiński 2021a, b); speech act pluralism and illocutionary pluralism in particular (Cappelen and Lepore 2005;Egan 2009;Johnson 2019;Lewiński 2021a;Sbisà 2013); the complexities of uptake (McDonald 2022;Sbisà 2009;Witek 2022a); varied functions of speech acts in online contexts (Connolly 2022;Labinaz and Sbisà 2021;Marsili 2021;McDonald 2021) and other related phenomena populating our daily communicative lives.…”

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confidence: 99%

Norms of Public Argument: A Speech Act Perspective

Lewiński

Cepollaro

Oswald

et al. 2023

Topoi

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confidence: 99%

Norms of Public Argument: A Speech Act Perspective

Lewiński

Cepollaro

Oswald

et al. 2023

Topoi

Self Cite

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Interactional Negotiation

Witek

2023

Philosophers in Depth

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Gricean insinuation and the fake one-way mirror effect

Witek

2024

Synthese

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The insinuating speaker, when successful, achieves two goals: they introduce a contentious content into a conversation while simultaneously marking it as not being officially stated. This positioning allows the speaker to plausibly deny any intention behind the implied message when challenged. I argue that reconciling the communicative nature of insinuation and its off-record status within the Gricean framework of overt communication appears to present a significant conceptual puzzle. In this paper, I address this challenge by introducing the notion of Gricean insinuation, which I define as communication that is both partially overt and partially covert. I start by exploring the nature and complexity of the insinuation puzzle mentioned earlier and reviewing two existing Gricean solutions to it. Then, I proceed to analyse three concepts relevant to the insinuation phenomenon: indirectness, cancellability, and plausible deniability. Following this, I introduce the concept of Gricean insinuation. In particular, I use the common ground framework to elucidate what I refer to as the ‘Fake One-Way Mirror Effect’, and apply the resulting model to explain some examples of insinuation as acts of off-record communication. In conclusion, I assess the model’s effectiveness and propose directions for future research.

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An Austinian alternative to the Gricean perspective on meaning and communication

Cited by 3 publications

References 33 publications

Norms of Public Argument: A Speech Act Perspective

Norms of Public Argument: A Speech Act Perspective

Interactional Negotiation

Gricean insinuation and the fake one-way mirror effect

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