Action Ascription in Social Interaction

Abstract

There is a long-standing tradition of theorizing ‘action’ in philosophy and linguistic pragmatics. Speech act theory claims that individual actions are instantiations of abstract types of speech acts, which are seen as conventional, “institutional” facts (Searle 1969). Their production and understanding is said to rely on rules, importantly including illocutionary force indicating devices (IFIDs), which index the kind of speech act an utterance is held to implement (Searle & Vanderveken 1985). Gricean pragmatics (Grice 1989), neo-Gricean pragmatics (Levinson 2006), and relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson 1995), however, point out that such rules are not able to properly account for indirect speech acts. They instead insist on the primary role of intentions and inferential processes in understanding speech acts (see also Brandom 1994, 2014). These approaches, however, lack empirical foundations for the most part. Among other problems, the issues of segmentation, identification, and interpretation of actions in context have not yet been settled to a satisfying degree in the context of those traditional approaches in the philosophy of language and linguistic pragmatics (Drew & Couper-Kuhlen 2014a; Levinson 2013). Indeed, Levinson (2017) has recently argued that