Heard but not received

Abstract

In speech act theory, we say there has been successful uptake of a speech act when a hearer has understood what the speaker was trying to say to them. I argue that it is possible to be understood without having what you say taken seriously. For a speech act to be without defect, then, hearers must not only take up the speech act, but also be open to responding to it in appropriate ways. I call this kind of openness receptivity and argue that it should be analysed as a kind of responsiveness to reasons. A receptive hearer takes the speaker's speech act as appropriately reason giving, while an unreceptive hearer does not. This analysis reveals subtle forms of communicative breakdown that bear similarities to phenomena such as illocutionary silencing and distortion but are both posterior to, and compatible with, uptake. The analysis also helps us understand how illocutionary acts give rise to specific perlocutionary effects by way of the hearer's practical reasoning.