Felipe Oliveira, 26 October 2018, 11h, Room I&D 006

ArgLab Colloquium

Reason-Giving as an Expressive Speech Act

Felipe Oliveira de Sousa, University of Maastricht, Netherlands

Abstract: Various prominent authors, from philosophers to cognitive scientists, have been inclined to think that justification is the most basic or important value of giving reasons. Other values that reason-giving has are often thought to be secondary - i.e. of lower importance - if compared to justification. I believe that, due to this emphasis on justification, other values that reason-giving has - and that might be equally or even more important than justification - have been discounted or simply ignored. I contend that recognition is one of these values. In this talk, against the predominant position in speech act theory and argumentation theory, I defend that reason-giving is best understood as an expressive speech act. In particular, I argue that, though reason-giving has features in common with adducing – which, following a recent account is one of the two speech acts forming the speech act complex of arguing –, reason-giving is different from adducing. Backed by examples and speech act theory, I argue that differently from adducing – which is an assertive speech act whose primary value is to achieve the justification of a claim –, reason-giving's primary value is to express a certain type of recognition for the other being addressed. This way of thinking about reason-giving, for instance, helps to explain why certain speech acts can be regarded as felicitous in an intuitive sense, even though they fail to achieve - and are not even aimed at achieving, properly understood - justification.