Search Results

Jennifer Hornsby and Rae Langton have argued that in some cultural contexts, women are not able to perform the illocutionary act of refusing sex by saying “No.” They argue that this illocutionary disablement is a kind of silencing. The silencing happens because men sometimes do not hear “No” as a refusal of sex, and hence sometimes a woman who utters “No” cannot achieve uptake of her intended illocution. Hornsby and Langton follow J. L. Austin in taking uptake to be necessary to illocution. But this view of Austin's is controversial and has recently been criticized by Alexander Bird. I argue that while uptake isn’t necessary to every illocutionary act, a speaker's beliefs about the possibility of uptake play a key role in some kinds of illocutionary acts. Because refusal is an illocutionary act of such a kind, women can be silenced in contexts where they believe their refusals won’t be heard as refusals. We are therefore still able to acknowledge loss of expressive power as a harm women sometimes suffer.

Normative reasons for belief—reasons to believe something—are constituted by truths or facts. Such reasons are distinguished from motivating reasons for belief, that is, reasons for which a subject believes something. These are constituted by considerations that the subject treats as reasons to believe. One has a justified belief, in the sense of a well-founded belief, only if the considerations that constitute one’s motivating reason are truths that one knows. Evidence-based knowledge that P is explicated in terms truths or facts that provide an adequate reason to believe that P. It is argued that not all knowledge is evidence-based, and suggested that we need to make sense of the idea that evidence adequate for knowledge is clinching evidence. The discussion addresses a problem raised by Jennifer Hornsby about the distinction between normative and motivating reasons.

This chapter discusses the idea of a “second-personal stance” as developed by Darwall and others, and notes some differences with the notion of “addressing” developed here, particularly with respect to the difference between theoretical and practical reasons. Austin’s distinction between the “illocutionary” and the “perlocutionary” is discussed in connection with Joseph Raz’s idea of the exercise of a normative power. The particular sense of “act” that applies to the perlocutionary status of utterances is illuminated by Jennifer Hornsby’s development of the idea of “reciprocity” as the distinguishing mark of the illocutionary (and hence of acts like telling). The chapter ends with further comparison and contrast between acts of telling and promising.

What is the role of effort in expert action? Beginning with a discussion of work by the philosophers Brian O’Shaughnessy, Jennifer Hornsby, and Robert Hanna and Michelle Maiese, who hold that trying is essential to all our intentional actions, this chapter goes on to distinguish the various ways that trying or the closely related phenomenon of effort occurs in actions, and then identifies the forms of trying that would reasonably occur in expert action. As consciously trying to do something, rather than just doing it, is effortful, expert action, it is argued (since it involves trying) is effortful. Moreover, though most of the book focuses on professional-level expert actions, this chapter also addresses an assumption about our social interactions, namely, that in one’s quest to find a mate, trying isn’t sexy.