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Interpreting Straw Man Argumentation pp 35–64Cite as

Communicative Intentions and Commitments

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Part of the book series: Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology ((PEPRPHPS,volume 14))

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the notion of commitment and shows how speakers’ commitments can be reconstructed. To this purpose, some models of utterance interpretation and the notions of speaker’s intention and dialogue acts will be discussed. A commitment is a dialogical obligation, a responsibility of the speaker for the intended effects of his utterance. We begin by attempting to use the concepts of speech acts and illocutionary forces and the theories developed on these subjects, and show how they cannot offer the capability to build an accurate reconstruction of the speakers’ commitments. Our proposal instead starts from using the context as evidence for a reconstruction and regards utterances as dialogue moves. We portray them as actions performed in a specific context. Dialogue moves are not merely placed in a context; they constitute the context and cannot be interpreted independent of it. For this reason, the starting point is the shared communicative goal that the interlocutors pursue, and the move is interpreted as a proposal to move the dialogue forward by pursuing a goal. On our theory, the interpretative process is the result of the operation of various presumptions of different types and levels, which are assessed and evaluated.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Searle did not exclude this broader meaning, stating that we use expressions such as “I promise” to emphasize the degree of our commitment when performing speech acts that are not commissive (Searle 1969, p. 58).

  2. 2.

    Bassett, B. (2016, August 2). Donald Trump insults women four times in four days. The Huffington Post. Retrieved from https://goo.gl/KxQdxO (Accessed on 12 October 2016).

  3. 3.

    We will use “global communicative/dialogical intention” or “dialogue goal” interchangeably to refer to a “we-intention” that characterizes the interaction, to which the individual utterances need to be relevant. The term “dialogical intention” will refer to the higher-order intention expressed by the individual move (negotiating; obtaining information, etc.) which in turn embed the communicative intention (the specific intention of performing a specific action through one’s utterance) (Haugh and Jaszczolt 2012, p. 102).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal

    Fabrizio Macagno

  2. Department of Philosophy, University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario, Canada

    Douglas Walton

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  1. Fabrizio Macagno
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  2. Douglas Walton
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Macagno, F., Walton, D. (2017). Communicative Intentions and Commitments. In: Interpreting Straw Man Argumentation. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 14. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62545-4_2

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