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Institutions, Emotions, and Group Agents pp 19–31Cite as

Document Acts

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Part of the book series: Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality ((SIPS,volume 2))

Abstract

The theory of document acts is an extension of the more traditional theory of speech acts advanced by Austin and Searle. It is designed to do justice to the ways in which documents can be used to bring about a variety of effects in virtue of the fact that, where speech is evanescent, documents are continuant entities. This means that documents can be preserved in such a way that they can be inspected and modified at successive points in time and grouped together into enduring document complexes. We outline some components of a theory of document acts, and show how it can throw light on certain problems in Searle’s ontology of social reality.

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Acknowledgements

With thanks to Guglielmo Feis, Ludger Jansen, Ingvar Johansson, Kevin Mulligan and Leo Zaibert for helpful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, USA

    Barry Smith

Authors
  1. Barry Smith
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Correspondence to Barry Smith .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Département de Philosophie, Université de Genève, Genève, Switzerland

    Anita Konzelmann Ziv

  2. Institut für Philosophie, Universität Wien, Wien, Austria

    Hans Bernhard Schmid

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Smith, B. (2014). Document Acts. In: Konzelmann Ziv, A., Schmid, H. (eds) Institutions, Emotions, and Group Agents. Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6934-2_2

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