The Speech Act of Making a Threat

Abstract

The concept of one party making a threat to another party is central to the project of analyzing the ad baculum. It is necessary to clearly define this concept in order to be able to sort out the various complications and different approaches in characterizing what the ad baculum really is (as outlined in the two previous chapters). But even once we have arrived at an abstract definition of what a threat is, as we will see, we also need guidelines that will help us to determine, in a particular case, whether a threat has really been made (uttered) or not.