My approach to negative actions

Iata un rezumat in engleza al textului despre care vorbeam aici:

In this paper I try to use the conceptual framework of the speech act
theory to clarify a few points regarding the philosophical debate
about the existence of negative actions.

For this, I start by looking at some of the most popular candidates to
this title: failing to do X, omitting to do X, avoiding to do X and
refraining from doing X, where X is some action.

In the second part of my paper I consider some examples of verbal
actions and try to investigate how would the property of ‘being
negative’ apply to them, concluding that we could only say about the
locutionary content of a speech act that it is positive or negative.
It is meaningless to speak of ‘negative illocutionary force’ and since
the force gives us the kind of verbal action performed in uttering a
certain sentence, I argue, we can safely conclude that speaking of
negative verbal actions in general is a categorial mistake.

Next, I try to show how this result can be extended to non-verbal
actions as well, by pointing out how the force-content distinction can
be applied to such cases. At the end of the paper I propose that an
analysis of the situations in which some actions seem to contradict
each other should replace the misleading problem of negative actions.

Comments are closed.