Maciej Witek

My aim in this paper is to contribute to the debate on the foundations of semantics and pragmatics by developing an Austinian alternative to the Gricean programme. The Gricean approach has been criticised by Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone who claim that most of the interpretive effects that are usually accounted for as inferentially recognized aspects of meaning are in fact determined by grammar. I argue, however, that it is the Austinian perspective rather than the extended-grammar outlook, that constitutes a genuine alternative to the Gricean programme. Viewed from the Austinian perspective, using language is a social practice that consists of performing conventional speech acts: acts done conforming to a convention. Unlike the Griceans and the proponents of the extended-grammar outlook, however, the Austinians assume that following a convention is not an algorithmic procedure, but a socially controlled process that involves interactional negotiation. They claim, namely, that each language convention — phatic, rhetic, illocutionary, rhetorical, procedural, etc. — is a lineage of reproduced precedents that put some constraints on what can be regarded as saying and doing the same, but underdetermine the exact properties of its new members.

The paper develops a speech act-based model of verbal irony. It argues, first, that ironic utterances are speech actions performed as conforming to a socially accepted procedure and, second, that they are best understood as so-called etiolated uses of language.
The paper is organized into four parts. The first one elaborates on Austin's doctrine of the etiolations of language and distinguishes between the normal or serious mode of communication and its etiolated mode. The second part discusses the dominant approaches to verbal irony and argues that the irony-as-a-trope theories can be viewed as attempts to describe ironic utterances as cases of normal speech, whereas the metalinguistic theories seem to treat them as etiolated uses of language. The third part proposes a set of felicity conditions for ironic acts and puts forth a hypothesis that echo and overt pretence are complementary techniques of linguistic etiolation used for ironizing. The fourth part uses the proposed model to discuss the social dimension of ironizing and argues that utterances intended as acts of ironizing may trigger the accommodating process of context-repair. The take-home message is that ironic utterances are essentially social actions: acts performed by invoking a socially accepted procedure.

My aim in this paper is to examine Mitchell S. Green’s notion of self-expression and the role it plays in his model of illocutionary communication. The paper is organized into three parts. In Section 2, after discussing Green’s notions of illocutionary speaker meaning and self-expression, I consider the contribution that self-expression makes to the mechanisms of intentional communication; in particular, I introduce the notion of proto-illocutionary speaker meaning and argue that it is necessary to account for acts overtly showing general commitments that are not ‘marked’ as being specific to one or another illocutionary force. In Section 3, I focus on Green’s account of expressive norms and argue that their function is to stabilize rather than constitute the structure of illocutionary signalling systems; moreover, I examine critically Green’s idea according to which expressive norms enable us to indicate the force of our speech acts and suggest that they play a key role in the mechanisms for epistemic vigilance. Finally, in Section 4, I elaborate on the idea of discourse-constituted thoughts—or, in other words, thoughts that exist in virtue of being expressed in making certain conversation-bound speech acts—and use it to develop a more comprehensive model of the expressive dimension of speech acts.

In this paper, I develop a speech-act based account of presumptions. Using a score-keeping model of illocutionary games, I argue that presumptions construed as speech acts can be grouped into three illocutionary act types defined by reference to how they affect the state of a conversation. The paper is organized into two parts. In the first one, I present the score-keeping model of speech act dynamics; in particular, I distinguish between two types of mechanisms—the direct mechanism of illocution and the indirect one of accommodation—that underlie the functioning of illocutionary acts. In the second part, I use the presented model to distinguish between (1) the unilateral act of individual presumption, the point of which is to shift the burden of proof by making the hearer committed to justifying his refusal to endorse the proposition communicated by the speaker, whenever he refuses to endorse it, (2) the bilateral act of joint presumption—‘bilateral’ in that it is performed jointly by at least two conversing agents—the function of which is to confer on the proposition endorsed by the speaker the normative status of jointly recognized though tentative acceptability, and (3) the indirect or back-door act of collective presumption, the purpose of which is to sustain rules and practices to which the conversing agents defer the felicity of their conversational moves.

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, the author examines Mitchell Green’s (2009) account of the expressive power and score-changing function of speech acts; second, he develops an alternative, though also evolutionist approach to explaining these two hallmarks of verbal interaction. After discussing the central tenets of Green’s model, the author draws two distinctions – between externalist and internalist aspects of veracity, and between perlocutionary and illocutionary credibility – and argues that they constitute a natural refinement of Green’s original conceptual framework. Finally, the author uses the refined framework to develop an alternative account of expressing thoughts with words. In particular, he argues that in theorising about expressing thoughts with words – as well as about using language to change context – we should adopt a Millikanian view on what can be called, following Green, acts of communication and an Austinian approach to speech or illocutionary acts.

My aim in this paper is to develop a model of the coordinative function of language conventions and, next, use it to account for the normative aspect of illocutionary practice. After discussing the current state of the philosophical debate on the nature of speech acts, I present an interactional account of illocutionary practice (Witek 2015a), which results from integrating Ruth G. Millikan’s (1998; 2005) biological model of language conventions within the framework of Austin’s (1975) theory of speech acts. Next, I elaborate on Millikan’s idea that the proper function of illocutionary conventions is coordinative and put forth a hypothesis according to which conventional patterns of linguistic interaction have been selected for the roles they play in producing and maintaining mental coordination between interacting agents. Finally, I use the resulting model of coordination to develop a naturalistic account of the so-called sincerity norms. Focusing my analysis on assertions and directives, I argue that the normative character of sincerity rules can be accounted for in terms of Normal conditions for proper functioning of speech acts understood as cooperative intentional signs in Millikan’s (2004) sense; I also discuss the possibility of providing a naturalistic account of the normative effects of illocutionary acts.

Accommodation is a process whereby the context of an utterance is adjusted or repaired in order to maintain the default assumption that the utterance constitutes an appropriate conversational move of a certain type. It involves, then, a kind of redressive action on the part of the audience and, depending on what the appropriateness of a speech act requires, results in providing missing contextual elements such as referents for anaphoric expressions, presuppositions, suppositions, deontic facts, pragmatically enriched contents, and so on. It remains to be determined, however, what is the source of the contextual requirements whose recognition motivates and guides the accommodating context-change. The aim of this paper is to address this question – which expresses the so-called triggering or constitution problem – and suggest that it can be adequately answered by a speech-act based model, the central idea of which is that the requirements in question are structural components of patterns, scripts or procedures for the performance of speech acts.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110628937-009

The paper develops a non-Gricean account of accommodation: a context-adjusting process guided by the assumption that the speaker’s utterance constitutes an appropriate conversational move. The paper is organized into three parts. The first one reconstructs the basic tenets of Lepore and Stone's non-Gricean model of meaning-making, which results from integrating direct intentionalism and extended semantics. The second part discusses the phenomenon of accommodation as it occurs in conversational practice. The third part uses the tenets of the non-Gricean model of meaning-making to account for the discursive mechanisms underlying accommodation; the proposed account relies on a distinction between the rules of appropriateness, which form part of extended grammar, and the Maxim of Appropriateness, which functions as a discursive norm guiding our conversational practice.

The paper develops a score-keeping model of illocutionary games and uses it to account for mechanisms responsible for creating institutional facts construed as rights and commitments of participants in a dialogue. After introducing the idea of Austinian games—understood as abstract entities representing different levels of the functioning of discourse—the paper defines the main categories of the proposed model: interactional negotiation, illocutionary score, appropriateness rules and kinematics rules. Finally, it discusses the phenomenon of accommodation as it occurs in illocutionary games and argues that the proposed model presupposes an externalist account of illocutionary practice.

The aim of this paper is to reformulate the Linguistic Underdeterminacy Thesis by making use of Austin’s theory of speech acts. Viewed from the post-Gricean perspective, linguistic underdeterminacy consists in there being a gap between the encoded meaning of a sentence uttered by a speaker and the proposition that she communicates. According to the Austinian model offered in this paper, linguistic underdeterminacy should be analysed in terms of semantic and force potentials conventionally associated with the lexical and syntactic properties of the pheme uttered by the speaker; in short, it is claimed that the conventionally specified phatic meaning of an utterance underdetermines its content and force. This Austinian version of the Linguistic Underdeterminacy Thesis plays a central role in a contextualist model of verbal communication. The model is eliminativist with respect to rhetic content and illocutionary force: it takes contents and forces to be one-off constructions whose function is to classify individual utterances in terms of their representational and institutional effects, respectively.

The paper aims to develop an interactional account of illocutionary practice, which results from integrating elements of Millikan’s biological model of language within the framework of Austin’s theory of speech acts. The proposed account rests on the assumption that the force of an act depends on what counts as its interactional effect or, in other words, on the response that it conventionally invites or attempts to elicit. The discussion is divided into two parts. The first one reconsiders Austin’s and Millikan’s contributions to the study of linguistic practice. The second part presents the main tenets of the interactional account. In particular, it draws a distinction between primary and secondary conventional patterns of interaction and argues that they make up coherent systems representing different language games or activity types; it is also argued that the proposed account is not subject to the massive ambiguity problem.

The aim of the paper is to explore the interrelation between persuasion tactics and properties of speech acts. We investigate two types of arguments ad: ad hominem and ad baculum. We show that with both of these tactics, the structures that play a key role are not inferential, but rather ethotic, i.e., related to the speaker’s character and trust. We use the concepts of illocutionary force and constitutive conditions related to the character or status of the speaker in order to explain the dynamics of these two techniques. In keeping with the research focus of the Polish School of Argumentation, we examine how the pragmatic and rhetorical aspects of the force of ad hominem and ad baculum arguments exploit trust in the speaker’s status to influence the audience’s cognition.

"The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it aims at providing an account of an indirect mechanism responsible for establishing one’s power to issue binding directive acts; second, it is intended as a case for an externalist account of illocutionary interaction. The mechanism in question is akin to what David Lewis calls “presupposition accommodation”: a rule-governed process whereby the context of an utterance is adjusted to make the utterance acceptable; the main idea behind the proposed account is that the indirect power-establishing mechanism involves the use of imperative sentences that function as presupposition triggers and as such can trigger off the accommodating change of the context of their utterance. According to the externalist account of illocutionary interaction, in turn, at least in some cases the illocutionary force of an act is determined by the audience’s uptake rather than by what the speaker intends or believes; in particular, at least in some cases it is the speaker, not her audience, who is invited to accommodate the presupposition of her act.
The paper has three parts. The first one defines a few terms — i.e., an “illocution”, a “binding act”, the “audience’s uptake” and an “Austinian presupposition” — thereby setting the stage for the subsequent discussion. The second part formulates and discusses the main problem of the present paper: what is the source of the agent’s power to perform binding directive acts? The third part offers an account of the indirect power-establishing mechanism and discusses its externalist implications.
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The paper reconstructs and discusses three different approaches to the study of speech acts: (i) the intentionalist approach, according to which most illocutionary acts are to be analysed as utterances made with the Gricean communicative intentions, (ii) the institutionalist approach, which is based on the idea of illocutions as institutional acts constituted by systems of collectively accepted rules, and (iii) the interactionalist approach, the main tenet of which is that performing illocutionary acts consists in making conventional moves in accordance with patterns of social interaction. It is claimed that, first, each of the discussed approaches presupposes a different account of the nature and structure of illocutionary acts, and, second, all those approaches result from one-sided interpretations of Austin’s conception of verbal action. The first part of the paper reconstructs Austin's views on the functions and effects of felicitous illocutionary acts. The second part reconstructs and considers three different research developments in the post-Austinian speech act theory—the intentionalist approach, the institutionalist approach, and the interactionalist approach.

My aim in this paper is to defend the view that the processes underlying early vision are informationally encapsulated. Following Marr (1982) and Pylyshyn (1999) I take early vision to be a cognitive process that takes sensory information as its input and produces the so-called primal sketches or shallow visual outputs: informational states that represent visual objects in terms of their shape, location, size, colour and luminosity. Recently, some researchers (Schirillo 1999, Macpherson 2012) have attempted to undermine the idea of the informational encapsulation of early vision by referring to experiments that seem to show that colour recognition is affected by the subject's beliefs about the typical colour of objects. In my view, however, one can reconcile the results of these experiments with the position that early vision is informationally encapsulated. Namely, I put forth a hypothesis according to which the early vision system has access to a local database that I call the mental palette and define as a network of associative links whose nodes stands for shapes and colours. The function of the palette is to facilitate colour recognition without employing central processes. I also describe two experiments by which the mental palette hypothesis can be tested.

""My aim in this paper is to develop a preliminary typology of subconscious, tacit mechanisms that underlie the conscious exercise of practical skills as well as the formation and functioning of conscious mental representations such as perceptual experiences, mental images, explicitly held beliefs and explanatory hypotheses. With this typology in hand, I consider whether these tacit mechanisms — or at least some of their aspects — can be examined and explicated by what Ryszard Wójcicki calls heuristic theorizing or reasoning.
My paper consists of two parts. In section 1 I outline the general structure of what Michael Polanyi calls personal knowledge or tacit knowing. I also discuss a few examples of tacit knowing and argue that they all have to be explained in terms of implicit mechanisms rather than in that of implicitly held beliefs or theories. In section 2 I claim that despite having the same structure, the implicit mechanisms under consideration fail to form a homogeneous class: some of them operate on tacitly held beliefs and theories, whereas others involve non-propositional rather than propositional representations; there are also implicit mechanisms whose characteristic feature is their using specific processing rules rather than representations of any sort. In other words, what Polanyi calls personal or tacit knowledge may take either the form of representational states — propositional or non-propositional — or that of processing rules. Finally, I put forth a hypothesis according to which these and similar differences are significant for understanding the role of heuristic theorizing in the acquisition and justification of objective knowledge. ""

The aim of this paper is to resist four arguments, originally developed by Mark Siebel, that seem to support scepticism about reflexive communicative intentions. I argue, first, that despite their complexity reflexive intentions are thinkable mental representations. To justify this claim, I offer an account of the cognitive mechanism that is capable of producing an intention whose content refers to the intention itself. Second, I claim that reflexive intentions can be individuated in terms of their contents. Third, I argue that the explanatory power of the theory of illocutionary reflexive intentions is not as limited as it would initially seem. Finally, I reject the suggestion that the conception of reflexive communicative intentions ascribes to a language user more cognitive abilities than he or she really has.

It can be said that Wittgenstein's Private Language Argument  initiated the internalism-externalism dilemma. In one of its interpretations the argument is read as a criticism of  methodological solipsism. Internalism, in turn, assumes that methodological solipsism is an adequate account of mental content. Therefore some externalists refer to Wittgenstein as their forerunner.  I argue, first, that the Private Language Argument  does not support the claim of externalism that meanings are not
in the head, even though it undermines methodological solipsism. I also claim that both internalism and externalism are not free from serious problems. Therefore we need a view that goes beyond the distinction in hand. To arrive at such a view I examine John Searle's account of mental content and argue that the real tension within the theory of content is between the first-person and the third-person point of view.

Punktem wyjścia proponowanych rozważań jest idea, że Austinowskie rozróżnienie na lokucyjny, illokucyjny oraz perlokucyjny aspekt aktywności językowej stosuje się nie tylko to jednostkowych aktów mowy, ale również do gier językowych: nakierowanych na pewien cel form aktywności, na której strukturę składają się wypowiedzi oraz niewerbalne działania przynajmniej dwóch uczestników. Artykuł przedstawia model zdobywania punktów w grze illokucyjnej. Posunięcia wykonywane w takiej grze definiuje się jako funkcje ze stanów punktacji w stany punktacji, gdzie stanem punktacji na danym etapie gry jest ciąg abstrakcyjnych elementów reprezentujących te aspekty kontekstu, które należy brać pod uwagę interpretując i oceniając posunięcia wykonywane na tym etapie. Każde posunięcie tego typu zmienia stan punktacji gry illokucyjnej, tworząc m.in. nowe fakty normatywne rozumiane jako uprawnienia i zobowiązania uczestników interakcji.
Artykuł składa się z czterech części. W pierwszej z nich omawiam różnicę między grami lokucyjnymi, illokucyjnymi oraz perlokucyjnymi. Nawiązując do pracy Davida Lewisa (1979), w części drugiej definiuję kategorię stanu punktacji w grze illokucyjnej. W części trzeciej odróżniam trzy typy reguł — reguły stosowności, reguły istotne oraz reguły akomodujące — i wyjaśniam rolę, jaką pełnią one w kształtowaniu struktury i przebiegu gry illokucyjnej. W czwartej części przedstawiam uwagę metodologiczną dotyczącą roli przedstawionego modelu w badaniach nad aktywnością językową, a także omawiam dwa przykłady gier illokucyjnych: dyskurs ustanawiający reguły działania oraz dialog argumentacyjny.

Celem niniejszego rozdziału jest przedstawienie neoaustinowskiego ujęcia aktów mowy oraz obrona tezy o przydatności kategorii mocy illokucyjnej w badaniach nad interakcją językową. Rozdział składa się z trzech części. W pierwszej z nich przywołuję krytyczne opinie o podejściu badawczym inspirowanym koncepcją mocy illokucyjnej. Formułuję również dwie tezy o teorii aktów mowy — mocną i słabą — i stwierdzam, że przywołane opinie dotyczą co najwyżej pierwszej z nich. Teza mocna głosi, że teoria aktów illokucyjnych ustanawia podstawy wszelkich badań nad interakcją językową; tymczasem według tezy słabej, kategoria mocy illokucyjnej pozwala na trafne ujęcie mechanizmów konwersacyjnych odpowiedzialnych za tworzenie normatywnych stanów rzeczy. W części drugiej przedstawiam podstawowe idee ujęcia aktów mowy, które nazywam interakcjonistycznym, i wyjaśniam, dlaczego zasługuje ono na miano neoaustinowskiego. W części trzeciej przedstawiam m.in. szkic neoaustinowskiego wyjaśnienia mechanizmów odpowiedzialnych za modyfikację normatywnej sfery uprawnień i zobowiązań uczestników interakcji, tym samym tworząc przyczynek do uzasadnienia słabej tezy o teorii aktów mowy.

""Celem artykułu jest obrona tezy o izolacji informacyjnej systemu wczesnego widzenia przed zarzutami odwołującymi się do eksperymentów świadczących rzekomo o wpływie przekonań o typowych barwach przedmiotów na budowę płytkich reprezentacji wzrokowych. Przez płytkie reprezentacje wzrokowe rozumiem doznania percepcyjne reprezentujące bodźce zewnętrzne wyłącznie za pomocą takich własności, jak kształt, wielkość,  położenie i barwa. Twierdzę, że doniesienia eksperymentalne przytaczane przez przeciwników tezy o izolacji informacyjnej można wyjaśnić za pomocą hipotezy, w myśl której system
wczesnego widzenia tworzy płytkie reprezentacje wzrokowe korzystając z lokalnej bazy informacji o typowych barwach określonych kształtów, przy czym baza ta ma postać modyfikowanej przez doświadczenie sieci związków asocjacyjnych. Opisuję też eksperymenty, za pomocą których można by powyższą hipotezę testować. ""

W niniejszym rozdziale przedstawiam spór między internalistycznym oraz eksternalistycznym ujęciem interakcji illokucyjnej, a następnie wykazuję, że ujęcie eksternalistyczne umożliwia wyjaśnienie kilku zjawisk dyskursywnych, których nie uwzględnia się na gruncie ujęcia internalistycznego. Rozdział składa się z trzech części. W pierwszej z nich porównuję eksternalizm semantyczny, czyli stanowisko dotyczące treści aktu mowy, z eksternalizmem pragmatycznym, czyli stanowiskiem dotyczącym mocy illokucyjnej aktu. W części drugiej wyróżniam dwie omawiane w literaturze odmiany eksternalizmu pragmatycznego ― eksternalizm warunków fortunności oraz eksternalizm sprawstwa illokucyjnego ― i wykazuję, że drugie z wyróżnionych stanowisk jest szczególnym wariantem stanowiska pierwszego. W części trzeciej rozważam argumenty przemawiające za akceptacją eksternalizmu sprawstwa illokucyjnego. Zauważam mianowicie, że wspomniane stanowisko umożliwia wyjaśnienie zjawisk dyskursywnych, które na gruncie stanowiska internalistycznego są albo nierozpoznawalne, albo ignorowane jako nieistotne anomalie; mowa o niezamierzonych, choć wiążących illokucjach, spontanicznym powstawaniu zrytualizowanych form dyskursu oraz pośrednim kształtowaniu normatywnej struktury społecznej.

"W filozofii konkurują ze sobą dwa ujęcia funkcji języka. W myśl pierwszego z nich, słowa służą głównie do opisywania świata, a zbudowane z nich zdania — zinterpretowane wytwory gramatyki — podlegają ocenie w kategoriach prawdy i fałszu. Na gruncie drugiego podejścia twierdzi się, że język jest przede wszystkim narzędziem działania w sytuacjach społecznych, a sformułowane w nim wypowiedzi są aktami mowy ocenianymi ze względu na ich skuteczność. Przyjmując drugi punkt widzenia nie musimy porzucać pytań o opisowe znaczenie słów oraz warunki prawdziwości zdań: chodzi jedynie o to, by rozważając te kwestie brać pod uwagę funkcje słów i zdań w badanej interakcji społecznej; tymczasem przyjęcie pierwszego punktu widzenia wiąże się z ryzykiem przeoczenia sytuacyjnych uwarunkowań semantycznych własności wyrażeń.
Celem niniejszego rozdziału jest przedstawienie głównych zagadnień teorii aktów mowy rozumianej jako filozoficzna dyscyplina badawcza. Tytułem wprowadzenia określimy krótko, (a) czym są akty mowy oraz (b) jakie dziedziny zajmują się ich badaniem, a następnie (c) przedstawimy plan rozdziału. "

Accommodation is a mechanism whereby the context of an utterance is adjusted or repaired in order to maintain the presumption that the utterance constitutes an appropriate conversational move. In other words, if the appropriateness of a speech act made in uttering a certain sentence requires that the context has a certain property, and if this requirement is not satisfied just before the time of this utterance, then normally – i.e., if certain conditions are met and no one objects – the context is changed so as to have the required property. The idea of accommodation plays a central role in philosophical accounts of such conversational phenomena as informative presuppositions (Lewis 1979; Stalnaker 1998, 2002; von Fintel 2008), conversational implicatures (Thomason 1990), anaphora resolution (van der Sandt 1992), explicit performatives (Lewis 1979), conversational exercitives (McGowan 2004), negotiated illocutionary forces (Sbisà 2009, 2014), and “back-door” authority-establishing acts (Langton 2015; Witek 2013, 2015). One can doubt, however, whether all these phenomena can be accounted for along the same lines. It is true that they all can be adequately described as involving a kind of context-redressive process driven by the need to meet certain expectations of appropriateness. When it comes to details, however, it turns out that different forms of accommodation should be accounted for by reference to different mechanisms, presumptions, and principles.
My aim in this talk is to develop a comprehensive framework within which one can account for the variety of forms that accommodation takes in linguistic interaction. Considering different instances of accommodation, I focus on the following four questions. First, how to represent the context that is affected by the accommodating mechanism under scrutiny? In particular, should we think of it as the common ground understood as a system of propositional attitudes mutually shared by the interacting agents or, rather, as the conversational score construed as a rule-governed structure whose elements track the evolving state of the conversation and register public commitments of its participants? Second, what is the nature of the considered mechanism? Should we describe it as a cooperative interaction involving the speaker’s expression and the hearer’s recognition and adoption of the speaker’s goals or, rather, as an objective mechanism that functions against the background of shared linguistic rules and, at least in some cases, affects the conversational score independently of what the speaker and the hearer believe? Third, what kind of appropriateness drives the accommodating mechanism under scrutiny? Should we describe it in terms of general expectations of cooperativeness or, rather, by reference to specific requirements defined by linguistic rules and norms? Fourth, does the redressive process that lies at the heart of the accommodating mechanism under scrutiny consist in adjusting, repairing or dramatically rebuilding the context? Our answers to these questions will vary from case to case, depending on the type of accommodating mechanisms involved in particular cases. My conclusion is that the alternative perspectives suggested by the above questions are not conflicting but complementary: we need them all to account for the varieties of accommodating mechanisms encountered in linguistic interaction.

My aim in this talk is, first, to make a case for an externalist account of illocutionary interaction and, second, to explore its possible implications for the theory of argumentation. My talk consists of three parts. The first one distinguishes between three types of externalism about illocutionary practice: externalism about felicity conditions, externalism about illocutionary agency and externalism about uptake. The second part discusses a phenomenon that I call ‘accommodation of Austinian presuppositions’ and argue that it can be best accounted for along the externalist lines. The third part discusses the possible implications of the resulting account for the study of natural arguments.

In my lecture I discuss three research developments in post-Austinian speech act theory: (i) the intentionalist tradition, according to which most illocutionary acts are to be analysed as utterances made with Gricean communicative intentions, (ii) the institutionalist tradition, which is based on the idea of illocutions as institutional acts constituted by systems of collectively accepted rules, and (iii) the interactionalist approach, whose main tenet is that performing illocutionary acts consists in making conventional moves in accordance with patterns of social interaction. I claim, first, that approaches (i), (ii) and (iii) presuppose different accounts of the nature and structure of illocutionary acts and, second, that they result from one-sided interpretations of Austin’s original conception of illocutions as context-changing social actions.

THE MINIMALIST CONCEPTION OF TRUTH AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Ajdukiewicz's Account of Scientific Inquiry MACIEJ WITEK University of Zielona Gdra, Poland Introduction In my paper I would like to consider Ajdukiewicz's theory of meaning as a form of ...