Your word against mine: the power of uptake
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Your word against mine: the power of uptake Lucy McDonald1 Received: 1 May 2020 / Accepted: 31 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Uptake is typically understood as the hearer’s recognition of the speaker’s communicative intention. According to one theory of uptake, the hearer’s role is merely as a ratifier. The speaker, by expressing a particular communicative intention, predetermines what kind of illocutionary act she might perform. Her hearer can then render this act a success or a failure. Thus the hearer has no power over which act could be performed, but she does have some power over whether it is performed. Call this the ratification theory of uptake. Several philosophers have recently endorsed an alternative theory of uptake, according to which the hearer can determine the nature of the act the speaker performs. According to this theory, if the hearer regards an utterance as illocutionary act y, then it is act y, even if the speaker intended to perform act x. Call this the constitution theory of uptake. The purported advantage of this theory is that it identifies a common but underanalysed way in which speakers can be silenced. I argue that despite its initial intuitive pull, the constitution theory of uptake should be rejected. It is incompatible with ordinary intuitions about speech, it entails a conceptual impossibility (the unintentional exercise of normative powers), and it has unsavoury political implications, entailing that marginalised speakers barely qualify as agents. Keywords Speech act theory · Uptake · Normative powers · Autonomy · Feminist philosophy · Intentionalism In 1952 two teenagers, Christopher Craig and Derek Bentley, attempted to burgle a warehouse in London. Christopher brought a revolver with him. Police officers arrived to find the boys on the roof of the warehouse. One police officer climbed up and grabbed hold of Derek, while instructing Christopher to hand over his gun. Derek shouted to his friend, ‘Let him have it, Chris!’. Christopher opened fire. He shot the police officer holding Derek non-fatally in the shoulder, and then shot the next police officer who climbed onto the roof in the head, killing him instantly. In the boys’ trial there was disagreement as to whether by shouting, ‘Let him have it’, Derek had
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Lucy McDonald [email protected] St John’s College, University of Cambridge, St John’s Street, Cambridge CB2 1TP, UK
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incited Christopher to murder the police officer or ordered him to surrender his gun. The former interpretation triumphed. Despite not firing the gun himself, Derek was charged with murder and in 1953 he was executed by hanging.1 This case raises the question of who determines illocutionary force. Let us assume that Derek intended to order Christopher to surrender the gun, but Christopher interpreted Derek as inciting him to murder the police officer. Whose judgement is authoritative? I.e., who decides which act was performed? For Derek, this question was a matter of life or death. More generally, it is as much an issue of ethic
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