The objection
CLAIM-151’s defeat condition: “A held account individuates the acts in question (teasing, reproach, reprimand) by intrinsic features of the utterance token plus speaker-internal states alone. Relations to audience, norms and uptake would then be only evidence of the act, not constituents of it, and that account would predict the CASE-018 variation as well.”
That describes a standard family of accounts of illocution, the intention-based one: Grice’s account of speaker meaning (1957), Strawson’s “Intention and Convention in Speech Acts” (1964), and Bach and Harnish’s Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts (1979). On it, a communicative act is individuated by the speaker’s communicative intention, an intention to be recognized as having a certain attitude or aim. Strawson set apart the acts that need conventions, such as an umpire’s call, from those that need only the recognition of intention.
Applied to CASE-018 (“said by a friend, a parent, a judge, a comedian”):
- The friend teasing, the parent reproaching and the comedian entertaining differ in what each speaker intends the audience to recognize. An intention-based account individuates the three acts by speaker-internal states, which is the defeat condition’s first clause.
- The judge condemning during sentencing performs an institutional act. Its force needs norms and a status, and Searle’s status functions and deontic powers (LIT-482, read in NOTE-388) already hold that part. CLAIM-151 itself names Searle as “the nearer held prior art”.
So the rival plausibly meets the defeat condition for three of CASE-018’s four acts, and the part it does not meet is the part Searle covers.
The record’s own worked model for CLAIM-111 is of this family. The rational-speech-act listener of THEORY-172 interprets an utterance “by inverting a model of a speaker”, and CLAIM-111 reads its output as “a posterior over what the speaker meant”. NOTE-634 introduces it as a formalization of what “Gricean, relevance-theoretic and common-ground accounts explained … informally”.
Two features of the defeat condition keep this from being noticed.
- “A held account”. No work of the intention-based line is in the record. A search on 2026-10-10 finds Grice only as mentioned in readings of other works (the rational-speech-act papers, Block, Brandom, Heim), no work by P. F. Strawson or by Bach and Harnish, and no LIT for any of them. While no such work is held, the condition cannot fire.
- “the CASE-018 variation”. It is an invented variation (CASE-018: “Invented, so it shows a possibility”), so there is no observed pattern a rival could predict worse. CLAIM-229 makes this point about the case’s standing.
What it does not say
It does not say the intention-based account is right, nor that CLAIM-151 is false. Intentions have audience-directed content, and an externalist can say the relation to the audience enters the act through that content; that is a reply, and it is not in the record. It says the standard rival exists, that it plausibly meets the stated defeat condition for the non-institutional acts, and that the record has neither read it nor answered it. Austin and Goffman, whom A187 §8 names, are held unread (LIT-785, LIT-780) and do not settle it either way.
What would answer it
- A reading of the intention-based line, and an argument that uptake or norms are constitutive of teasing and reproach, not only evidence of them: for instance a case in which the speaker’s intention is held fixed and the act changes with the audience’s standing.
- Or a narrowing of CLAIM-151 to institutional and normative acts, where Searle already supports it. CLAIM-139 and CLAIM-137, which rest on CLAIM-151, would narrow with it.
The works named here should be checked against the Anthology of the SOTA before any is filed.
Where it stands
Strictly, the defeat condition is not met. It asks for an account that individuates “the acts in question (teasing, reproach, reprimand)” by intrinsic features and speaker-internal states alone, and this objection grants that reprimand needs Searle’s standing. On 2026-10-10 CLAIM-151 was restated (version 2) with a defeat condition on the acts with standing conditions, which carry the claim’s “can change the act”, and on cases in which the speaker’s intention is held fixed. For teasing, the line’s central case, the rival is unanswered and its literature unread here, and QUESTION-073 holds it open. The objection stays open.
Note of 2026-10-10: a documented case
CASE-069 is the first case the record holds that can be read against this objection’s rival on documented data rather than on CASE-018’s invented variation. In Labov’s recorded sounding sessions, whether a remark is a ritual or a personal insult follows the shared knowledge, before the audience, that it is untrue. The verdicts of the target and the group change while the ritual aim that Labov attributes to the speaker stays fixed.
It supplies what this objection’s first answer asks for: a case in which the act changes with a relation among the parties while the intention is held fixed. It does so only partly. The intention is the analyst’s attribution, except in one exchange with a use/mention complication. And Labov’s rule is stated in nested beliefs, which is Gricean in shape, so the rival can read it as the condition for recognising an intention to sound and call the hearers’ uptake a mistake. The case does not settle that dispute. It does move it from an invented case to recorded transcripts, and names the elicited test that would settle it. The objection stays open.
Note of 2026-10-10: an unintended-reading case
CASE-073, the Kia Provo (2013), is a case of the kind this objection’s first answer asks for, an intention held fixed while the audience changes, and the intention is the speaker’s own published statement, not an analyst’s attribution as in CASE-069. What it does to the intentionalist reply is two-sided. When Kia’s intention became known, the offended audience revised its verdict (“this was a mistake made by the company”), as the intention account predicts: the audience’s reading was evidence, and better evidence corrected it. But Kia withdrew the name for the UK and Ireland after its intention was known and accepted, treating it as unusable before that audience whatever it meant by it. The reply can call that prudence before a foreseeable misreading. The relational view calls it the act changing with the audience. So the case removes the multivocal-act escape that CASE-061 left open, and moves the dispute to what the withdrawal shows. It does not settle it. The act is a naming, and part of the change is a lexical collision. The objection stays open.
Note of 2026-10-12: filed positions on main
The title says the record “holds no counter” for intention-based accounts. Since PR #121 branched, main has filed two positions on the dispute. CLAIM-160, the owner’s claim, fixes intended meaning at the write, relative to the writer’s projected receiver. CLAIM-171 is its reception-side counter: “the writer’s projected receiver is one more reading”. Both are filed positions, not readings, and neither reads Grice, Strawson or Bach and Harnish. Whether CLAIM-160 is an intention-based account of the act, or only of intended meaning, is left to the owner.
Note of 2026-10-13: the line is now held
The four works this objection names are filed. Grice’s “Meaning” (1957, LIT-1042, NOTE-735) and Strawson’s “Intention and Convention in Speech Acts” (1964, LIT-1043, NOTE-736) are read in full. Grice’s “Logic and Conversation” (1975, LIT-1041) is read only at pp. 45–47. Bach and Harnish (1979, LIT-1040) is unread, because no lawful copy was reachable. So the “held account” clause no longer blocks the defeat condition by default. Read, the line confirms the objection in substance and corrects it in two places.
- Confirmed. Strawson individuates non-conventional illocutions by the speaker’s wholly overt intention. He separates request from entreaty, said with the same words (“Don’t go”), by the recognised attitude with which the wish is held. That is CASE-018’s form. He concedes the essentially conventional acts (verdict, sentence, the umpire’s call) to procedure, as this objection concedes the judge to Searle.
- Corrected: not “alone”. On Strawson, “the act of communication is performed if uptake is secured”, so the audience’s recognition is a condition of the act, not only evidence of it. CLAIM-151’s defeat condition asks for individuation by speaker-internal states “alone”, and the line’s central text does not supply it. The condition still does not fire.
- Corrected: the reply is in the record. “What it does not say” calls the externalist reply, that the audience relation enters through the content of the intention, absent. It is in Strawson’s treatment of orders. An order’s overt intention includes that the utterance be recognised as “issued in a certain social context such that certain social rules or conventions apply”. Strawson grants the scheme holds this only “with some strain”. A parent’s reproach would sit there, between the communicative and the institutional ends.
- Grice (1957) is about meaning, not acts, and does not separate teasing from reproach. Its one case near reproach, cutting someone in the street, is speaker-internal in this objection’s sense.
The dispute now turns on whether standing that enters through the content of the speaker’s intention counts as a relation in CLAIM-151’s sense. Neither text decides that. For teasing neither text says anything, and Bach and Harnish, the work most likely to, is unread. The objection stays open.
Note of 2026-10-30: what holds it back
For teasing, the intention-based reading is still missing. Harnish (LIT-1850) confirms that Bach and Harnish individuate communicative acts by the attitude the speaker R-intends to be recognized, with context only as input to the hearer’s inference. Berdini (LIT-1877) quotes them that acts “at best … create mutual beliefs … about rights and obligations” (1979, p. 124). Neither text mentions teasing, reproach or standing, and the book (LIT-1040) is unread. Harnish’s suggestion that expressed attitude and liability to censure coincide (p. 38) leaves open whether QUESTION-073’s dispute is verbal.