Federica Berdini (2012), “Rationality as the Normative Dimension of Speech Acts”, Phenomenology and Mind 2. DOI 10.13128/phe_mi-19636.
Key takeaways
From the reading, NOTE-1445.
- Rules do not fix the act. With Bach and Harnish, “meaning never exhausts illocutionary force” (1979, p. 132): “The door is open” may be an assertion, an order, a threat or advice. So a rule-based account cannot say what makes an act the act it is, even in literal cases.
- The inferential model. The hearer infers the speaker’s attitude from what is said, mutual contextual beliefs, and the linguistic, communicative and conversational presumptions. Communication is the speaker’s expressing an attitude by reflexive intention (Bach and Harnish 1979, p. 39, as quoted).
- Bach and Harnish on deontology. They call it “a moral question” whether illocutionary acts create a deontology: “at best they create mutual beliefs between speaker and hearer about rights and obligations” (1979, p. 124, as quoted). Berdini sides with Searle that deontology is internal to speech acts, but not because of rules.
- Rationality as minimal normativity. The presumption that one’s interlocutor is rational, following Grice’s late work on reason and value, sets expectations and constraints that might ground commitments and obligations. The paper offers this as a proposal for further research.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-30 for its quotation of Bach and Harnish (LIT-1040, unread) on rights and obligations, which bears on CLAIM-221 and QUESTION-073. It is a second-hand route to that one passage, not a reading of the book.