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QUESTION-296: Can an intervention on what an interpreter is told about a communicative situation tell the relations that constitute the act from those that only accompany it?

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Properties5
StatusAnswered
Tagscausality, social-ontology
Linepragmatic-transport
RefinesQUESTION-030 — Which interventions tell the relations that constitute a communicative act from those that only accompany or diagnose it?
Answered byCLAIM-130 — Telling an interpreter about a communicative situation, do(I = a), is a different intervention from changing the situation, do(S = s): only a do(S) intervenes on the relations that would constitute an act, and in a vignette or rating study every manipulation is a do(I)

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The question

QUESTION-030 asks which interventions tell constitutive relations from diagnostic ones. Most designs that propose to answer it, vignette and rating studies among them, change what the interpreter is told: that the speaker is a friend, has authority, or made a commitment earlier. This question asks whether an intervention of that kind can bear on constitution at all.

The answer

CLAIM-130, Active, answers it: no, not by itself. In the structural model A129 §1 writes, do(I = a) and do(S = s) act on different variables, and nothing in the model makes their effects on the judgement equal (THEORY-419, THEORY-138). A191 §6: “If we merely tell participants that an utterance is a reprimand, and they subsequently classify it as a reprimand, we have learned something about interpretation under instruction. We have not necessarily demonstrated that the underlying speech act changed.” A do(S) needs a design in which the speaker’s role or the conversation’s history actually changes.

What stays open is QUESTION-030’s: which do(S) designs tell constitutive relations apart, and the conceptual half, which needs a theory of the act.

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