How to Do Bad Things with Words: Hostile Speech Acts and the Foundations of Speech Act Theory

Abstract

In this paper I argue that the study of a particular family of speech acts, the hostile illocutionary acts, gives us the key for the re-examination of four important foundational questions in speech act theory: the illocutionary/perlocutionary distinction, the notion of infelicity, the question of the primacy of first versus third person perspective in the study of force, and the question of the possibility of a general and systematic theory of the phenomenon of force.