Speech Acts

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On 21 May 2012, at 16:45, Stephan Packard wrote:

>> Generally, Wednesday is not that bad for me, Thursday or Friday could be
>> good as well, but from 23th of May to 2nd of June I will be out of
>> office. Could we start in first week of June?
> 
> If so, let's assign us some reading beforehand, so we can start right away when we get together in June. Henry, what do you think would be the best start? Derrida, Searle, Millikan, Nissenbaum -- ?

I have read the Searle/Derrida debate, gathered in Limited Inc [1], last year. 
But then I don't think I fully understood where Derrida was coming from,
and have been trying to get some understanding of the big picture. 
I think I have a bit of a better overview now of the space, and I could re-read 
it again, but also there are a few books on the  subject which I wanted to read.

  - "Derrida/Searle, Déconstruction et language ordinaries" Raoul Moati
  - "Deconstruction and Speech Act Theory: A Defence of the Distinction between Normal and Parasitic Speech Acts"
     http://www.e-anglais.com/parasitic_sa.html
  - In Millikan's "Language: A Biological Model" 'Proper Function and Convention in Speech Acts'
    
I am not sure if Nissenbaum speaks of speech acts yet, but she speaks of context and its importance to privacy, 
which is I think part of how this ends up getting to be interesting to the philosophy of the web. 

  in my "Philosophy of the social web" slides 40-47 I cover a little bit the relation between speech acts
and HTTP requests on the world wide web.

  That is probably enough for the moment. 

My guess is that the language games for the forms of life of humans before the internet, 
such as Searle, Austin, Wittgenstein and Derrida were, may no longer apply to forms of 
life with computers (us), where things that resemble human speech acts but are not
quite the same, (perhaps these are document acts) come to be very useful. I think that
should perhaps bring a new angle to the debate.

	Henry


[1] http://www.amazon.com/Limited-Inc-Jacques-Derrida/dp/0810107880


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Received on Monday, 21 May 2012 15:44:20 UTC