Bill Baue and Ben Roberts recently posted a "conversational exploration" of two recently published books: "Collective Power" by Ted Rau, and Ben read "Activating the Common Good" by Peter Block. (You can find the post here.) It's worth watching. Ben reports that "I’ve heard people say 'we need more action and less talk' or 'there’s talk and then there’s action,' and disparaging 'conversation,'" and shares my concern that people commonly don't understand "the power of conversation."
Thanks for the comment and the mention of my book Gil. It was Flores who brought the conversation about language action into our world. Searle's list of performative verbs was longer than you cite here, as it was brought from the work of his teacher, John L Austin. Flores was the speaker who, having swum deeply into the work of Martin Heidegger as well as Searle and Austin, saw that this arcane domain called "speech acts" was far more important than it looked in rarified discussions in a few graduate school departments of "analytic philosophy." And, in your list, be sure to add Offers as one of the first rank of language actions for making new worlds. With the making of our offers we invite the world to understand our identities in particular ways. When an offer is made and accepted, the speaker of the offer is understood as having made a promise.
Thanks, Chauncey, for enriching the context and for spotlighting Offers. I observe that I've considered Offers as a sort of conditional Promise. ("I commit to do this _on_the_condition_ that you commit to do that.") In your perspective and experience, is that a fruitful or a dangerous approach?
The danger (and there is one) is that we diminish the bright light that offers deserve. I could go on and on, but let me say simply that we train people to wait for instructions (i.e., requests) and scold them for making offers, when the most direct way of changing some situation in the world is for the person who has sight of what is broken, missing, or in the way to offer something different, and then to deliver it. In other words, I recommend you start a serious investigation of the act of making offers.
Thanks for the comment and the mention of my book Gil. It was Flores who brought the conversation about language action into our world. Searle's list of performative verbs was longer than you cite here, as it was brought from the work of his teacher, John L Austin. Flores was the speaker who, having swum deeply into the work of Martin Heidegger as well as Searle and Austin, saw that this arcane domain called "speech acts" was far more important than it looked in rarified discussions in a few graduate school departments of "analytic philosophy." And, in your list, be sure to add Offers as one of the first rank of language actions for making new worlds. With the making of our offers we invite the world to understand our identities in particular ways. When an offer is made and accepted, the speaker of the offer is understood as having made a promise.
Thanks, Chauncey, for enriching the context and for spotlighting Offers. I observe that I've considered Offers as a sort of conditional Promise. ("I commit to do this _on_the_condition_ that you commit to do that.") In your perspective and experience, is that a fruitful or a dangerous approach?
The danger (and there is one) is that we diminish the bright light that offers deserve. I could go on and on, but let me say simply that we train people to wait for instructions (i.e., requests) and scold them for making offers, when the most direct way of changing some situation in the world is for the person who has sight of what is broken, missing, or in the way to offer something different, and then to deliver it. In other words, I recommend you start a serious investigation of the act of making offers.
Thanks for this, Chauncey. I've added "offers" to the short list above. And I'm living in "a serious investigation of the act of making offers."