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Groups speaking for themselves: Articulating first-person plural authority
Language & Communication xxx (xxxx) xxx
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Groups speaking for themselves: Articulating first-person plural authority Hans Bernhard Schmid University of Vienna, Universitätsstraße 7, A-1010 Vienna, Austria
a r t i c l e i n f o
a b s t r a c t
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This paper examines the ways in which group speech acts involve speakers. Against the view that groups need spokespeople speak for (or on behalf of, or in the name of) them, I argue that groups can speak for themselves. Group speech acts are a special type of joint intentional action. Groups speak when they express their illocutionary intention. Group illocutionary intentions are collective intentions of their members, and they are collective in virtue of the members’ plural pre-reflective self-knowledge of what it is they – together – want to say. It is only in virtue of the groups’ ability to speak for themselves that they can authorize individual spokespeople to speak for them.1 Ó 2019 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Keywords: Group speech acts Joint action Collective intentionality Plural self-awareness
The view that in order to be effective in what they want to achieve, groups sometimes need to choose and authorize some sort of representative to act for them, or on their behalf, is far from unusual or unheard of. Sometimes, it is even taken to be a general truth about our social condition. Thus Thomas Hobbes famously suggests (in chap. XVI of his Leviathan) that cooperation does not come naturally to us. A multitude of people, he claims, simply cannot act, unless they, as the authors of the act, authorize an actor to carry it out. Through authorization by the multitude, the actor’s act counts as – or is – the group’s, though strictly speaking, it isn’t anything the group does. Much of the recent literature on cooperation and joint action, however, tends to disagree. The general spirit is Aristotelian (or Rousseauian) rather than Hobbesian. It is widely recognized that basic forms of joint agency come quite naturally to us. There is a lot groups can do cooperatively, as a group or team, all by themselves, and without authorizing a representative to act for them, on their behalf, or in their name (I’ll be using these expressions interchangeably in the following). The paradigm in the recent literature is, of course, small-scale cooperation rather than the Hobbesian large-scale problem of the constitution of a “body politick”. It is argued in the recent literature that groups can do such things as going for walks, painting houses, or preparing complicated meals all by themselves and without any process of authorization or structure of representation. If a group of friends cooperate in the cooking of a meal, they need not authorize a chef to issue orders on their behalf. Granted that at least some of their members need to do something for them to act, it is not the case that at least one of them acts “for” the group or “on behalf of” the group – everybody is busy in the activity of cooking, and if the particular individual preparing the salad does indeed prepare the salad for the group, it is in the straightforward sense that it is the salad the group is going to eat, not in the sense that he or she prepares the salad “on behalf” or “in the name” of the group (if you’re worried that cooking is disanalogous to speaking in that the latter is secondpersonal and thus addresses an audience, just take the case of cooking for somebody).
E-mail address: [email protected]. I am grateful to the participants of the workshop on Group Speech Acts at the University of Vienna on Aug. 26–27, 2016, for their suggestions, especially to Justin Hughes, Anthonie Meijers, Michael Schmitz, and Leo Townsend. I am also grateful to two anonymous referees for Language & Communication for their sharp-minded and helpful comments. 1
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2019.07.001 0271-5309/Ó 2019 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Please cite this article as: Schmid, H.B., Groups speaking for themselves: Articulating first-person plural authority, Language & Communication, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2019.07.001
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Within this largely Aristotelian (or Rousseauian) discourse, however, a small pocket of Hobbesian resistance seems to remain. Groups, it is argued, may be “natural agents” in many domains. They can cook or walk by themselves. But when it comes to talking, things seem to be different, and very different indeed. In the small body of received literature on the topic (Hughes, 1984; Meijers, 2007), a Hobbesian spirit prevails. Polemically put, the view seems to be this: Groups can do things with their hands and feet, with paintbrushes or cooking equipment, but they can’t really do things with words. By themselves, groups can’t talk or write, or engage in some other form of linguistic communication, unless they find themselves a speaker who does it for them by speaking on their behalf or in their name through authorization.2 In this view, it is only when a group spokesperson speaks that – in a sense – a group talks. This is group speech action in a sense only because the utterances in question are analyzed as utterances of and by a speaker, and the speaker, it is assumed, is not the group itself, but an individual who is somehow authorized – or at least tacitly accepted by – the group as playing the speaker’s role. The speaker whose utterance is a group speech act does not speak for him- or herself – and neither does the group. Of course, the speaker might very well be a group member. But a group member – however well-informed and powerful he or she might be within the group, is not the group, and this is where authorization and representation come in – elements that do not seem to be necessary in other, “natural” types of joint agency. In the view of the received literature, there is thus an important discrepancy between group speech and other forms of joint action. There is, in this view, a big difference between singular and plural speech acts (i.e., the speech acts of an individual and the speech acts of a group, respectively). Individuals can either talk by themselves and speak their own minds, or alternatively, they can authorize a speaker to do it for them or in their behalf. For groups, by contrast, there seems to be no such choice. It seems that for groups, there is simply no talking to speak of without an – formally or informally – authorized representative, the speaker (or, more appropriately, the spokesperson). It is the spokesperson’s utterances that are counted as group speech acts, not any of the group’s own performances. This view has obvious issues, not the least of which is how exactly groups could ever hire or otherwise authorize a spokesperson had they not at least the degree of linguistic communicative capacity required for acts of authorization or informed consent. Granted that authorization might be given tacitly, tacit consent makes sense only on the background of the possibility of explicit dissent. Avoiding this problem by granting that groups can voice dissent in some way easily backfires because if they can voice dissent, it is not entirely obvious why groups should be so utterly unable to speak their own minds. It is not impossible to derive rather complex views from dissent to single propositions. Also, if all groups can say is “no”, there must be a blatantly stark contrast between cognitive ability and linguistic competence in groups. After all, it is assumed that groups can understand such complicated propositions such as the question whether or not to accept person S as their spokesperson in a particular domain, and person S’s utterances as their own speech acts. These are not easy propositions to process at all. Given their assumed cognitive abilities, their dependence on spokespeople to talk makes groups out to be in a rather deplorable position. They can walk the walk together, but they cannot talk the talk, as it were. Groups thus appear to something like “natural slaves”, and it is in their spokespeople that they find their masters. Is this just one of the harsh realities of social life – that our joint agential capacities, well-developed as they are in other domains, are limited when it comes to talk? Or is rather just due to an old political prejudice that groups are assumed to be unable to utter words in a meaningful way? Is this view perhaps even an ideology driven by the interests of those who are afraid of – or disinclined against – what groups generally tend to be saying, and who would rather have themselves in a position to speak for the group, or on their group’s behalf? Is the Hobbesian view nothing but a symptom of what one might call the spokespersons’ conceit? Spokespersonship notoriously comes with far-reaching ambitions, and it might not be a coincidence that in many groups – as in formal institutions –, “The Speaker” is quite a powerful figure. Those among us who say what we think are often those who “have the final say” when it comes to the question of what to do. And some think this is not even be because of their ability to give us a voice and express our group’s thoughts. Rather, some think, “The Speaker” is really the person who brings us together in the first place. “All realities come with their spokespersons”, writes one Dick Pels in his Studies in Spokespersonship (Pels, 2000, xiii). “Re-inscribing the ‘place’ of the spokesperson therefore ties all realities back to the performative act without which they would not become real” (ibid.). This paper aims at undermining the spokespersons’ conceit that Pels expresses so hyperbolically. The first section of this paper will investigate the alleged fundamental difference between singular and plural speech acts and examine the reasons for assuming that groups need a speaker to talk for them or on behalf of them. Why, it is asked, should we assume a separate agent – the speaker – as acting for or on behalf of the group? It is argued that a particularly strong case for the speaker–model of group speech acts is in the apparent fact that groups lack consciousness (self-awareness, or self-knowledge) of what it is they want to say rather than in any limitation in physical capacity. In other words, a plausible reason why one might think that groups can’t speak for themselves is that speaking involves knowing what one wants to say – consciousness of one’s illocutionary intention –, and groups are not conscious agents. In the second section, I will argue that introducing the speaker or
2 This is written with Hughes (1984) and Meijers (2007) in mind. A somewhat different picture emerges in the most recent literature on group testimony and group assertion, where Deborah Tollefsen (forthcoming) and Jennifer Lackey (2018) conceive of certain types of group speech as cooperative ventures. In Lackey’s account at least, however, the “authority based” kind of group assertion prevails over the cooperative kind; the former is “the core notion” (Lackey, 2018, 21). Kirk Ludwig (forthcoming) seems to continue the Hobbesian line rather directly in his views on corporate assertion.
Please cite this article as: Schmid, H.B., Groups speaking for themselves: Articulating first-person plural authority, Language & Communication, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2019.07.001
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spokesperson as a substitute for the missing element of group consciousness backfires, for it seems that he or she cannot provide and thus assert the right kind of knowledge of what it is we want to say either. If the way in which the speaker is aware of the group attitudes is third-personal, he or she is a mere reporter relaying facts about the group, rather than speaking for or on behalf of the group. This is insufficient because in contrast to accurate reporters, good spokespeople should be able to speak authoritatively; minimally, they should be committed to (and thus answerable for) the attitudes they relate. If, however, the group speaker relates to the attitudes in a committed and answerable way – expressing rather than denotating, or avowing rather than just reporting them – he or she relates to them as her own, thus displacing the group authority, as if it were the speaker him- or herself who “makes up” the group mind. The group speaker can neither just report the group attitudes while avowing only his or her own beliefs thereabout, nor avow the group attitudes, or so it seems. As the first-person authority that constitute avowals is a feature of consciousness, the result is that if it is true that groups cannot speak for themselves because they are not conscious of their illocutionary intentions, spokespeople cannot speak for them or on their behalf either because they, too, lack the right sort of “knowing the group illocutionary intention”. The third section opens with the promising idea of “co-avowal” that has recently been proposed. Though this concept is heavily fraught with elements of the Hobbesian tradition, it can easily be developed further into a proper concept of expressing or avowing group attitudes. The way in which the speaker knows the group’s intention is neither third-personal nor first-personal in the singular, but first-personal in the plural. The way in which this dissolves the speaker’s dilemma it that as one of us, the speaker does avow our attitude, but not in the autocratic way in which each of us makes up his or her own mind about what he or she wants to say, but in the democratic way in which we, together, settle what it is that we, collectively, want to say jointly. In that way, however, expressing our attitudes is something we can very well do jointly, rather than creating a special role for the task.
1. Who Knows what We Want to Say? If a group of people wants to cook a meal together, they do not hire, appoint, or otherwise authorize a cook to do it for them. For any such step would defeat their purpose. What they want to do is cook together, after all, not standing by, watch what their cook is doing for them or on their behalf (and just nod or protest at what they observe to be going on “in their name”). Cooking is something a group of people can very well do themselves (especially if they already know what it is they want to cook together). They might assign special roles beforehand or let the division of tasks evolve spontaneously, but the chances are good that each of them will eventually be involved in the activity of cooking. Though they will often have to assist each other, or correct each other’s mistakes in the process, and talk about what exactly it is they want to prepare together, at no point is anybody active for them, or on their behalf. The question is: Why shouldn’t we conceive of group speech acts along the very same line? Why not say that groups speak whenever they say what they, together, want to say – in a way that involves many (if not all) in one or another active role? Too many speakers garble the message, one might think. If everyone talks at the same time, nothing will be communicated, or taken up. But this is no more true than the proverbial fact that too many cooks spoil the broth – and still many groups can cook quite well, if they are not too big. In these, just as in any other cases, there are pragmatic limits to what can effectively be done jointly. Above a certain group size, some appointing, hiring, outsourcing, or some other authorizing might be necessary. But when it comes to analyzing the concept (or idea) of cooking together, we assume favorable circumstances without further ado. In all fairness, similarly favorable conditions should be assumed when it comes to analyzing group speech acts. Expecting perfection under unfavorable conditions from a group speech act seems just as unfair as expecting a six star meal from a typical case of improvised cooking together. Cooking together seldom runs as smooth and hyper-efficient as a professional kitchen with an appointed chef and well-trained hands. Similarly, typical group speech acts may not be of the sort of ready-to-print statements one receives from trained spokespeople from institutional bodies or corporations. When we, together, jointly say something, we say what we (collectively rather than distributively) want to say in the same way in which we cook together when this is what we want. But this is not really the view in the literature. Rather, the view in the literature focuses on the role of a particular person, the speaker. A version of the view that groups really need a speaker to talk can be found in the seminal paper on the topic – Justin Hughes’ “Group Speech Acts” from 1984. Hughes characterizes the conditions of a group speech act for a group G, speaker S and utterance X as follows: (1) There exists a group (G), this group has an illocutionary intention, and X conveys that illocutionary intention. (2) S (believes that he/she) knows the illocutionary intention of G and that X conveys that illocutionary intention. (3) G does not object to S uttering X on its behalf and if G intends for any specific individual(s) to utter X, it intends for S to utter X. S (believes that he/she) knows this. (4) #2 and #3 are (the) reasons S utters X. (Hughes, 1984, 388). The speaker features in no less than three out of Hughes’ four conditions. Condition 1 stands out in that it is concerned solely with the group. It requires, as Hughes puts it, a group having an illocutionary intention. This is remarkable enough and sounds very much like the collective (or plural) analogue of the first condition of individual (or singular) speech acts. Please cite this article as: Schmid, H.B., Groups speaking for themselves: Articulating first-person plural authority, Language & Communication, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2019.07.001
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In order for you to say something, there has to be something you want (and indeed intend) to say, and an utterance that means what you want to say. This is what Hughes’ condition 1 postulates for the plural, too. If there are group speech acts, it is true that groups, just as individuals, can want to say something. But in the case of singular speech acts, the analysis is already almost done here. All that is missing in addition to a singular illocutionary intention and an expression that means what the individual wants to say is the individual’s actually saying it, and saying it because she wants to say it. For individuals to speak, is not necessary that they have to find somebody to do it for them (though quite often, they can if they so wish). According to Hughes, the story is different (and more complicated) in the group case. Sadly for the groups, they simply can’t utter what they want to say. There is need for this ominous further party here, “the Speaker (S)”. One might ask: Why? Is the reason why groups simply can’t speak that they have no mouth (and that they can’t write, because they have no fingers)? But typically, there is no lack of mouths and fingers in groups. They do not just have one and ten, respectively, but many more. Or is it rather that groups have too many mouths and too many fingers, and that whenever they try to use their many mouths and fingers to speak, they fail to say clearly what they want to say, resulting in a garble of signs rather than recognizable speech? But the same point could be made with regards to feet and hands: if groups have too many and too uncoordinated mouths to speak, one would expect that they have too many and too uncoordinated feet to walk and hands to cook. But walking and cooking are agential capacities easily ascribed to groups. And more complicated things, too: Groups can do more than go for walks together, operate simple pumping mechanisms, stir sauces, and push broken down cars (as the classical examples in the recent literature have them doing). They can build houses and win football world championships. And all of that without needing a housebuilder or a football world championship winner to do it for them, or in their name; they just do it themselves. A further consideration that takes away some of the initial plausibility of the claim that a distinction between the group and the speaker has to be made is that some of things groups obviously can do involve rather intricate linguistic practices. Some groups can do such amazing things as performing a Shakespeare play – something that is very hard if not outright impossible to do for an individual. How plausible is it to assume that an agent who can perform such an astonishing feat of linguistic competence as performing a Shakespeare play should be utterly unable to say what it wants to say? Is the Shakespeare Company not saying what it wants to say when it performs Hamlet? Or is it that there are only the Shakespeare Company’s speakers on the stage doing the talking, not the Shakespeare Company itself performing the play? Is it that the group is performing, but leaving the talking to the individual actors in doing so? Clearly, no such view can be Hughes’ opinion. Groups can achieve linguistic coordination with their mouths just as they can with their hands and with their feet. Thus they can very well engage in linguistic performances. The issue is a different one; the issue is not with the talking as such, because this works rather well in joint performances, but rather with a form of talking about themselves, as it were: It is with saying what they themselves believe or want, or, put differently, with the expression of group attitudes. The Shakespeare Company can easily recite an entire play, but just saying what it believes to be its best piece so far or what it intends to play next is a wholly different issue, and very different indeed. One can, of course, ask what individual members think. But for the Company to speak on such issues as a group, more is needed, or so one might believe. Because whatever a simple individual member reports, this can be taken only as an expression of an individual belief about the Company’s intention, not as an authoritative expression thereof (or so this view has it). And this obviously matters when it comes to the question of whose speech act it is that counts as a group speech act. It matters in a way that, at first glance at least, seems to have no equivalent when it comes to the question of whether a person is cooking all for- and by herself, or as a part of a team cooking effort. 2. The Hobbesian Spokesperson’s Dilemma Another way of putting the argument for the Hobbesian view (against which we will argue directly in section three) is this: While groups seem to be able to do such things as cooking all by themselves, because all they have to do to achieve this is putting together the necessary dishes and courses, performing a speech act cannot be done in such piecemeal cooperative fashion, because speech, unlike cooking, has to issue from a unified place of authority; and since this authority does not come naturally in groups – at least not in the way first-person authority seems to accrue quite naturally to individual linguistic practitioners –, it has to be artificially created in the case of groups, and the way groups can do this is via authorization of the speaker to speak for them or on their behalf (within a certain domain). Put simply: groups need to authorize a speaker because in contrast to individuals, they simply lack first-person authority. Though as far as I can see, this has not been spelled out quite in these terms in the received literature, there are clear traces of this view, and it nicely explains the Hobbesian model of thinking about group speech acts. Though Meijers disagrees with Hughes in many respects, there seems to be a (tacit) agreement between the two here. Hughes introduces the speaker’s role innocently enough in his condition 2, and the further conditions leave ample room for a wide variety of forms in which group speech acts can be realized. According to condition 2, the group speaker simply utters the words that convey the meaning of a group speech act. The further conditions make clear that saying what the group wants to say merely by incident is not enough; the speaker has to be in the know about the group illocutionary intention, and he or she has to do so because the group will not object to his or her speaking “on the group’s behalf”, and because if the group wants a particular person to say the words, that person is him- or herself. This may not sound like the speaker’s uttering of words comes with any special authority invested into the speaker by the group. Hughes allows for the possibility that the group intends for S speak, but it is enough that there is something the group Please cite this article as: Schmid, H.B., Groups speaking for themselves: Articulating first-person plural authority, Language & Communication, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2019.07.001
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wants to say, and does not have anyone else in mind to say it for the speaker to utter the words that constitute a group speech act. And yet, the question of authority clearly matters, and it is implied in the idea of speaking “on the group’s behalf” mentioned by Hughes. For if what the speaker were doing was simply giving an accurate report of what the group believes, wants, or intends, he or she would be doing were simply talking about the group rather than speaking for the group. Talking about somebody else – saying what it is that somebody else thinks, wants, and intends – is different from speaking for (or on behalf of) somebody else in at least one decisive respect. When the speaker speaks for or on behalf of the agent whose speaker he or she is, he or she does not simply denotate, report, or otherwise refer to the attitude of the agent about whose attitude he or she is talking; rather, it seems that he or she – to some degree at least – expresses or avows that attitude. Let us take a closer look at the difference between speaking about somebody else and speaking on his or her behalf. Obviously, speaking for or on behalf of somebody comes with a different kind of authority – the speaker speaks with (some of) the author’s authority, rather than just with his or her own, as in the case of a report. The speaker’s authority is not simply the reliability of a trustworthy reporter. The reason why he or she is to be believed is not that he or she has particularly good evidence to know the author’s attitudes. Rather, by speaking for – or on behalf of, or in the name of – the author, he or she does for the author what the author would be doing were he or she speaking for herself through avowal. In the way they work in communication, avowals differ from mere reports in several respects, three of which deserve to be mentioned here. First, avowals are not open to questions concerning the speaker’s reliability concerning the identification of the subject of the attitude. “It’s raining” usually avows the speaker’s belief that it is raining in a way that is not open to challenging the speaker’s knowledge that the belief is really his or hers, and that the thought that this is what he or she believes does not misidentify the subject. The belief is assumed to be self-known by the author, and self-knowledge selfidentifies the subject. It is sometimes claimed that self-knowledge is immune to error not just in matters of identification, but in matters of predication, too. Though this seems exaggerated, it remains true that under normal circumstances, the sort of knowledge of what we think and want that we avow in speech is not of the observational or inferential kind. We usually do not need to check (or infer from) evidence to know what it is we believe or want. Consciousness comes with “groundless” knowledge – we know it “just like that”; self-knowledge is, as I propose it, usually self-validating rather than being validated by evidence and through inference. This does not preclude the possibility of error, but the point is that it requires unusual circumstances that it makes sense to ask a speaker “how do you know you believe what you’re saying?” Knowledge of this self-validating kind thus constitutes special speaker’s authority. As Davidson famously puts the point: “When a speaker avers that he has a belief, hope, desire or intention, there is a presumption that he is not mistaken, a presumption that does not attach to his ascriptions of similar mental states to others.” (Davidson, 2001 [1984], 3) Avowal theories of self-knowledge (cf. Goldberg/Pessin, 1997, 221ff.) often argue that this self-validating feature of avowals has to do with the fact that avowing an attitude is not simply a special way of cognitive registering, but rather some sort of making – avowal expresses a making up of one’s mind, and first-person authority thus comes with the maker’s privilege. Third and even more importantly for our discussion, self-knowledge self-commits. Reporting somebody else’s intention does not commit the reporter (but, if accurate, report a commitment of the person whose intention is being reported), avowals do. Whenever I express an intention, there is no question of whether or not I am motivated to act on it, and when I express a belief, there is no question of whether or not I think it is true (this is the point of Moore’s Paradox). Whoever avows an intention thereby expresses a commitment of hers and precludes challenges of the sort: “you say that this is your intention, but why would you carry it out?” Given these features of first-person authority – self-identification, self-validation, and self-commitment – it might seem that no group speaker can possibly aspire to speak with this sort of authority on our behalf. It is of the nature of first-person authority that one has it only in speaking for oneself, and whatever authorization there might be involved in appointing a group speaker cannot result in his or her avowing our attitudes, because whatever he or she avows is his or her own attitude. If this is what we authorize him or her to do, he or she is avowing his or her own attitudes as ours, and what we think or want is quite literally up to him or her. Rather than hiring somebody to do the job of uttering our attitudes, we have found ourselves a dictator with unlimited powers – he or she is in the position to make up “our” mind, and to commit us in whatever way she makes “our” attitude up to be. Thus it seems that avowing is not what we can authorize our speaker to do. It cannot, it seems, be done “on behalf of” anyone else. Yet at the same time, authorizing a group speaker cannot be merely about finding a reliable reporter. It is not enough for our speaker to be authorized to talk about our group’s attitudes. This comes to the fore if we focus on the role of the speaker in communication with outgroup listeners. Consider the case in which the supposed speaker for an author – an individual or a group – were to understands his or her role as one of a reporter of the author’s attitudes. In playing his or her role in this way, the speaker would be expressing or avowing his or her own attitudes, rather than ours. A “speaker” who really speaks just as a reporter relates third-personally to the attitudes which he or she reports. A speaker’s saying that “group x wants to y” would then be expressing or avowing nothing more than his or her own belief that this is really what the group intends. This might be o.k. for an expert on group attitudes, but not for a speaker speaking on behalf of us. From the perspective of the listeners, this reporting way of playing his or her role will undermine the sort of authority required of a proper speaker. Proper spokespeople speak with the authority invested in them through authorization, and this authority is
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not simply a permission or charge to report the message. For some spokespeople, it might sometimes be tempting to disguise as mere reporters when the attitudes they report turn out to be contentious with the audience. That way, spokespeople become immune to questions concerning the commitments that inhere in the reported attitudes. A “spokesperson” who withdraws to such a position need not defend the truth of the beliefs or the goodness of the intentions he or she reports. “This is merely what they believe and intend, I’m not saying it is true or good”. Acting merely as a reporter limits the way in which the speaker is committed – and thus to be held responsible – for what he or she says; for the listeners, he or she might still be a good source of evidence for the author’s views, but he is by no means speaking for the author, or in the author’s name. A proper spokesperson needs to relate differently to what he or she is reporting. In order to be good at what he or she does, he or she needs to impersonate the author, as it were, and cannot simply relate third-personally to the author’s attitudes. He or she cannot open him- or herself up to questions concerning the accuracy of his or her reports, if he or she is to be successful in his or her role – for all means and purposes, he or she is the author speaking. He or she has to give his or her report of the author’s beliefs, desires, and intentions, with the sort of commitments to their truth and goodness that any speaker has in relation to his or her own. After all, for the spokesperson to be counting as uttering what is a group speech act there is a sense in which his or her utterance is what the group says. The spokesperson’s report cannot come from the spokesperson’s own first-personal authority; whatever authorization is has to entail, the spokesperson’s speaking with the author’s authority, and in this case, it is ours. However, this is obviously just another blunder. For it seems straightforward and a priori that one can speak with firstpersonal authority only for oneself, and ex hypothesi, the spokesperson is not the author. The spokesperson’s report can misidentify the author (perhaps he or she has taken on several spokesperson positions and occasionally mixes up his or her authors), his or her reports are not of the self-validating sort (we should not trust him or her if we know him or her to be lazy in reading up on his or her author’s orders), and if he or she is such a sloppy spokesperson, her apparent speaking on our behalf does not, as the listeners will know, commit us. Whatever it is the spokesperson does is not self-identifying, selfvalidating and self-committing with regards to us. The spokesperson’s dilemma is thus a choice between two ways of failing at his or her job: It is between mere reporting, that is, speaking with his or her own authority only and thus acting as a mere reporter, on the one hand, and overdoing his or her role by assuming the author’s own authority – the Robespierre version of a group speech act, as it were. Some aspects of this issue have been touched upon in the literature, and the way it is approached by Meijers is that the speaker’s task is precisely to act as a sort of substitute for the sort of self-validating, non-observational and non-inferential knowledge – or, in short, consciousness – that individuals have of their own attitude, and that has no equivalent in the plural case, as Meijers argues: “Individuals usually don’t have to make an extra effort to know their illocutionary intentions when performing a speech act. They just know it. Groups, on the other hand, do not have the type of epistemic access that individuals have. In order to know what a group’s intention is, a conscious effort needs to be made by the speaker who acts on behalf of the group. Usually he or she needs to consult other members and there has to be some procedure to decide on the group’s intention.” (Meijers, 2007, 102). In other words, group speakers, in this conception, substitute for the group’s lack of consciousness, or self-knowledge. We will return to this basic point shortly, but let us first focus on the practical consequences for the role of the group speaker suggested by Meijers. The first of Meijers’ two suggestions in the last sentence seems puzzling. If the problem is that there really is something a group wants to say, but that the group somehow does not know it, and if the way to know it is to ask group members – why, then, do we need an extra speaker? After all, the group members seem to know, or else it would not help to ask them, because if they don’t know either, asking them leads nowhere. Also, this suggestion puts the speaker in the role of a mere reporter, the first horn of our above dilemma. Meijers’ second suggestion might seem more plausible, but as we shall see, it leads straight up the second horn of the dilemma. The view implied here is that the group consists of individual members who want the group to have a certain illocutionary intention and then to say something, and that the task of the speaker really is more than just to say what the group wants to say, but rather to determine who wants the group to say what, and see to it that according to some acceptable aggregation procedure – e.g., the majority rule – which view of what the group should be saying should be the group’s. Besides pointing into the direction of the second horn of the dilemma (the determination of the group attitude seems to be up to the speaker who acts under the sole restriction that the group will go along), this understanding of the role of the group speaker backfires on Hughes’ condition 1. If the speaker’s task is to “determine” the group’s illocutionary intention in that way, the talk of a group having an illocutionary intention even before that procedure seems a bit misleading, to say the least. What we would be talking about here under the label “group illocutionary intention” would clearly not in any way be the group equivalent to an individual having an illocutionary intention. Rather, it would be the group equivalent to an individual having different ideas about what it might want to say, without really having made up his or her mind yet, and thus without having an illocutionary intention. The way in which this leads up the second horn of the dilemma is that thinking along this second line puts the speaker in a position that competes with the position assigned to the group in condition 1: if it is the speaker who determines what the group’s illocutionary intention is, and if a plethora of individual members’ views of what the group should be saying is all there is to the group’s intentional states before the speaker comes into the picture, it is hard to see why one should talk of the Please cite this article as: Schmid, H.B., Groups speaking for themselves: Articulating first-person plural authority, Language & Communication, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2019.07.001
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group as “having” an illocutionary intention. Again, following this line makes the speaker a somewhat worrisome figure, reminding of political figures in the past who thought they knew what the people really wanted (without them knowing). Recall that there is a similar “determination problem” about Rousseau’s idea of a general will. Allegedly, everybody has it, or rather, all of us together have it, but there clearly is a problem of knowing what exactly it is that is generally wanted in this way – and this is an obvious job opportunity for the likes of the “comité de salut public” and its spokesperson Robespierre. All he’s supposedly doing is just “determining” the general will, and passing on its orders. In his own view, he is merely engaged in an epistemic task – his executive powers are simply to be the stout and unwavering voice of the general will. Now such dictatorial powers of “determining” the general will are clearly not what Hughes means; explicitly, Hughes invokes “consensus mechanisms” (Hughes, 1984, 384). Against this conception, Meijers (2007, 102f.) has raised the worry that Hughes’ whole analysis might be unfit for non-democratic groups. And well-taken as Meijers’ point seems to be, surely there has to be some criterion to distinguish between not fully democratic but genuine group speech acts and a bunch of people just accepting as “their” statement anything one of them pleases to say. Thus the puzzle remains: if the speaker can ask the members what their illocutionary intentions are, it seems that he or she is redundant, as the members could speak for themselves; if there is more to the speakers’ “determining” the group’s intention, there is an issue whether or not it is really “for the group” that he or she speaks, as the attitudes which the speaker reports are whatever he or she wishes them to be. The basic question is this: Is there any middle ground – a way of speaking for a group that is neither just a mere report nor a symptom of autocratic ambitions? 3. How We Know What We Want to Say – and How We Say it In his recent work, Philip Pettit (2018, 128) proposes a concept of avowing an attitude that hinges on the idea of the individual speaker being a member of the group whose shared attitude he or she expresses, and it consists in what Pettit proposes to call “co-avowal”. Co-avowing a group attitude does not, he claims, presuppose advance authorization through appointment of a spokesperson: “Advance authorization [.] may obviously be appropriate in special circumstances where I speak for all of us in a more or less formal capacity. But the authority on the basis of which I can co-avow certain attitudes in common with you and others need not have its origin in any such ex ante arrangement, however tacit. I may presume on being authorized and claim authorization in the absence of ex post protest at my avowal of a purportedly shared attitude. On this picture I will signal that I am speaking for what each of us in a certain group thinks or feels, whatever form that signal takes, and I will presume on having the authority of a spokesperson insofar as no one objects to what I say in that role. I do not speak in this case with your advance license, your ex ante authorization. Rather I speak on the presumption that no one will reject my authority and that if no one rejects it, then the absence of rejection will have the same effect as ex ante authorization. You and others do not say ‘Yea’ in advance to my playing the role of spokesperson but neither do you say ‘Nay’ in the wake of my assuming the role. And that amounts to the same thing. It means that you authorize me in a virtual rather than an actual manner: you authorize me, not by what you said, but by what you might saliently have said and chose not to say.” (Pettit, 2018, 128). Though the idea of co-avowing does not entail advance authorization, it is obviously a modification of the classical Hobbesian idea thereof. But for our purpose of solving the spokesperson’s paradox, this hardly seems promising. After all, what we need to understand is how a spokesperson can avow – and that is, speak with first-person authority – in a way in which that first person is not just him- or herself. But perhaps we can turn Pettit’s concept of co-avowing around and understand the authorized spokesperson’s speech as a special form of a co-avowal rather than interpreting co-avowing as a special, “virtual” form of Hobbesian authorization. Detaching the idea of co-avowing against the Hobbesian roots from which it stems in Pettit’s account can start with re-examining the self-knowledge that constitute first-person authority. Self-knowledge, we claimed above, involves self-identification, self-validation, and self-commitment. The first-person authority that distinguishes avowals from mere reports comes from the unique way in which the speaker “knows” the attitudes he or she expresses. Hughes explicitly introduces the group speaker as someone who “knows” the group’s illocutionary intention. And yet, it seems that whatever the authorization of a speaker by a group might mean cannot constitute the kind of knowledge required for avowals, and Meijers argues that the group itself cannot know its illocutionary intention in that way. Interestingly, however, Hughes’ own conception of a group illocutionary intention as developed in his 1984 paper does not seem to allow for the wide epistemic gap between the having of a group intention, on the one hand, and the knowing of it, on the other hand, that Meijers assumes. Here is what Hughes – tentatively, one must admit – says on what he means by a group having an illocutionary intention: “For the group to have an illocutionary intention, i.e. to intend to convey a particular meaning, it would seem that the members of the group or a majority of the members of the group must want to convey this particular meaning. It may also be necessary that the members or a majority of the members be aware that the members (or a majority of members) want to convey this particular meaning. It is not enough that the members (or a majority of members) want to convey a meaning as individuals and that each individual’s meaning concurs with those of other members, e.g. it is not enough that each of the members of the jury want to state that he/she believes the defendant is guilty. The members must individually want to convey something as a group. There must be a sense of ‘we’ness [.].” (Hughes, 1984, 381f.). It is thus not the case that there is an “unconscious” illocutionary intention in the group which only a Robespierrian speaker can “know”; rather, for us to perform a speech act, it has to be the case that we know what we want to say. In order to be able to avow group illocutionary intentions, the speaker has to have first-personal knowledge thereof; however, we argued Please cite this article as: Schmid, H.B., Groups speaking for themselves: Articulating first-person plural authority, Language & Communication, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2019.07.001
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that whatever first-personal knowledge he or she has of intention, it can be only of his or her own, not of ours. However, thinking along the lines sketched by Hughes, it seems that there can be first-personal knowledge of group illocutionary intention in which the speaker can share; he or she can know what it is we want to say in the way we know it – not firstpersonal knowledge in the singular, but first-personal knowledge in the plural. In other papers (Schmid, 2014, 2016, 2018), I argue in some detail that the way in which we know what it is we intend collectively is indeed first-personal, and though this first person plural self-knowledge differs in many ways from its equivalent in the singular, it is self-knowledge nevertheless because it has the plural version of the three features of selfknowledge we identified: self-identification, self-validation and self-commitment. A brief remark on how this can be spelled out concerning self-validation is in order. Recall Meijers’ claim that whereas an individual usually knows what it is he or she intends “just like that”, knowing what a group wants to say is a complex cognitive achievement that involves taking into account evidence and inferring; knowing what it is we intend does not come, it seems, “just like that”, but involves observing others and inferring from what one remembers them to have said, and some such. Now the first thing to say is that even in the individual case, observation and inference is not entirely irrelevant to the way in which intention is “known” to the intentional agent; consciousness of intentional activity requires that what one observes and what one infers is “in tune” with what one takes oneself to be doing. And conversely, knowing what it is we intend has its own form of “immediate” availability; if you take yourself to be immersed in a conversation with another person – i.e., if you take yourself to be engaged in a collectively intentional action – you do not constantly observe and infer and conclude from there that this is what the two of you jointly intend; there is a “sense of us” that, even though it may fail under some circumstances, is immediate. E.g., we “just know” that we’re talking when we are engaged in conversation. If plural self-knowledge is the way in which we can know what it is we want to say, there are obviously many ways of saying it. You can start, and I can correct you where I disagree, a third party can join in until we finally think we have said what we wanted to say. This is the improvised form of a group speech act, a form that may not be the best suited for all occasions, but very much parallels the way in which we might spontaneously be preparing a meal together: us acting jointly on a collective illocutionary intention that we avow plurally through our plural pre-reflective self-knowledge on what it is we want to say. The way in which this reflects back on the Hobbesian conception of group speech acts is this. Authorization of a group speaker cannot substitute for our plural pre-reflective self-knowledge of what it is we want to say; rather, it is only in virtue of our plural self-knowledge of what it is what we want to say that we can authorize a speaker to act for us, on our behalf or in our name. As far as the group speech act is concerned, he or she acts as “one of us”, a participant who shares in the way in which our collective illocutionary intention is self-known; his or her words then come with first-person plural authority, reinforced by his or her special mandate, since he or she is not just one of us, but the one charged with speaking for us in some domain. It is in this way of expressing a group attitude that he or she is not caught in the dilemma of two ways of failing at his or her job. He or she is neither “just a reporter”, nor does he or she subject the group to his or her first-person singular authority. He or she is speaking authoritatively, but the relevant authority is of the plural kind. He or she is indeed expressing – avowing – a group attitude, and it is through his or her sharing in our first-person plural self-knowledge of what it is what we want to say that his or her uttering of words is our group speech act – an act that we could well perform jointly, though this may occasionally be inconvenient. References Davidson, D., 2001 [1984]. First person authority. In: Donald Davidson, Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective. Clarendon Press, Oxford, pp. 3–14. Goldberg, S., Pessin, A., 1997. Gray Matters. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind. Armonk NY, ME Sharpe. Hughes, J., 1984. Group speech acts. Linguist. Philos. 7 (4), 379–395. Lackey, J., 2018. Group Assertion. Erkenntnis 83, 21–42. Ludwig Kirk, Proxy assertion, In S. Goldberg (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Assertion, (forthcoming), Oxford University Press, Oxford. Meijers, A., 2007. Collective speech acts. In: Tsohatzidis, S. (Ed.), Intentional Acts and Institutional Facts. Essays on John Searle’s Social Ontology. Springer, Dordrecht, pp. 93–112. Pels, D., 2000. The Intellectual as Stranger. Studies in Spokespersonship. Routledge, London. Pettit, P., 2018. The Birth of Ethics. Reconstructing the Role and Nature of Morality. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Schmid, H.B., 2014. Expressing group Attitudes: on first person plural authority. Erkenntnis 79 (Suppl. l), 1685–1701, 9. Schmid, H.B., 2016. “On knowing what we’re doing together: groundless group self-knowledge and plural self-blindness.” In: Brady, M.S., Fricker, M. (Eds.), The Epistemic Life of Groups. Essays in the Epistemology of Collectives. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 51–73. Schmid, H.B., 2018. The subject of ‘we intend’. Phenomenol. Cognitive Sci. 17/2, 231–243. Tollefsen, Deborah, 2019. can groups assert that P? In: Goldberg, S. (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Assertion. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Please cite this article as: Schmid, H.B., Groups speaking for themselves: Articulating first-person plural authority, Language & Communication, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2019.07.001
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Groups speaking for themselves: Articulating first-person plural authority Hans Bernhard Schmid University of Vienna, Universitätsstraße 7, A-1010 Vienna, Austria
a r t i c l e i n f o
a b s t r a c t
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This paper examines the ways in which group speech acts involve speakers. Against the view that groups need spokespeople speak for (or on behalf of, or in the name of) them, I argue that groups can speak for themselves. Group speech acts are a special type of joint intentional action. Groups speak when they express their illocutionary intention. Group illocutionary intentions are collective intentions of their members, and they are collective in virtue of the members’ plural pre-reflective self-knowledge of what it is they – together – want to say. It is only in virtue of the groups’ ability to speak for themselves that they can authorize individual spokespeople to speak for them.1 Ó 2019 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Keywords: Group speech acts Joint action Collective intentionality Plural self-awareness
The view that in order to be effective in what they want to achieve, groups sometimes need to choose and authorize some sort of representative to act for them, or on their behalf, is far from unusual or unheard of. Sometimes, it is even taken to be a general truth about our social condition. Thus Thomas Hobbes famously suggests (in chap. XVI of his Leviathan) that cooperation does not come naturally to us. A multitude of people, he claims, simply cannot act, unless they, as the authors of the act, authorize an actor to carry it out. Through authorization by the multitude, the actor’s act counts as – or is – the group’s, though strictly speaking, it isn’t anything the group does. Much of the recent literature on cooperation and joint action, however, tends to disagree. The general spirit is Aristotelian (or Rousseauian) rather than Hobbesian. It is widely recognized that basic forms of joint agency come quite naturally to us. There is a lot groups can do cooperatively, as a group or team, all by themselves, and without authorizing a representative to act for them, on their behalf, or in their name (I’ll be using these expressions interchangeably in the following). The paradigm in the recent literature is, of course, small-scale cooperation rather than the Hobbesian large-scale problem of the constitution of a “body politick”. It is argued in the recent literature that groups can do such things as going for walks, painting houses, or preparing complicated meals all by themselves and without any process of authorization or structure of representation. If a group of friends cooperate in the cooking of a meal, they need not authorize a chef to issue orders on their behalf. Granted that at least some of their members need to do something for them to act, it is not the case that at least one of them acts “for” the group or “on behalf of” the group – everybody is busy in the activity of cooking, and if the particular individual preparing the salad does indeed prepare the salad for the group, it is in the straightforward sense that it is the salad the group is going to eat, not in the sense that he or she prepares the salad “on behalf” or “in the name” of the group (if you’re worried that cooking is disanalogous to speaking in that the latter is secondpersonal and thus addresses an audience, just take the case of cooking for somebody).
E-mail address: [email protected]. I am grateful to the participants of the workshop on Group Speech Acts at the University of Vienna on Aug. 26–27, 2016, for their suggestions, especially to Justin Hughes, Anthonie Meijers, Michael Schmitz, and Leo Townsend. I am also grateful to two anonymous referees for Language & Communication for their sharp-minded and helpful comments. 1
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Within this largely Aristotelian (or Rousseauian) discourse, however, a small pocket of Hobbesian resistance seems to remain. Groups, it is argued, may be “natural agents” in many domains. They can cook or walk by themselves. But when it comes to talking, things seem to be different, and very different indeed. In the small body of received literature on the topic (Hughes, 1984; Meijers, 2007), a Hobbesian spirit prevails. Polemically put, the view seems to be this: Groups can do things with their hands and feet, with paintbrushes or cooking equipment, but they can’t really do things with words. By themselves, groups can’t talk or write, or engage in some other form of linguistic communication, unless they find themselves a speaker who does it for them by speaking on their behalf or in their name through authorization.2 In this view, it is only when a group spokesperson speaks that – in a sense – a group talks. This is group speech action in a sense only because the utterances in question are analyzed as utterances of and by a speaker, and the speaker, it is assumed, is not the group itself, but an individual who is somehow authorized – or at least tacitly accepted by – the group as playing the speaker’s role. The speaker whose utterance is a group speech act does not speak for him- or herself – and neither does the group. Of course, the speaker might very well be a group member. But a group member – however well-informed and powerful he or she might be within the group, is not the group, and this is where authorization and representation come in – elements that do not seem to be necessary in other, “natural” types of joint agency. In the view of the received literature, there is thus an important discrepancy between group speech and other forms of joint action. There is, in this view, a big difference between singular and plural speech acts (i.e., the speech acts of an individual and the speech acts of a group, respectively). Individuals can either talk by themselves and speak their own minds, or alternatively, they can authorize a speaker to do it for them or in their behalf. For groups, by contrast, there seems to be no such choice. It seems that for groups, there is simply no talking to speak of without an – formally or informally – authorized representative, the speaker (or, more appropriately, the spokesperson). It is the spokesperson’s utterances that are counted as group speech acts, not any of the group’s own performances. This view has obvious issues, not the least of which is how exactly groups could ever hire or otherwise authorize a spokesperson had they not at least the degree of linguistic communicative capacity required for acts of authorization or informed consent. Granted that authorization might be given tacitly, tacit consent makes sense only on the background of the possibility of explicit dissent. Avoiding this problem by granting that groups can voice dissent in some way easily backfires because if they can voice dissent, it is not entirely obvious why groups should be so utterly unable to speak their own minds. It is not impossible to derive rather complex views from dissent to single propositions. Also, if all groups can say is “no”, there must be a blatantly stark contrast between cognitive ability and linguistic competence in groups. After all, it is assumed that groups can understand such complicated propositions such as the question whether or not to accept person S as their spokesperson in a particular domain, and person S’s utterances as their own speech acts. These are not easy propositions to process at all. Given their assumed cognitive abilities, their dependence on spokespeople to talk makes groups out to be in a rather deplorable position. They can walk the walk together, but they cannot talk the talk, as it were. Groups thus appear to something like “natural slaves”, and it is in their spokespeople that they find their masters. Is this just one of the harsh realities of social life – that our joint agential capacities, well-developed as they are in other domains, are limited when it comes to talk? Or is rather just due to an old political prejudice that groups are assumed to be unable to utter words in a meaningful way? Is this view perhaps even an ideology driven by the interests of those who are afraid of – or disinclined against – what groups generally tend to be saying, and who would rather have themselves in a position to speak for the group, or on their group’s behalf? Is the Hobbesian view nothing but a symptom of what one might call the spokespersons’ conceit? Spokespersonship notoriously comes with far-reaching ambitions, and it might not be a coincidence that in many groups – as in formal institutions –, “The Speaker” is quite a powerful figure. Those among us who say what we think are often those who “have the final say” when it comes to the question of what to do. And some think this is not even be because of their ability to give us a voice and express our group’s thoughts. Rather, some think, “The Speaker” is really the person who brings us together in the first place. “All realities come with their spokespersons”, writes one Dick Pels in his Studies in Spokespersonship (Pels, 2000, xiii). “Re-inscribing the ‘place’ of the spokesperson therefore ties all realities back to the performative act without which they would not become real” (ibid.). This paper aims at undermining the spokespersons’ conceit that Pels expresses so hyperbolically. The first section of this paper will investigate the alleged fundamental difference between singular and plural speech acts and examine the reasons for assuming that groups need a speaker to talk for them or on behalf of them. Why, it is asked, should we assume a separate agent – the speaker – as acting for or on behalf of the group? It is argued that a particularly strong case for the speaker–model of group speech acts is in the apparent fact that groups lack consciousness (self-awareness, or self-knowledge) of what it is they want to say rather than in any limitation in physical capacity. In other words, a plausible reason why one might think that groups can’t speak for themselves is that speaking involves knowing what one wants to say – consciousness of one’s illocutionary intention –, and groups are not conscious agents. In the second section, I will argue that introducing the speaker or
2 This is written with Hughes (1984) and Meijers (2007) in mind. A somewhat different picture emerges in the most recent literature on group testimony and group assertion, where Deborah Tollefsen (forthcoming) and Jennifer Lackey (2018) conceive of certain types of group speech as cooperative ventures. In Lackey’s account at least, however, the “authority based” kind of group assertion prevails over the cooperative kind; the former is “the core notion” (Lackey, 2018, 21). Kirk Ludwig (forthcoming) seems to continue the Hobbesian line rather directly in his views on corporate assertion.
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spokesperson as a substitute for the missing element of group consciousness backfires, for it seems that he or she cannot provide and thus assert the right kind of knowledge of what it is we want to say either. If the way in which the speaker is aware of the group attitudes is third-personal, he or she is a mere reporter relaying facts about the group, rather than speaking for or on behalf of the group. This is insufficient because in contrast to accurate reporters, good spokespeople should be able to speak authoritatively; minimally, they should be committed to (and thus answerable for) the attitudes they relate. If, however, the group speaker relates to the attitudes in a committed and answerable way – expressing rather than denotating, or avowing rather than just reporting them – he or she relates to them as her own, thus displacing the group authority, as if it were the speaker him- or herself who “makes up” the group mind. The group speaker can neither just report the group attitudes while avowing only his or her own beliefs thereabout, nor avow the group attitudes, or so it seems. As the first-person authority that constitute avowals is a feature of consciousness, the result is that if it is true that groups cannot speak for themselves because they are not conscious of their illocutionary intentions, spokespeople cannot speak for them or on their behalf either because they, too, lack the right sort of “knowing the group illocutionary intention”. The third section opens with the promising idea of “co-avowal” that has recently been proposed. Though this concept is heavily fraught with elements of the Hobbesian tradition, it can easily be developed further into a proper concept of expressing or avowing group attitudes. The way in which the speaker knows the group’s intention is neither third-personal nor first-personal in the singular, but first-personal in the plural. The way in which this dissolves the speaker’s dilemma it that as one of us, the speaker does avow our attitude, but not in the autocratic way in which each of us makes up his or her own mind about what he or she wants to say, but in the democratic way in which we, together, settle what it is that we, collectively, want to say jointly. In that way, however, expressing our attitudes is something we can very well do jointly, rather than creating a special role for the task.
1. Who Knows what We Want to Say? If a group of people wants to cook a meal together, they do not hire, appoint, or otherwise authorize a cook to do it for them. For any such step would defeat their purpose. What they want to do is cook together, after all, not standing by, watch what their cook is doing for them or on their behalf (and just nod or protest at what they observe to be going on “in their name”). Cooking is something a group of people can very well do themselves (especially if they already know what it is they want to cook together). They might assign special roles beforehand or let the division of tasks evolve spontaneously, but the chances are good that each of them will eventually be involved in the activity of cooking. Though they will often have to assist each other, or correct each other’s mistakes in the process, and talk about what exactly it is they want to prepare together, at no point is anybody active for them, or on their behalf. The question is: Why shouldn’t we conceive of group speech acts along the very same line? Why not say that groups speak whenever they say what they, together, want to say – in a way that involves many (if not all) in one or another active role? Too many speakers garble the message, one might think. If everyone talks at the same time, nothing will be communicated, or taken up. But this is no more true than the proverbial fact that too many cooks spoil the broth – and still many groups can cook quite well, if they are not too big. In these, just as in any other cases, there are pragmatic limits to what can effectively be done jointly. Above a certain group size, some appointing, hiring, outsourcing, or some other authorizing might be necessary. But when it comes to analyzing the concept (or idea) of cooking together, we assume favorable circumstances without further ado. In all fairness, similarly favorable conditions should be assumed when it comes to analyzing group speech acts. Expecting perfection under unfavorable conditions from a group speech act seems just as unfair as expecting a six star meal from a typical case of improvised cooking together. Cooking together seldom runs as smooth and hyper-efficient as a professional kitchen with an appointed chef and well-trained hands. Similarly, typical group speech acts may not be of the sort of ready-to-print statements one receives from trained spokespeople from institutional bodies or corporations. When we, together, jointly say something, we say what we (collectively rather than distributively) want to say in the same way in which we cook together when this is what we want. But this is not really the view in the literature. Rather, the view in the literature focuses on the role of a particular person, the speaker. A version of the view that groups really need a speaker to talk can be found in the seminal paper on the topic – Justin Hughes’ “Group Speech Acts” from 1984. Hughes characterizes the conditions of a group speech act for a group G, speaker S and utterance X as follows: (1) There exists a group (G), this group has an illocutionary intention, and X conveys that illocutionary intention. (2) S (believes that he/she) knows the illocutionary intention of G and that X conveys that illocutionary intention. (3) G does not object to S uttering X on its behalf and if G intends for any specific individual(s) to utter X, it intends for S to utter X. S (believes that he/she) knows this. (4) #2 and #3 are (the) reasons S utters X. (Hughes, 1984, 388). The speaker features in no less than three out of Hughes’ four conditions. Condition 1 stands out in that it is concerned solely with the group. It requires, as Hughes puts it, a group having an illocutionary intention. This is remarkable enough and sounds very much like the collective (or plural) analogue of the first condition of individual (or singular) speech acts. Please cite this article as: Schmid, H.B., Groups speaking for themselves: Articulating first-person plural authority, Language & Communication, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2019.07.001
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In order for you to say something, there has to be something you want (and indeed intend) to say, and an utterance that means what you want to say. This is what Hughes’ condition 1 postulates for the plural, too. If there are group speech acts, it is true that groups, just as individuals, can want to say something. But in the case of singular speech acts, the analysis is already almost done here. All that is missing in addition to a singular illocutionary intention and an expression that means what the individual wants to say is the individual’s actually saying it, and saying it because she wants to say it. For individuals to speak, is not necessary that they have to find somebody to do it for them (though quite often, they can if they so wish). According to Hughes, the story is different (and more complicated) in the group case. Sadly for the groups, they simply can’t utter what they want to say. There is need for this ominous further party here, “the Speaker (S)”. One might ask: Why? Is the reason why groups simply can’t speak that they have no mouth (and that they can’t write, because they have no fingers)? But typically, there is no lack of mouths and fingers in groups. They do not just have one and ten, respectively, but many more. Or is it rather that groups have too many mouths and too many fingers, and that whenever they try to use their many mouths and fingers to speak, they fail to say clearly what they want to say, resulting in a garble of signs rather than recognizable speech? But the same point could be made with regards to feet and hands: if groups have too many and too uncoordinated mouths to speak, one would expect that they have too many and too uncoordinated feet to walk and hands to cook. But walking and cooking are agential capacities easily ascribed to groups. And more complicated things, too: Groups can do more than go for walks together, operate simple pumping mechanisms, stir sauces, and push broken down cars (as the classical examples in the recent literature have them doing). They can build houses and win football world championships. And all of that without needing a housebuilder or a football world championship winner to do it for them, or in their name; they just do it themselves. A further consideration that takes away some of the initial plausibility of the claim that a distinction between the group and the speaker has to be made is that some of things groups obviously can do involve rather intricate linguistic practices. Some groups can do such amazing things as performing a Shakespeare play – something that is very hard if not outright impossible to do for an individual. How plausible is it to assume that an agent who can perform such an astonishing feat of linguistic competence as performing a Shakespeare play should be utterly unable to say what it wants to say? Is the Shakespeare Company not saying what it wants to say when it performs Hamlet? Or is it that there are only the Shakespeare Company’s speakers on the stage doing the talking, not the Shakespeare Company itself performing the play? Is it that the group is performing, but leaving the talking to the individual actors in doing so? Clearly, no such view can be Hughes’ opinion. Groups can achieve linguistic coordination with their mouths just as they can with their hands and with their feet. Thus they can very well engage in linguistic performances. The issue is a different one; the issue is not with the talking as such, because this works rather well in joint performances, but rather with a form of talking about themselves, as it were: It is with saying what they themselves believe or want, or, put differently, with the expression of group attitudes. The Shakespeare Company can easily recite an entire play, but just saying what it believes to be its best piece so far or what it intends to play next is a wholly different issue, and very different indeed. One can, of course, ask what individual members think. But for the Company to speak on such issues as a group, more is needed, or so one might believe. Because whatever a simple individual member reports, this can be taken only as an expression of an individual belief about the Company’s intention, not as an authoritative expression thereof (or so this view has it). And this obviously matters when it comes to the question of whose speech act it is that counts as a group speech act. It matters in a way that, at first glance at least, seems to have no equivalent when it comes to the question of whether a person is cooking all for- and by herself, or as a part of a team cooking effort. 2. The Hobbesian Spokesperson’s Dilemma Another way of putting the argument for the Hobbesian view (against which we will argue directly in section three) is this: While groups seem to be able to do such things as cooking all by themselves, because all they have to do to achieve this is putting together the necessary dishes and courses, performing a speech act cannot be done in such piecemeal cooperative fashion, because speech, unlike cooking, has to issue from a unified place of authority; and since this authority does not come naturally in groups – at least not in the way first-person authority seems to accrue quite naturally to individual linguistic practitioners –, it has to be artificially created in the case of groups, and the way groups can do this is via authorization of the speaker to speak for them or on their behalf (within a certain domain). Put simply: groups need to authorize a speaker because in contrast to individuals, they simply lack first-person authority. Though as far as I can see, this has not been spelled out quite in these terms in the received literature, there are clear traces of this view, and it nicely explains the Hobbesian model of thinking about group speech acts. Though Meijers disagrees with Hughes in many respects, there seems to be a (tacit) agreement between the two here. Hughes introduces the speaker’s role innocently enough in his condition 2, and the further conditions leave ample room for a wide variety of forms in which group speech acts can be realized. According to condition 2, the group speaker simply utters the words that convey the meaning of a group speech act. The further conditions make clear that saying what the group wants to say merely by incident is not enough; the speaker has to be in the know about the group illocutionary intention, and he or she has to do so because the group will not object to his or her speaking “on the group’s behalf”, and because if the group wants a particular person to say the words, that person is him- or herself. This may not sound like the speaker’s uttering of words comes with any special authority invested into the speaker by the group. Hughes allows for the possibility that the group intends for S speak, but it is enough that there is something the group Please cite this article as: Schmid, H.B., Groups speaking for themselves: Articulating first-person plural authority, Language & Communication, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2019.07.001
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wants to say, and does not have anyone else in mind to say it for the speaker to utter the words that constitute a group speech act. And yet, the question of authority clearly matters, and it is implied in the idea of speaking “on the group’s behalf” mentioned by Hughes. For if what the speaker were doing was simply giving an accurate report of what the group believes, wants, or intends, he or she would be doing were simply talking about the group rather than speaking for the group. Talking about somebody else – saying what it is that somebody else thinks, wants, and intends – is different from speaking for (or on behalf of) somebody else in at least one decisive respect. When the speaker speaks for or on behalf of the agent whose speaker he or she is, he or she does not simply denotate, report, or otherwise refer to the attitude of the agent about whose attitude he or she is talking; rather, it seems that he or she – to some degree at least – expresses or avows that attitude. Let us take a closer look at the difference between speaking about somebody else and speaking on his or her behalf. Obviously, speaking for or on behalf of somebody comes with a different kind of authority – the speaker speaks with (some of) the author’s authority, rather than just with his or her own, as in the case of a report. The speaker’s authority is not simply the reliability of a trustworthy reporter. The reason why he or she is to be believed is not that he or she has particularly good evidence to know the author’s attitudes. Rather, by speaking for – or on behalf of, or in the name of – the author, he or she does for the author what the author would be doing were he or she speaking for herself through avowal. In the way they work in communication, avowals differ from mere reports in several respects, three of which deserve to be mentioned here. First, avowals are not open to questions concerning the speaker’s reliability concerning the identification of the subject of the attitude. “It’s raining” usually avows the speaker’s belief that it is raining in a way that is not open to challenging the speaker’s knowledge that the belief is really his or hers, and that the thought that this is what he or she believes does not misidentify the subject. The belief is assumed to be self-known by the author, and self-knowledge selfidentifies the subject. It is sometimes claimed that self-knowledge is immune to error not just in matters of identification, but in matters of predication, too. Though this seems exaggerated, it remains true that under normal circumstances, the sort of knowledge of what we think and want that we avow in speech is not of the observational or inferential kind. We usually do not need to check (or infer from) evidence to know what it is we believe or want. Consciousness comes with “groundless” knowledge – we know it “just like that”; self-knowledge is, as I propose it, usually self-validating rather than being validated by evidence and through inference. This does not preclude the possibility of error, but the point is that it requires unusual circumstances that it makes sense to ask a speaker “how do you know you believe what you’re saying?” Knowledge of this self-validating kind thus constitutes special speaker’s authority. As Davidson famously puts the point: “When a speaker avers that he has a belief, hope, desire or intention, there is a presumption that he is not mistaken, a presumption that does not attach to his ascriptions of similar mental states to others.” (Davidson, 2001 [1984], 3) Avowal theories of self-knowledge (cf. Goldberg/Pessin, 1997, 221ff.) often argue that this self-validating feature of avowals has to do with the fact that avowing an attitude is not simply a special way of cognitive registering, but rather some sort of making – avowal expresses a making up of one’s mind, and first-person authority thus comes with the maker’s privilege. Third and even more importantly for our discussion, self-knowledge self-commits. Reporting somebody else’s intention does not commit the reporter (but, if accurate, report a commitment of the person whose intention is being reported), avowals do. Whenever I express an intention, there is no question of whether or not I am motivated to act on it, and when I express a belief, there is no question of whether or not I think it is true (this is the point of Moore’s Paradox). Whoever avows an intention thereby expresses a commitment of hers and precludes challenges of the sort: “you say that this is your intention, but why would you carry it out?” Given these features of first-person authority – self-identification, self-validation, and self-commitment – it might seem that no group speaker can possibly aspire to speak with this sort of authority on our behalf. It is of the nature of first-person authority that one has it only in speaking for oneself, and whatever authorization there might be involved in appointing a group speaker cannot result in his or her avowing our attitudes, because whatever he or she avows is his or her own attitude. If this is what we authorize him or her to do, he or she is avowing his or her own attitudes as ours, and what we think or want is quite literally up to him or her. Rather than hiring somebody to do the job of uttering our attitudes, we have found ourselves a dictator with unlimited powers – he or she is in the position to make up “our” mind, and to commit us in whatever way she makes “our” attitude up to be. Thus it seems that avowing is not what we can authorize our speaker to do. It cannot, it seems, be done “on behalf of” anyone else. Yet at the same time, authorizing a group speaker cannot be merely about finding a reliable reporter. It is not enough for our speaker to be authorized to talk about our group’s attitudes. This comes to the fore if we focus on the role of the speaker in communication with outgroup listeners. Consider the case in which the supposed speaker for an author – an individual or a group – were to understands his or her role as one of a reporter of the author’s attitudes. In playing his or her role in this way, the speaker would be expressing or avowing his or her own attitudes, rather than ours. A “speaker” who really speaks just as a reporter relates third-personally to the attitudes which he or she reports. A speaker’s saying that “group x wants to y” would then be expressing or avowing nothing more than his or her own belief that this is really what the group intends. This might be o.k. for an expert on group attitudes, but not for a speaker speaking on behalf of us. From the perspective of the listeners, this reporting way of playing his or her role will undermine the sort of authority required of a proper speaker. Proper spokespeople speak with the authority invested in them through authorization, and this authority is
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not simply a permission or charge to report the message. For some spokespeople, it might sometimes be tempting to disguise as mere reporters when the attitudes they report turn out to be contentious with the audience. That way, spokespeople become immune to questions concerning the commitments that inhere in the reported attitudes. A “spokesperson” who withdraws to such a position need not defend the truth of the beliefs or the goodness of the intentions he or she reports. “This is merely what they believe and intend, I’m not saying it is true or good”. Acting merely as a reporter limits the way in which the speaker is committed – and thus to be held responsible – for what he or she says; for the listeners, he or she might still be a good source of evidence for the author’s views, but he is by no means speaking for the author, or in the author’s name. A proper spokesperson needs to relate differently to what he or she is reporting. In order to be good at what he or she does, he or she needs to impersonate the author, as it were, and cannot simply relate third-personally to the author’s attitudes. He or she cannot open him- or herself up to questions concerning the accuracy of his or her reports, if he or she is to be successful in his or her role – for all means and purposes, he or she is the author speaking. He or she has to give his or her report of the author’s beliefs, desires, and intentions, with the sort of commitments to their truth and goodness that any speaker has in relation to his or her own. After all, for the spokesperson to be counting as uttering what is a group speech act there is a sense in which his or her utterance is what the group says. The spokesperson’s report cannot come from the spokesperson’s own first-personal authority; whatever authorization is has to entail, the spokesperson’s speaking with the author’s authority, and in this case, it is ours. However, this is obviously just another blunder. For it seems straightforward and a priori that one can speak with firstpersonal authority only for oneself, and ex hypothesi, the spokesperson is not the author. The spokesperson’s report can misidentify the author (perhaps he or she has taken on several spokesperson positions and occasionally mixes up his or her authors), his or her reports are not of the self-validating sort (we should not trust him or her if we know him or her to be lazy in reading up on his or her author’s orders), and if he or she is such a sloppy spokesperson, her apparent speaking on our behalf does not, as the listeners will know, commit us. Whatever it is the spokesperson does is not self-identifying, selfvalidating and self-committing with regards to us. The spokesperson’s dilemma is thus a choice between two ways of failing at his or her job: It is between mere reporting, that is, speaking with his or her own authority only and thus acting as a mere reporter, on the one hand, and overdoing his or her role by assuming the author’s own authority – the Robespierre version of a group speech act, as it were. Some aspects of this issue have been touched upon in the literature, and the way it is approached by Meijers is that the speaker’s task is precisely to act as a sort of substitute for the sort of self-validating, non-observational and non-inferential knowledge – or, in short, consciousness – that individuals have of their own attitude, and that has no equivalent in the plural case, as Meijers argues: “Individuals usually don’t have to make an extra effort to know their illocutionary intentions when performing a speech act. They just know it. Groups, on the other hand, do not have the type of epistemic access that individuals have. In order to know what a group’s intention is, a conscious effort needs to be made by the speaker who acts on behalf of the group. Usually he or she needs to consult other members and there has to be some procedure to decide on the group’s intention.” (Meijers, 2007, 102). In other words, group speakers, in this conception, substitute for the group’s lack of consciousness, or self-knowledge. We will return to this basic point shortly, but let us first focus on the practical consequences for the role of the group speaker suggested by Meijers. The first of Meijers’ two suggestions in the last sentence seems puzzling. If the problem is that there really is something a group wants to say, but that the group somehow does not know it, and if the way to know it is to ask group members – why, then, do we need an extra speaker? After all, the group members seem to know, or else it would not help to ask them, because if they don’t know either, asking them leads nowhere. Also, this suggestion puts the speaker in the role of a mere reporter, the first horn of our above dilemma. Meijers’ second suggestion might seem more plausible, but as we shall see, it leads straight up the second horn of the dilemma. The view implied here is that the group consists of individual members who want the group to have a certain illocutionary intention and then to say something, and that the task of the speaker really is more than just to say what the group wants to say, but rather to determine who wants the group to say what, and see to it that according to some acceptable aggregation procedure – e.g., the majority rule – which view of what the group should be saying should be the group’s. Besides pointing into the direction of the second horn of the dilemma (the determination of the group attitude seems to be up to the speaker who acts under the sole restriction that the group will go along), this understanding of the role of the group speaker backfires on Hughes’ condition 1. If the speaker’s task is to “determine” the group’s illocutionary intention in that way, the talk of a group having an illocutionary intention even before that procedure seems a bit misleading, to say the least. What we would be talking about here under the label “group illocutionary intention” would clearly not in any way be the group equivalent to an individual having an illocutionary intention. Rather, it would be the group equivalent to an individual having different ideas about what it might want to say, without really having made up his or her mind yet, and thus without having an illocutionary intention. The way in which this leads up the second horn of the dilemma is that thinking along this second line puts the speaker in a position that competes with the position assigned to the group in condition 1: if it is the speaker who determines what the group’s illocutionary intention is, and if a plethora of individual members’ views of what the group should be saying is all there is to the group’s intentional states before the speaker comes into the picture, it is hard to see why one should talk of the Please cite this article as: Schmid, H.B., Groups speaking for themselves: Articulating first-person plural authority, Language & Communication, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2019.07.001
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group as “having” an illocutionary intention. Again, following this line makes the speaker a somewhat worrisome figure, reminding of political figures in the past who thought they knew what the people really wanted (without them knowing). Recall that there is a similar “determination problem” about Rousseau’s idea of a general will. Allegedly, everybody has it, or rather, all of us together have it, but there clearly is a problem of knowing what exactly it is that is generally wanted in this way – and this is an obvious job opportunity for the likes of the “comité de salut public” and its spokesperson Robespierre. All he’s supposedly doing is just “determining” the general will, and passing on its orders. In his own view, he is merely engaged in an epistemic task – his executive powers are simply to be the stout and unwavering voice of the general will. Now such dictatorial powers of “determining” the general will are clearly not what Hughes means; explicitly, Hughes invokes “consensus mechanisms” (Hughes, 1984, 384). Against this conception, Meijers (2007, 102f.) has raised the worry that Hughes’ whole analysis might be unfit for non-democratic groups. And well-taken as Meijers’ point seems to be, surely there has to be some criterion to distinguish between not fully democratic but genuine group speech acts and a bunch of people just accepting as “their” statement anything one of them pleases to say. Thus the puzzle remains: if the speaker can ask the members what their illocutionary intentions are, it seems that he or she is redundant, as the members could speak for themselves; if there is more to the speakers’ “determining” the group’s intention, there is an issue whether or not it is really “for the group” that he or she speaks, as the attitudes which the speaker reports are whatever he or she wishes them to be. The basic question is this: Is there any middle ground – a way of speaking for a group that is neither just a mere report nor a symptom of autocratic ambitions? 3. How We Know What We Want to Say – and How We Say it In his recent work, Philip Pettit (2018, 128) proposes a concept of avowing an attitude that hinges on the idea of the individual speaker being a member of the group whose shared attitude he or she expresses, and it consists in what Pettit proposes to call “co-avowal”. Co-avowing a group attitude does not, he claims, presuppose advance authorization through appointment of a spokesperson: “Advance authorization [.] may obviously be appropriate in special circumstances where I speak for all of us in a more or less formal capacity. But the authority on the basis of which I can co-avow certain attitudes in common with you and others need not have its origin in any such ex ante arrangement, however tacit. I may presume on being authorized and claim authorization in the absence of ex post protest at my avowal of a purportedly shared attitude. On this picture I will signal that I am speaking for what each of us in a certain group thinks or feels, whatever form that signal takes, and I will presume on having the authority of a spokesperson insofar as no one objects to what I say in that role. I do not speak in this case with your advance license, your ex ante authorization. Rather I speak on the presumption that no one will reject my authority and that if no one rejects it, then the absence of rejection will have the same effect as ex ante authorization. You and others do not say ‘Yea’ in advance to my playing the role of spokesperson but neither do you say ‘Nay’ in the wake of my assuming the role. And that amounts to the same thing. It means that you authorize me in a virtual rather than an actual manner: you authorize me, not by what you said, but by what you might saliently have said and chose not to say.” (Pettit, 2018, 128). Though the idea of co-avowing does not entail advance authorization, it is obviously a modification of the classical Hobbesian idea thereof. But for our purpose of solving the spokesperson’s paradox, this hardly seems promising. After all, what we need to understand is how a spokesperson can avow – and that is, speak with first-person authority – in a way in which that first person is not just him- or herself. But perhaps we can turn Pettit’s concept of co-avowing around and understand the authorized spokesperson’s speech as a special form of a co-avowal rather than interpreting co-avowing as a special, “virtual” form of Hobbesian authorization. Detaching the idea of co-avowing against the Hobbesian roots from which it stems in Pettit’s account can start with re-examining the self-knowledge that constitute first-person authority. Self-knowledge, we claimed above, involves self-identification, self-validation, and self-commitment. The first-person authority that distinguishes avowals from mere reports comes from the unique way in which the speaker “knows” the attitudes he or she expresses. Hughes explicitly introduces the group speaker as someone who “knows” the group’s illocutionary intention. And yet, it seems that whatever the authorization of a speaker by a group might mean cannot constitute the kind of knowledge required for avowals, and Meijers argues that the group itself cannot know its illocutionary intention in that way. Interestingly, however, Hughes’ own conception of a group illocutionary intention as developed in his 1984 paper does not seem to allow for the wide epistemic gap between the having of a group intention, on the one hand, and the knowing of it, on the other hand, that Meijers assumes. Here is what Hughes – tentatively, one must admit – says on what he means by a group having an illocutionary intention: “For the group to have an illocutionary intention, i.e. to intend to convey a particular meaning, it would seem that the members of the group or a majority of the members of the group must want to convey this particular meaning. It may also be necessary that the members or a majority of the members be aware that the members (or a majority of members) want to convey this particular meaning. It is not enough that the members (or a majority of members) want to convey a meaning as individuals and that each individual’s meaning concurs with those of other members, e.g. it is not enough that each of the members of the jury want to state that he/she believes the defendant is guilty. The members must individually want to convey something as a group. There must be a sense of ‘we’ness [.].” (Hughes, 1984, 381f.). It is thus not the case that there is an “unconscious” illocutionary intention in the group which only a Robespierrian speaker can “know”; rather, for us to perform a speech act, it has to be the case that we know what we want to say. In order to be able to avow group illocutionary intentions, the speaker has to have first-personal knowledge thereof; however, we argued Please cite this article as: Schmid, H.B., Groups speaking for themselves: Articulating first-person plural authority, Language & Communication, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2019.07.001
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that whatever first-personal knowledge he or she has of intention, it can be only of his or her own, not of ours. However, thinking along the lines sketched by Hughes, it seems that there can be first-personal knowledge of group illocutionary intention in which the speaker can share; he or she can know what it is we want to say in the way we know it – not firstpersonal knowledge in the singular, but first-personal knowledge in the plural. In other papers (Schmid, 2014, 2016, 2018), I argue in some detail that the way in which we know what it is we intend collectively is indeed first-personal, and though this first person plural self-knowledge differs in many ways from its equivalent in the singular, it is self-knowledge nevertheless because it has the plural version of the three features of selfknowledge we identified: self-identification, self-validation and self-commitment. A brief remark on how this can be spelled out concerning self-validation is in order. Recall Meijers’ claim that whereas an individual usually knows what it is he or she intends “just like that”, knowing what a group wants to say is a complex cognitive achievement that involves taking into account evidence and inferring; knowing what it is we intend does not come, it seems, “just like that”, but involves observing others and inferring from what one remembers them to have said, and some such. Now the first thing to say is that even in the individual case, observation and inference is not entirely irrelevant to the way in which intention is “known” to the intentional agent; consciousness of intentional activity requires that what one observes and what one infers is “in tune” with what one takes oneself to be doing. And conversely, knowing what it is we intend has its own form of “immediate” availability; if you take yourself to be immersed in a conversation with another person – i.e., if you take yourself to be engaged in a collectively intentional action – you do not constantly observe and infer and conclude from there that this is what the two of you jointly intend; there is a “sense of us” that, even though it may fail under some circumstances, is immediate. E.g., we “just know” that we’re talking when we are engaged in conversation. If plural self-knowledge is the way in which we can know what it is we want to say, there are obviously many ways of saying it. You can start, and I can correct you where I disagree, a third party can join in until we finally think we have said what we wanted to say. This is the improvised form of a group speech act, a form that may not be the best suited for all occasions, but very much parallels the way in which we might spontaneously be preparing a meal together: us acting jointly on a collective illocutionary intention that we avow plurally through our plural pre-reflective self-knowledge on what it is we want to say. The way in which this reflects back on the Hobbesian conception of group speech acts is this. Authorization of a group speaker cannot substitute for our plural pre-reflective self-knowledge of what it is we want to say; rather, it is only in virtue of our plural self-knowledge of what it is what we want to say that we can authorize a speaker to act for us, on our behalf or in our name. As far as the group speech act is concerned, he or she acts as “one of us”, a participant who shares in the way in which our collective illocutionary intention is self-known; his or her words then come with first-person plural authority, reinforced by his or her special mandate, since he or she is not just one of us, but the one charged with speaking for us in some domain. It is in this way of expressing a group attitude that he or she is not caught in the dilemma of two ways of failing at his or her job. He or she is neither “just a reporter”, nor does he or she subject the group to his or her first-person singular authority. He or she is speaking authoritatively, but the relevant authority is of the plural kind. He or she is indeed expressing – avowing – a group attitude, and it is through his or her sharing in our first-person plural self-knowledge of what it is what we want to say that his or her uttering of words is our group speech act – an act that we could well perform jointly, though this may occasionally be inconvenient. References Davidson, D., 2001 [1984]. First person authority. In: Donald Davidson, Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective. Clarendon Press, Oxford, pp. 3–14. Goldberg, S., Pessin, A., 1997. Gray Matters. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind. Armonk NY, ME Sharpe. Hughes, J., 1984. Group speech acts. Linguist. Philos. 7 (4), 379–395. Lackey, J., 2018. Group Assertion. Erkenntnis 83, 21–42. Ludwig Kirk, Proxy assertion, In S. Goldberg (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Assertion, (forthcoming), Oxford University Press, Oxford. Meijers, A., 2007. Collective speech acts. In: Tsohatzidis, S. (Ed.), Intentional Acts and Institutional Facts. Essays on John Searle’s Social Ontology. Springer, Dordrecht, pp. 93–112. Pels, D., 2000. The Intellectual as Stranger. Studies in Spokespersonship. Routledge, London. Pettit, P., 2018. The Birth of Ethics. Reconstructing the Role and Nature of Morality. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Schmid, H.B., 2014. Expressing group Attitudes: on first person plural authority. Erkenntnis 79 (Suppl. l), 1685–1701, 9. Schmid, H.B., 2016. “On knowing what we’re doing together: groundless group self-knowledge and plural self-blindness.” In: Brady, M.S., Fricker, M. (Eds.), The Epistemic Life of Groups. Essays in the Epistemology of Collectives. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 51–73. Schmid, H.B., 2018. The subject of ‘we intend’. Phenomenol. Cognitive Sci. 17/2, 231–243. Tollefsen, Deborah, 2019. can groups assert that P? In: Goldberg, S. (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Assertion. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Please cite this article as: Schmid, H.B., Groups speaking for themselves: Articulating first-person plural authority, Language & Communication, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2019.07.001