[lit-ideas] Re: Can, logically, there be any such thing as a "performative contradiction"?

I've just returned from some intense R&Ring at the Congress in Ottawa, so my
mind may not be up to the standards Donal's post characteristically demand, but
I think I can reply to Donal's question at some level. A performative
conradiction is a contradiction not between 2 propositions as in a logical
contradiction but rather between (the semantic content of) a proposition and
the act of asserting it. Examples: 

1. "All truth is relative." 

2. "I speak no English."

3. N is a universalizable norm (judgement) but the views of Russians from
Volgograd are not included in the discourse. 

This is Habermas's conception of a performative contradiction, as I understand
it. 

The formal structure of the contradiction is closely related to Kant's notions
of illegitimate self-exemption and self-contradiction as features of the moral
impermissibility of maxims (Groundwerk). 

Walter O
MUN


Quoting Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>:

> 
> Of course, it may depend how far or little we stretch the idea of a
> "performative" and a "contradiction".
> 
> But taking as a central case of a performative utterance those statements
> that lawyers admit as 'original evidence' e.g. "I do" in marriage, "I accept"
> in contract. Such out-of-court statements are not hearsay of accepting the
> marriage or other contract but are constitutive of that acceptance - hence
> they are "performative" utterances. In this sense of "performative", how
> could such an utterance ever be a "contradiction" (or at odds with itself),
> where this would seem to imply that it at once constituted and did not
> constitute the relevant act of acceptance? 
> 
> The utterance "I do because father-in-law-to-be has a shotgun at my back" ,
> or "I accept because otherwise Luca Brasi will ensure it is my brains on the
> contract", do not constitute genuine acceptance and so do not, in any strict
> sense, amount to a performative contradiction - rather they are imperfect or
> counterfeit or surrogate, or whatever, performatives.
> They fall short of being genuine performatives and so cannot amount to a
> "performative contradiction".
> 
> Donal
> Too much time on my (F.A.Cup watching, if you must) hands
> Aware W.O. was perhaps being humourously playful in his previous use of
> "performative contradiction" and/or deploying a widened concept of
> "performative" and "contradiction"; and hoping he took only an acceptable
> level of offence at my previous animadversions 
> Final whistle - o, god..
> Next on this weary day - Britain's Got Talent
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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