Donal writes
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".
This looks plausible, but the more I think about it the more these seem like genuine performatives. I say this, because contexts require specific contexts (this is obvious) in order to 'work,' e.g., one cannot sat, sitting in one's living room, with no ship in sight and no brief to christen one should there be, 'I hereby christen this ship the S. S. Brighton Rock,' and achieve anything relevant to ships and their christenings.
However, should one have been invited to christen a ship by those who have the authority to arrange such things, and finding oneself below the prow of the ship, champagne bottle in hand, send the bottle prow-ward, while crying out, before all assembled, 'I hereby christen this ship...,' then, ceteris paribus, one would have in saying this, done something, namely, christened a ship.
Now, why one came to be there before God and this assembly of christening-fanciers, need not be revealed, i.e., announced ('Upon the kind invitation of the Queen to do so—everyone else being busy—I hereby...,' Or one might have sought to job as a way of getting one's christening moment on TV. Whatever. There will always be a reason, unless zombies are recruited to christen ships, marry one's daughter, etc.
In short: {[['I do']] ['and I say this because my future wife's father pressing a shotgun to my back]} is analogous to {[['I christen this ship...']] [and I do say this because the Queen asked me to]}. Which goes to show that Leibniz was right and that there's no such thing as
a vacuum.'Moore's Paradox' ('It's raining, but I don't believe it,') would seem to have nothing to do with what Donal is worrying about.
Robert Paul, awed by the weather ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
