Constitutive versus normative accounts of speech and mental acts

Abstract

At the end of his “Promisings and other Social Acts: Their Constituents and Structure,” Kevin Mulligan briefly considers the question of the normativity of speech and mental acts. This has been a matter hotly debated in recent years; several authors (including Kathrin Glüer-Pagin and Åsa Wikforss) have contended that, properly understood, superficially looking normative notions that we deploy in characterizing such acts should be understood in a constitutive, nonnormative sense (in contrast with views such as the one recently defended by Tim Williamson about assertion, on which this is a constitutively normative act). The goal of my chapter would be to critically examine these suggestions and defend a normative account.