Dani Alnashi
Università della Svizzera italiana
In this talk, I aim to argue that the power of performative contradictions (PC) is, contrary to what most people think, very limited. PCs are shown that they are not only contextually relevant but can also be evidentially and pragmatically overweighed.
A PC is a sentence where the act of uttering that sentence contradicts the content of the sentence. Examples include ”I don’t speak a word of English” or ”I don’t exist”. They were thought to be a decisive argumentative device by, e.g., Habermas (1983;1985), Hintikka (1962).
However, even though the act of uttering “I don’t speak a word of English” has evidence against the content of the sentence, this, like any other evidence, has to be weighed against the evidence we have to believe the content of the sentence to be true. For instance, one might have learnt the sentence phonetically. What the utterer said is still true even though the utterer committed a PC.
Moreover, PCs can be pragmatically overweighed. For instance, if we are debating Cartesian scepticism and the sceptic says “I do not exist”, we cannot accuse the sceptic of committing a PC as if it destroys the sceptic’s position. If we do so, we would be favouring practical considerations, of what one can and cannot say, over the theoretical consideration we have a hand, whether scepticism is true or not. Similarly, we shouldn’t reject the claim of someone who says “I’m the most humble person on Earth”. Even if we think that the most humble person on Earth should not utter such a sentence, the content of the sentence can still be true and we should be concerned with it and not with the utterer.
References
Habermas, J. (1983). ’Diskursethik: Notizen zu einem Begr¨undungsprogramm.’ In Moralbewusstsein und kommunikatives Handeln. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Habermas, J. (1985). Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: zwölf Vorlesungen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkam
Hintikka, J. (1962). ’Cogito, Ergo Sum: Inference or Performance?’ The
Philosophical Review, 71(1), 3–32.
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SOPhiA 2026 