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Advocacy and Enactment: Exercitives and Acts of Arguing
Cristina Corredor
University of Valladolid
corredor@fyl.uva.es
Abstract
Goodwin and Innocenti (2016) have contended that giving reasons may be a form of enactment,
where a claim is supported by the very activity of making the claim. In my view, the kind of
interaction that these authors are considering should be analysed as a form of advocacy, and
therefore as an exercitive speech act. In this paper I will suggest that acts of advocating, qua
illocutions, institute a normative framework where the speaker’s obligation to justify cannot be
redeemed by a mere “making reasons apparent”. In general, giving reasons is part of the
procedure in virtue of which the advocate’s authority to exert influence is recognised by their
addressees. This illocutionary effect should be distinguished from other perlocutionary
consequences.
Keywords: advocacy, enactment, exercitive speech acts, acts of arguing, Austin
Introduction
In an insightful paper, Jean Goodwin and Beth Innocenti (2016) have contended that giving
reasons may be a form of enactment, where a claim is supported by the very activity of making
the claim. Following their study of two egregious cases of suffragist women defending the right
to vote, they conclude that these women showed, by giving reasons in the public sphere, that
they were rational beings, able to think and reason. According to the authors, the suffragists’
conveying this idea was accomplished by means of the enactment of “making reasons
apparent”, and not for their arguments performing certain defining function or goal. In
particular, they resist the idea that goals such as justifying a claim to an audience, rationally
persuading an audience, or critically testing a claim in order to rationally resolve a disagreement
can be seen as intrinsic, essential or constitutive goals of argumentation.
This paper takes a point of departure in Goodwin and Innocenti (2016) and respectfully aims to
contribute to the line of thought that they have opened. I am indebted to their joint reflection,
which I find challenging and in many respects illuminating in what concerns the historical
import of the early suffragist movement. The plan of this paper is the following. In section 1, I
summarise some of the main tenets in the mentioned above paper. Section 2 is also mainly
expositive and takes into account some available views in the literature on the notion of
advocacy and other related ones. In section 3, after a brief presentation of the Austinian
framework I endorse, I put forth a view of acts of advocating as exercitive speech acts. Section
4 applies the proposed view to a reflection on the connection between advocacy and enactment,
which is further illustrated in section 5 by taking into account Goodwin and Innocenti (2016)’s
analysis of cases. Section 6 briefly considers the notion of acts of arguing, before coming to the
conclusions (section 7).
1. Advocacy as a rhetorical form in enactment
Taking a point of departure in O’Keefe’s distinction between argument1 (the premise-conclusion
units people exchange) and argument2 (the transactions between speakers and audiences in
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which context the first occur), Goodwin and Innocenti present two case studies with which they
aim to demonstrate that making argument1s can accomplish different tasks from changing an
audience’s beliefs or attitudes relating to a claim. These case studies come from the early
women’s suffrage movement in the US, one from 1848 and one from 1869-1875. In their
reconstruction of these cases, the following statements hold: (1) a speaker makes a reason
apparent; (2) the speaker cannot expect her audience to accept (infer, adhere to, take as justified)
her claim; (3) the speaker does something by making a reason apparent. According to the
authors, what the speaker does in (3) is to support her claim “by the activity of making the
claim” (p. 453). This move is identified as a rhetorical technique, namely, that of enactment,
where the speaker is said to incarnate the argument, in the sense of being the proof of the truth
of what is said (cf. Campbell and Jamieson, 1978, p. 9). According to Goodwin and Innocenti,
their case studies show that, given the strong opposition against the suffragist movement,
together with the prejudices concerning the role of women and their (lack of) intellectual
capacity, it was unlikely that the audiences would take their demands for the vote seriously.
Notwithstanding this, they contend (cf. p. 456) that the women’s giving reasons in support of
their claim in a public space showed to their audiences, and to themselves:
C.1. that their attempts to vote were reasoned, and
C.2. that the activity of a woman voting is supportable by reasons.
Thus, according to the authors, in order to have a voice in the public sphere and be taken
seriously, making reasons apparent was a strategy for accomplishing this.
I think this conclusion is sound and illuminates the kind of effect that the speech act of
advocacy can achieve through the technique of enactment. Yet the authors go on to say,
“Here we provide an argument that many asserted functions are parasitic on making
reasons apparent. In order to affect an audience in any way (to persuade them, to induce
them to alter their standpoint, etc.) a speaker first has to make a reason apparent” (p.
458)
Thus, the suffragists’ aim to have a voice in the public sphere and to be taken seriously was to
be accomplished by means of a strategic making reasons apparent. In the general case, the
authors draw the conclusion that a speaker’s argumentation can have the “mode of action” of
making reasons apparent. Moreover, even if this action is unlikely to have an impact on the
intended addressees, the mere making reasons apparent could accomplish important individual
and social tasks.
In my light, it is undeniable that giving reasons and making these reasons public can contribute
to a variety of goals. Nevertheless, I doubt that, in the particular case of advocating in favour of
a position (person, organisation, cause, and the like), mere enactment can accomplish the same
effects as arguing. My aim in the next section will be to examine the notion of advocacy in its
relationship to other close notions. For that, I will rely on the work of some reputed scholars.
2. Advocacy, critical discussion, persuasion, and deliberation in argumentative interactions
Advocacy is sometimes identified with arguing for a viewpoint. It is also taken to be a biased
form of argument, where the arguer does not make efforts to solve a difference of opinion but
tries to persuade their audience.
On one end of the assessment, Daniel O’Keefe (2007) has highlighted the conflict that exists
between the practical interests of an advocate who tries to persuade, and other normative
interests, as the interest to convey accurate information. What is more, he takes it that maximal
effectivity in advocacy “may require abandoning what we would ordinarily take to be
normatively desirable practices of advocacy” (p. 159). It is worth mentioning that the author
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supports his critical conclusions by appeal to several social-scientific research findings that
seem to raise doubts about the role and efficacy of normatively-proper advocacy. O´ Keefe sees
these findings as a manifestation of the wider conflict of weighing between aims and ends.
Interestingly, his views presuppose a normative conception of advocacy practices that are
available to the analyst.
A contrasting, more positive point of view can be found in Marcin Lewinski (2017), for whom
in multi-party deliberation “advocacy is instrumental to making a reasonable decision” (p. 91).
He distinguishes two approaches to collective deliberations, namely, issue-based dialectics vs.
what he terms role-based dialectics. Issue-based dialectics discusses one or many options on an
issue by pooling all possible pro and con arguments on each option, based on its internal merits.
In contrast, in role-based dialectics the parties’ positions are clearly defined and advocated by
them. The goal is to select, upon critical examination, “the best” of these positions (cf. p. 101).
Lewinsky ritghtly notes that a requirement of consistency in each party’s argumentative
commitments is in force all along the deliberation.
From a more neutral point of view, Goodwin (2013) notices that advocacy can be equated to
persuasion. As such, a positive or negative assessment would depend on the context in which it
takes place. Whereas in persuasion dialogues advocacy “promotes the collective goal of coming
to a consensus or mutual understanding”, in information-seeking dialogues “advocacy will be
taken as biased, irrelevant and possibly fallacious” (p. 2). She herself puts forward a normative
account where “The activity of advocating would be structured around two sets of obligations:
obligations to the person, organization or cause advocated for, and obligations to the audience
and other actors in the communication setting.” (pp. 11-12) This author acknowledges that both
sets of obligations may be in mutual tension, and considers that it will be the advocate’s task to
decide in face of the dilemma.
Although the three positions here considered contrast with each other in their overall
assessment, they jointly contribute to a nuanced view of advocacy. The three of them coincide
in seeing this practice as subjected to certain norms or obligations, and in contrasting (O’Keefe)
or, assuming this contrast, trying to conciliate (Lewinsky, Goodwin) its instrumental goals with
promoting decisions as based on the merits. It is relevant for our discussion that in the three
cases advocacy is seen as preeminently oriented to persuasion and, to that extent, as an
argumentative activity, or at least as embedded in argumentative forms of dialogue. It seems to
me that this idea, in part tacitly assumed, is worth of a more detailed analysis.
3. Advocacy as an illocutionary speech act
My suggestion is that two different approaches to advocacy can and should be distinguished,
namely, advocacy as a complex communicative activity that aims to persuade and gain
adherence in favour of a position (Adv1), and the illocutionary speech act of advocacy (Adv2).
Although I am not able to discuss (Adv1)1, it can be pointed out that this is the approach mainly
undertaken by the authors whose points of view have been considered in the preceding section.
My present aim is to approach the notion of advocacy as a type of speech act and offer an
account of it within an Austinian framework. As a previous remark, it is worth noticing that acts
of advocacy in this second sense do not need to be accompanied by argumentation, nor do they
need to be embedded into a persuasion dialogue. (Imagine e.g. a speaker who merely declares,
“S is the best candidate for the job”, in a context where a candidate has to be selected).
Nevertheless, I will suggest that there is an inner, built-in connection between the speech act of
advocacy and the activity of arguing, in a way to be clarified below.
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1 Some brief comments will be added below, in relation to the role of argumentation in both approaches
to advocacy.
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With respect to the speech act of advocating, and following Austin (1962), my suggestion is to
see it as a subtype within the general type of exercitive speech acts. Exercitives are
characterised for transferring or assigning an obligation, responsibility, or commitment on the
addressee, by virtue of the influence, power, or authority accorded to the speaker. As Austin
says,
“An exercitive is the giving of a decision in favour of or against a certain course of
action, or advocacy of it. It is a decision that something is to be so, as distinct from a
judgement that it is so: it is advocacy that it should be so, as opposed to an estimate that
it is so (...)” (1962, p. 154)
It may seem slightly puzzling for our discussion the fact that Austin chose to characterise the
general type of exercitives by appealing to the very action of advocacy. This move suggests that
he considered advocating to be a primitive notion within his theory. In my light, however, such
way of proceeding only reinforces the consideration that acts of advocating are exercitive
speech acts -one might say even that they are prototypical exercitives. To give support to this
point of view, it can be taken into consideration that the general category of exercitives includes
verbs such as urge, plead, beg, and others closely connected.
Furthermore, I endorse an Austinian approach to speech acts (as put forward by Marina Sbisà,
see e.g. 2006 and 2009; see also Maciej Witek, 2015). This approach sees speech as a form of
action and focuses on the normative aspects of the interpersonal and social relations that are
established and affected through communicative interaction. The approach can be characterised
by means of two thesis, namely,
T.1- To make a speech act is to bring about a series of changes in one’s social environment (the
context of interpersonal relationships, and/or the social world).
T.2- These changes impinge on the interactants’ normative stances, namely, their duties,
obligations and commitments, as well as their entitlements, rights and authorisations, as
mutually recognised and/or socially acknowledged.
Within this framework and following Austin, exercitives are taken to be illocutionary acts
consisting of the exercise of authority or influence. Furthermore, in what affects the normative
positions of speaker and addressees, exercitives presuppose some degree of authority or
authoritativeness on the part of the speaker, and assign or cancel rights or obligations to or from
the addressee (cf. Sbisà, 2006, p. 165). It is worth noticing that for the illocution to be
successful it is not required that it effectively exercises influence or gains adherence. Even if the
addressees are not moved accordingly, and supposing other conditions in place, it is their
recognition of the type of act that has taken place, together with their recognition of the way in
which it has affected their mutual normative positions, what makes of the speech act the
illocution it is. (For instance, a particular act of advocating could result in the assignment of a
commitment to adhere to the advocate’s position, or with the transference of a right to raise
doubts and objections).
In my view, as said above, whenever a speaker advocates for a position, she is performing an
exercitive speech act. If certain conditions are in place, with her performance the speaker
presents herself as requiring from her addressees that they support her position, in what can be
seen as an exercise of influence (provided the appropriate authority has been granted to the
speaker). And, as already noticed, this is not the same as saying that, for the speech act to be
successful, her audience must be influenced and moved accordingly. A speech act of
advocating, if it is recognised as such by the interactants, also confers them a right to raise
doubts and objections and ask for justification. Such a dialectical move brings about a
corresponding obligation on the part of the speaker, namely, the obligation to adduce reasons in
support of her claim. Apart from these illocutionary effects, I take it that, if and when the
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illocution achieves the goal of persuading the audience, this latter effect should be seen as
perlocutionary in Austin’s original sense2.
In the particular case of acts of advocating, what is characteristic of them is that they are usually
embedded in a wider argumentative discourse, in which reasons are adduced even before other
interactants ask for it. My suggestion is that the argumentative explicitness that characterises the
activity of advocating, beyond and above its being a means to achieve the goal of persuading,
redeems an obligation that is constitutively present in the speech act. Notice that, as said before,
acts of advocating qua exercitives presuppose some degree of authority (or authoritativeness) on
the part of the speaker. It is in virtue of this authority being recognised that the speaker’s speech
act can be seen as an exercise of influence. However, in a context where an advocate strives to
gain the adherence of her addressees, her authority needs not to be initially granted, nor will it
be granted in the general case. The person who advocates has to obtain the addressees’
recognition that she has the appropriate authority (or else she needs to receive from them the
required authorisation) to exercise her influence and pursue their adherence. The means that are
at her disposal, in a direct and attainable form, are those of the reasons she can give in support
of her position. It is in virtue of the reasons adduced, and to the extend that those reasons can be
understood and assessed by the addressees, that the advocate can be credited with the authority
she needs for her speech act to be successfully performed.
A possible objection to the view I have outlined in the preceding paragraph would bring to the
fore the fact that, in real contexts, advocacy aims to achieve the addressees’ adherence, and for
that (as O’Keefe, 2007, shows) every means available are instrumental and will be valued for its
efficacy, including arguments. I think this possible objection is double-sided. On one reading, it
appeals to the empirically attested fact that advocates acting in the public domain will try to
gain support for their position by resorting to every means available to them; this effort may in
some cases be exerted in dubious, not to say illegitimate ways (for example, by means of bribe
and threat; we may think, for instance, of a conditional threat or bribe of the form, “If you
support my position, I will/I won’t…”). My answer to this reading of the objection is that the
illocution, in such cases, could no longer be counted as advocacy. Instead, the corresponding
illocution should be typified as a different speech act3.
The second reading of the objection concerns the advocate’s authority and how she manages to
have it, so as to exert influence on her addressees. Concerning this point, my view is that within
an argumentative dialogue, this authority is obtained on the merits of the reasons given, on
condition that these merits be acknowledged by the addressees. In the general case, it is in virtue
of the force of an arguer’s reasons, provided this force is recognised by her interlocutors, that
she can be credited with the appropriate authority to influence her addressees’ positions. Her
authority comes from the authoritativeness that is bestowed upon her by her addressees. The
fact that the addressees could be induced to a wrong idea of the true merits of the arguments (for
instance, they might be persuaded by a fallacious use of an argument), in itself does not
contradict my contention. In the particular case of advocacy, correspondingly, whenever an
advocate has resource to argumentation to support her position, she is entering the domain of an
argumentative dialogue where authority, in the form of authoritativeness, may be bestowed
upon her on the merits of her arguments.
Now, it seems obliged to ask how this account of advocacy is connected to enactment,
understood as a mere making reasons apparent. In the next section my aim is to address this
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2 Arguments in support of this viewpoint are to be found in section 4 below.
3 There is ample literature discussing threats and their status as illocution. Many authors follow Searle
(1975) in treating threats as directive speech acts (which in Searle’s original taxonomy is the type usually
correlated to Austin’s exercitives), but this has not been the only view on the matter. I cannot address this
interesting issue here, but see e.g. Searle and Vanderveken (1985); Corredor (2001); Kissine (2013);
Budzynska and Witek (2014).
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issue, trying to identify the differences between both types of action. I will argue that whereas
advocacy is an illocutionary act, mere enactment should be seen, in the general case, as
perlocutionary in its effects.
4. Acts of advocating and enactment
As argued above, in advocating in favour of a position an advocate can give reasons, which in
its turn may credit her with the authority that is appropriate to influence their addresses. My
point has been that this authority has the form of authoritativeness, to the extent that it is bestow
by the advocate’s addressees, and this move takes place in virtue of their recognition of the
reasons given. My suggestion is now to turn the attention to the types of effect that advocacy
and enactment can have, in order to compare them and try to establish their differences.
When considering the outcomes of acts of communicative interaction, one should be careful not
to confound perlocutionary and illocutionary effects. According to Austin (1962), illocutionary
effects have to be seen as conventional. Perlocutionary effects, in contrasts, are consequences in
the normal course of events, and as such may be explained in terms of causal relations. In order
to clarify this conceptual distinction, Austin said,
“lt will be seen that the consequential effects of perlocutions are really consequences,
which do not include such conventional effects as, for example, the speaker's being
committed by his promise (which comes into the illocutionary act) […] We must notice
that the illocutionary act is a conventional act: an act done as conforming to a
convention.” (Austin, 1962, pp. 102, 105)
The Austinian approach I favour interprets this conventionality as a social recognition or
intersubjective agreement (possibly tacit) in that the effect has taken place, an effect that
impinges on the normative positions (commitments and obligations, rights and entitlements, and
the like) of the interactants. In advocacy, my suggestion has been that acts of advocating are
exercitive speech acts; moreover, I have contended that it is in virtue of the addressees’
recognition of the advocate’s reasons that she is bestowed with the authority required for her
exercitive. Other effects, like effectively influencing the addressees in the intended way, should
be seen as perlocutionary.
In enactment, it is worth considering whether its effects can be assessed in a similar manner.
Remember that, according to Goodwin and Innocenti (2016), a speaker making arguments can
have the “mode of action” of making reasons apparent; and even if this action were unlikely to
have an impact on the intended addressees, the mere making reasons apparent might accomplish
other individual and social tasks. In the cases they study, the suffragists’ acts of advocacy could
not have the intended effect on their addressees (that of gaining their support for the suffragists’
cause). Yet, as these authors suggest, the suffragists’ making reasons apparent would have had
the effect of showing to their audiences that “she, a woman, was a person capable of making
argument1s” (p. 454). Innocenti and Goodwin’s analysis of the social and interpersonal
transactions that were going on seems to me sensible and sound. Undoubtedly, their diagnosis
of the effect that the suffragists’ discourses might achieve in their context is also historically
accurate. My concern has to do with the tacit contrast that they seem to establish between the
rhetorical effect achieved through enactment and the effect that acts of arguing can have on an
audience.
It seems to me that stressing the persuasive effects of enactment on advocacy, yields the
undesirable result of blurring the proper illocutionary effect of the exercitive as such. We should
carefully distinguish perlocutionary consequences (e.g. achieving persuasion) and illocutionary
effects (the commitments and responsibilities, rights and authorisations, etc. instituted by the
speech act). Even if making reasons apparent had the effect of persuading the suffragists’
addressees that they were women capable of arguing in the public sphere, this idea (no matter its
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being right) was induced by means of an implicit inference. In contrast, the historical evidence
supports the conclusion that, at this point at least, the women’s explicit reasons were, for the
most part, not taken into consideration in a serious manner. The conclusion to be drawn is that,
in the general case, the induced idea was a perlocutionary consequence, and not an illocutionary
effect as based on the recognition granted to the suffragists. To that extent, the women’s speech
was deprived from being a successful illocution.
I am aware that the above reflection may be disturbing, since it seems to suggest that the
capability of performing actions through speech depends, in an essential and constitutive way,
on the interlocutors’ response. In the literature on speech acts and actions, attention has been
paid to forms of interaction conceptualised as silencing speech and subordinating speech4. Here,
the impact of certain forms of communication (pornography, hate speech, and other related
forms of discourse) on the addressees has been competently assessed, and this issue is still an
open field of research, not to say of social concern. However, to my knowledge, it has not been
sufficiently studied the way in which the interlocutors’ responsive actions may impinge on the
social and interpersonal meaning and force of a speaker’s speech. Here, the Austinian view
emphasises the conventional character of the illocutionary effect, which depends on an
interpersonal or social recognition that such an effect has taken place. Whenever this
recognition or agreement (possibly tacit) does not take place, the intended speech act may result
in an unsuccessful one (not necessarily void and null, but nevertheless faulty in some respect)5.
It is a merit of Goodwin and Innocenti’s essay that it brings to the fore a way in which a speaker
can be deprived of the pragmatic force that allows one’s speech to have an effect on one’s social
and interpersonal world -on the obligations, commitments, rights, authorisations, etc. of the
interactants, as mutually or socially recognised.
5. Discussion of one case
In order to sustain and better precise my point, it is worth paying closer attention at the case
studies considered by these authors, in particular at the conclusions reached by them. As already
seen (sec. 1), when considering the claims that turned out to be conveyed through enactment,
they contend that the women’s giving reasons in a public space showed to their audiences (and
even to themselves),
C.1. that their attempts to vote were reasoned, and
C.2. that the activity of a woman voting is supportable by reasons.
It seems to me essentially correct to say that, in what concerns claims C.1 and C.2, enactment is
used as a direct and effective means to induce in the addressees these conclusions. The authors’
consideration that enactment showed the correctness of both claims even to the suffragists’
themselves, strongly suggests that the claims were not intended by them as conclusions, at least
not in a fully conscious and explicit form. If this were the case, then it would reinforce my
contention that the inference leading to C.1 and C.2 should be seen as perlocutionary.
Nevertheless, even if these two claims had been intended, this fact would not contradict the
assessment that the effect so achieved was perlocutionary. For one thing, the addressees did not
draw both conclusions because of their recognising the suffragists’ authority to influence their
opinions (which could have led to a successful illocution). Rather, they had to yield to the
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4 For general overviews, see: Mari Matsuda et al.,1993; Ishani Maitra and Mary Kate McGowan, 2012.
5 Austin (1962) distinguished, within the common category of infelicities (speech acts incorrectly
performed), the subcategories of misfires (failures to follow the conventional procedure, in their turn
divided into misinvocations and misexecutions) and abuses. Only the former were doomed to result in
null and void acts; abuses, in contrast, could give rise to a performed action, though faulty in some
respect or other, as e.g. insincere promises (cf. 1962, pp. 18, 25). As Marina Sbisà has contended (see ref.
in her 2009), this view entails that illocutionary speech acts are subjected to defeasibility, which depends
on the social or intersubjective recognition.
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evidence that the suffragists’ enactment represented for them, in what can be seen as a
consequential effect.
Against my assessment, a possible objection would be the following. In the two studied cases,
enactment was equivalent to showing the facts that could be adduced, qua reasons, in support of
claims C.1 and C.2. A liberal conception of argumentation would take it that the giving of
reasons can be effected by showing relevant facts and evidence, in a straightforward (and even
possibly non-verbal) way. The suffragists’ arguing in public would qualify as evidence to
support both claims.
I am willing to endorse this point of view, in relation to claims C.1 and C.2. But notice that in
order to induce these conclusions, the suffragists’ discourses could not be random asserts. They
had to give reasons of a kind appropriate to be recognised, even for their opponents, as
supportive of the suffragists’ position. They had to perform genuine acts of arguing. Only in this
way, enactment could qualify as showing the facts that supported conclusions C.1 and C.2. To
that extent, enactment was apt to become the justificatory redemption of an illocutionary act,
namely, that of advocating in favour of C.1 and C.2. The addressees had to acknowledge this
public action as appropriate supportive evidence and, even if they resisted the suffragists’
reasons, they nevertheless had to recognised the suffragists’ authority to present their case and
advocate for it.
Still, my concern is that this approach is not applicable to the general case, nor to other
particular claims that the suffragists were trying to vindicate. My contention is that, in the
general case, speech acts of advocacy belong to a normative framework within which the
speaker’s obligation to justify cannot be redeemed by a mere “making reasons apparent”. To
better see what is at issue here, it is worth considering other claims advocated by the suffragists.
According to Goodwin and Innocenti (2016), they also defended the following claim,
C. No state can abridge women's right to vote.
This declaration conveys an elaborated tenet which is in need of grounding. In this particular
case, enactment as a rhetorical device, as a mere showing in the public domain that one is able
to give reasons, would had fallen short of providing the required justification. Given the
historical context, and the strong unwillingness to accept claim C from the part of other relevant
agents, the effort to gain support for this declaration was doomed to fail, and the corresponding
advocating act was doomed to become null and void. This set of conditions made of the
obligation to justify claim C, to sustain it by giving reasons, an imperative move in the
interaction.
In fact, women arguing for their right to full citizenship and their right to vote acted
accordingly. They assumed their obligation to justify and redeemed this obligation when
advocating. Goodwin and Innocenti report that claim C was presented and argued for in many
occasions. Following their reconstruction of the argument in one of the studied cases (2016, p.
454), it went like this,
P1. Women are citizens of the United States.
P2. Voting is a privilege or immunity of citizenship.
P3. The (new) 14th Amendment to the Constitution provides that “no State shall make or
enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United
States.”
C. Therefore, no state can abridge women’s right to vote.
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Note that, by giving reasons (P1 to P3), the suffragists provided their addressees with the kind
of argumentative support needed for them to recognise the suffragists’ advocating exercitive.
The suffragists’ adducing reasons eventually forced their addressees to credit the suffragists
with the appropriate authority for their advocacy. The fact that, historically, it took a long time
to influence addressees so that they gave their support to women’s voting rights does not
prevent the suffragists’ discourse from being a successful illocutionary act of advocacy.
Interestingly, the suffragists’ redemption of their obligation to give reasons was not prompted
by a corresponding request of justification from their addressees, but by their resistance to
recognise the suffragists’ pursued illocution. In virtue of supporting their cause with reasons,
the suffragists’ exercitive was to be recognised as such by their audiences. Even if, for a long
period of time, these audiences did not get moved in their attitudes (a perlocutionary effect), the
illocutionary speech act was correctly, successfully performed.
6. Acts of arguing
In the preceding sections, the focus has been on the speech act of advocating as an exercitive.
Formerly, a distinction was introduced between two approaches to advocacy, namely, advocacy
as a complex communicative activity that aims to persuade and gain support in favour of a
position (Adv1), and the illocution of advocating as a type of speech act (Adv2). It was pointed
out that an act of advocating can be performed without presenting any arguments and detached
from any embedding in a persuasion dialogue. Yet I have tried to show that this illocution is
connected in an essential way to acts of arguing, in as much as the advocate’s capability to
influence her addressees is dependent on the authority she may be credited with by them in
virtue of so doing. In contexts of advocacy (as something different from contexts of e.g. threats
or bribery), giving reasons is a procedure available to the speaker for her illocution to be
recognised and successfully performed. If this contention is correct, then performing the
illocution of advocating leads to acts of arguing in a conventional and direct form.
My interest lies in argumentation understood as a special communicative activity. As such, it
can serve many different purposes, and the intention to persuade undoubtedly is a prominent
one. This makes of argumentation a common activity connecting the two approaches to
advocacy here distinguished. Notice that (Adv1) sees advocacy as entering into persuasion
dialogues, and thus also as usually involving argumentation -possibly together with the recourse
to rhetorical devices and other means of persuasion. Notwithstanding this, I doubt that
argumentation could serve the purpose of persuading (which is, as already said, a perlocutionary
consequence), if it were not an essentially justificatory practice. Thus I endorse the view
according to which in argumentation, speakers present reasons, data, evidence, etc. in order to
give support to a claim and thus present it as justified.
Moreover, I find insightful the reconstruction of arguments originally put forward by Stephen
Toulmin (1958). Following Toulmin’s model, I take it that whenever a speaker engages in the
activity of giving reasons (facts, evidence, etc.) in order to present a claim as justified, she is
presenting herself (usually in a tacit, implicit way) as committed to the inferential license that
authorises the step from reasons to claim. I also find correct the point of view according to
which argumentation, as a (preeminently) linguistic and communicative activity, can be
analysed in terms of a speech act complex6. To that extent, my references to acts of arguing can
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6 As is well known, a first treatment of argumentation as a speech act complex (and the introduction of
the term) is due to the joint work of Frans van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst (1982, 2004). A more
recent use of the term, within the framework of an original and compelling theoretical model, is due to
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be seen as entailing the tenet that giving reasons is part of a more complex speech act, which in
any case answers to the general orientation outlined.
7. Conclusion
My point of departure has been Jean Goodwin and Beth Innocenti’s joint work on the pragmatic
force of “making reasons apparent”. In my view, the kind of enactment they are considering in
their (2016) should be analysed as embedded in acts of advocacy. To the extend that it is so, I
have suggested that the speech act, if successful, institutes a normative framework where the
speaker’s obligation to justify cannot be redeemed by a mere “making reasons apparent”,
without further qualification.
I have presented a view of acts of advocating as exercitive speech acts. My contention has been
that the authority the speaker needs in order to perform her illocution successfully -that is to
say, in order to be recognised by their addressees as an agent capable of exerting influence-, is
bestowed upon her in view of the reasons she can give, and they can acknowledge, in support of
her position. It is in virtue of the advocate’s giving reasons that she can be credited with the
capability to try and exert influence on their addressees. This authority is bestowed on her by
their addressees’ recognition that her position may be and is defended with reasons. I have
contended also that the effective influence that the advocating act can, or cannot achieve -its
effectively influencing the advocate’s addressees as intended by her- should be considered a
perlocutionary consequence, as something different from the conventional effect due to the
illocution.
The previous ideas impinge on the relation between advocacy and enactment. To the extent that
enactment is characterised as a mere “making reasons apparent”, its power to induce certain
inferences on the addressees (and other social agents) should be seen as a perlocutionary
consequence. This general assessment does not contradict the possibility that, in certain cases,
the very activity of arguing in public might qualify as directly showing the evidence that
supports a particular claim. Here, my contention has been that this is only possible in certain
particular cases, and only if the activity of “making reasons manifest” can be recognised as a
correct performance of genuine acts of arguing.
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Lilian Bermejo-Luque (2011). Although I do not endorse in their entirety these (different) theoretical
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