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AbstractThis paper sets out to unpack the pragmatic structure of refusal—its illocutionary nature, success conditions, and normative effects. I argue that our ordinary concept of refusal captures a whole family of illocutions, comprising acts such as rejecting, declining, and the like, which share the property of being 'negative second-turn illocutions'. Only proper refusals (i.e. negative replies to permission requests), I submit, require speaker authority. I construe the 'refusal family' as a subclass of the directives-commissives intersection. After defending my view against a number of potential objections, I highlight how a theoretically grounded analysis of refusal is not only of intrinsic value, but may also have significant moral and legal implications.

Marina Sbisà's Deontic Approach to Speech Actions -- Should Speech Act Theory Eschew Propositions? -- On the Conventional Nature of Illocutionary Acts: Uptake, Conventions, and Illocutionary Effects -- Varieties of Uptake -- Interactional Negotiation -- Some Varieties of Illocutionary Pluralism -- Speech Acts and Ventriloquation: The Contribution of Marina Sbisà to a General Theory of Action and Performativity -- Towards a Unified Theory of Illocutionary Normativity -- llocutionary Force, Speech Act Norms, and the Coordination and Mutuality of Conversational Expectations -- Speech in Non-ideal Conditions: On Silence and Being Silenced -- A Speech-Act Theoretic Analysis of White (Prosocial) Lies -- Presupposition and Propaganda: A Socially Extended Analysis -- Replies to Contributors.

AbstractIt is prima facie uncontroversial that the justification of an assertion amounts to a collection of other (inferentially related) assertions. In this paper, we point at a class of assertions, i.e. mathematical assertions, that appear to systematically flout this principle. To justify a mathematical assertion (e.g. a theorem) is to provide a proof—and proofs are sequences of directives. The claim is backed up by linguistic data on the use of imperatives in proofs, and by a pragmatic analysis of theorems and their proofs. Proofs, we argue, are sequences of instructions whose performance inevitably gets one to truth. It follows that a felicitous theorem, i.e. a theorem that has been correctly proven, is a persuasive theorem. When it comes to mathematical assertions, there is no sharp distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary success.