Keywords:
complex speech acts, deontic modal competence, deliberative dialogue, disagreement, illocutionary effect, illocutionary interaction, M. SbisàCopyright (c) 2024 Revista Iberoamericana de Argumentación
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Abstract
Devil’s advocacy is widely known and studied as a virtuous argumentative strategy, whose use is often encouraged in deliberative settings in view of its trademark epistemic benefits. By contrast, little to no scholarly attention has been devoted to the increasingly common uses of devil’s advocacy as a harmful argumentative tactic, observed in particular in the context of conversations about racial and gender-based discrimination and oppression. We suggest that the observed usage patterns may be partly explained as improper manipulations of the characteristic illocutionary force of the manoeuvre. We further argue that adopting a normative approach to speech acts is more appropriate for accounting for the types of incorrect uses of the move, as for their consequences on the conversational participants.
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