Arguments and Speech Acts

© 2003 by Teed Rockwell

An argument is what philosophers call a speech act. It is something that we do with words in order to fulfill a goal or purpose. But there are many other speech acts which have different goals and/or means of achieving those goals, which are sometimes mistakenly seen as arguments. A child might say “Mommy and Daddy are arguing”, when in fact they are only insulting each other, or complaining. One effective way of identifying a speech act is by identifying what it is trying to achieve, and how it is trying to achieve it. The goal of an argument is to convince…