Authority, Illocutionary Accommodation, and Social Accommodation

Abstract

ABSTRACT By appeal to the phenomenon of presupposition accommodation, Rae Langton and others have proposed that speakers can gain genuine authority over their audiences when they implicitly claim such authority and the audience accommodates them. I address this argument in two ways. First, I explain where and why we should expect authority within particular conventional practices to be able to be gained by accommodation, considering the balance of values and norms that authority claims implicate. Second, I argue that audiences will often have good reason to accommodate the speaker without recognising a claim of authority over them. To explain how audiences can accomplish this, I propose the mechanism of social accommodation. In social accommodation, audiences exercise control over the context in order to bring speakers and their utterances into conformity with background social norms, including moral, legal, and religious norms. In this way, audiences can impose their understanding of the prevailing valid norms onto speakers.