Commitments continued

My target article outlines a pragmatic theory centred on the notion of commitment, which I believe is simpler and more general than what has been on offer so far. First, I argue that commitments are involved in a wider variety of utterances than are covered by alternative accounts, and are also the basis for turn-taking (question–answer, greeting–greeting, and so on). Second, the theory features a new analysis of common ground in terms of commitment sharing, which not only accommodates assertions and presuppositions, but affords a general account of how the common ground is changed by speech acts and the responses they elicit from their addressees. Third, the theory includes and extends the Gricean theory of cooperative communication, which also accounts for the sincerity inferences associated with various speech act types. Last, the theory shows how we can get much of our communicative business done without attributing mental states to each other, thus paving the way for a better understanding of the phylogeny and ontogeny of human communication. These are the main ideas, and I am pleasantly surprised to see that the critical responses to my article are, on the whole, constructive and supportive. At the same time, I find it oddly reassuring that there is a small but vocal minority representing the intentionalist establishment, who find no merit in my theory whatsoever, and are out for the kill. As Nietzsche used to say, what does not kill you makes you stronger. In the following, I will address a fair number of the issues raised bymy critics, but first I would like to clarify my project by mentioning some of the objectives I was not trying to achieve. To beginwith, it was notmy purpose to provide, defend, or criticize any taxonomy of speech acts, or analyse in detail any type of speech act; nor did I want even to suggest, let alone argue, that an industrial strength theory of speech acts can be built from commitments alone. If there are gaps in my theory (and there are many), I will first try to fill them with such conceptual