“Actually, Scratch That!”: A Tour into the Illocutionary Fabric of Retraction

Retraction maneuvers are common currency and play a significant role in our discursive practices, as well as in our social and political lives. By expanding upon previous work (Caponetto, Synthese 197: 2399–2414, 2020) and engaging with recent contributions to the topic (esp., Kukla, Steinberg, ‘I really didn’t say everything I said’: The pragmatics of retraction. In: Townsend et al. (eds.), The social institution of discursive norms. Historical, naturalistic, and pragmatic perspectives. Routledge, New York and London, 2021), I set out to unpack the illocutionary fabric of retraction. I construe retraction as a higher-order speech act whose definitional function is to cancel the normative update enacted by some previous, lower-order speech act. I identify and examine a set of general felicity conditions for retraction. The picture that emerges includes the following features. (i) Retraction operates on felicitous speech acts: since you cannot cancel what was never done, any attempt to retract an infelicitous act would result in an infelicitous retraction. (ii) One can only retract one’s own speech acts—as such, retracting involves admitting responsibility or authorship. (iii) Depending on the act to be retracted, a retraction may require that the audience recognizes and accepts the speaker’s attempt to retract. I conclude by stressing that retractions are often accompanied by reason-stating assertions, whose insincerity may affect the felicity of the retraction.