| Summary: | There are two views of the essences of speech acts: according to one view, they are <em>natural kinds</em>; according to the other, they are what I call <em>normative kinds</em> — kinds in the (possibly non-reductive) definition of which some normative term occurs. In this article I show that speech acts can be normative but also natural kinds by deriving Williamson’s account of assertion, on which it is an act individuated, and constitutively governed, by a norm (the knowledge rule), from a consideration of the natural characteristics of normal cases of its performance.
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