come to accept that individuals or institutions can grant rights - and impose obligations - through the issuance of an appropriate document, and practitioners of diplomatic give the label 'dispositive' to documents that substantiate actions of this kind; documents that supply evidence of actions that were 'complete before being manifested in writing' are labelled 'probative' (Duranti, 1998, pp. 65-66; Duranti Preston, 2008, pp. 811, 830). Both labels are confined to documents whose written form is legally (or 'juridically') recognised. Although the English word 'record' is not native to the civil-law traditions in which diplomatic scholarship has flourished (Yeo, 2015, p. 315), diplomatists working in an English-speaking environment have equated records with the documents that are the focus of diplomatic study, and have thus been able to claim that the field of diplomatic 'categorizes records according to their relationship with the acts that caused their creation' (Duranti, 2010, pp. 1594, 1596). Many diplomatists have also sought to expand the scope of their field beyond the study of documents or records with legal consequences, to encompass records relating to any aspect of human affairs (Boyle, 1992, pp. 87-88; Duranti, 2010, p. 1594). Recognising that records now play a variety of roles outside the legal arena, they have attempted to apply or adapt diplomatic principles and methods to new forms of record in the contemporary world. In Germany, for example, 20th-century scholars set out to extend the range of diplomatic beyond urkunden (diplomas and charters) to akten (office files). In some quarters, however, this endeavour generated a critical response; because diplomatic criteria remained the norm and office files did not fulfil this norm, 'they were simply treated as the other of diplomas', as non- urkunden (Vismann, 2008, p. 75). Much the same can be said of Luciana Duranti's proposal to cater for an expanded scope of diplomatic by supplementing the traditional categories of 'dispositive' and 'probative' with additional categories of 'narrative' and 'supporting' records. In Duranti's writings, 'narrative' records are described as constituting 'evidence of activities that are juridically irrelevant', and 'supporting' records are said to constitute evidence of activities that are juridically relevant but do not 'result in a juridical act' (Duranti, 1998, pp. 68-69; Duranti Preston, 2008, pp. 825, 840).1 Juridical relevance - or the presence or absence of legal consequences - appears to be the yardstick by which all records and activities are assessed. Although the questions that diplomatic scholarship asks (can I trust this record? do I think it is authentic?) are pertinent to records of any kind, its analytic approach to answering them arguably works best when applied to the legalistic records for which it was first designed. For diplomatists, such records remain the prototype,2 and other forms of record are judged by what they lack in relation to them. Speech act theory In earlier work (Yeo, 2010), I argued that concepts of 'speech acts', developed in the second half of the 20th century by the Oxford-educated philosophers J. L. Austin and John Searle, offer a fruitful alternative approach to understanding the connections between records and activity. Speech act theory affirms that, in speaking or writing under the right conditions, we can perform certain kinds of act. Although it was discussed occasionally in archival literature before 2010 (Brothman, 2002, p. 320; Henttonen, 2007; Underwood, 2008), the applicability of speech act theory to archival science has not been widely addressed. The studies by Austin (1962) and Searle (1969; 1979; 1995) tended to give more emphasis to speaking than to writing, and Searle's promotion of the label 'speech acts' has probably obscured the relevance of their concepts to a discipline such as archival science, which is largely concerned with written documents. Nevertheless, speech act theory has been explored and adapted by numerous scholars in philosophy and other fields, including many who have applied it to acts performed by means of written texts (Cooren, 2004; Doty Hiltunen, 2009; Ferraris, 2013; Kurzon, 1986; Lee, 1988; Smith, 2014; Winograd Flores, 1986).3 In his seminal work How to do things with words (1962), Austin challenged the assumption that the sole function of language is to transmit information. His examples of what he called 'performative' uses of language included utterances such as 'I pronounce you guilty', 'I bequeath you my watch', 'I apologise', and 'I name this ship'. He noted that a ruler or official who says 'I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth' does not simply tell her listeners what the ship is to be called; by uttering these words, she performs the act of giving the ship its name. Likewise, when I write 'I apologise' in an email, I do not merely send information about an apology; I perform the act of apologising. Broadly similar ideas had been proposed earlier in the 20th century by the American pragmatic philosopher George Herbert Mead, who wrote that 'language does not simply symbolize a situation or object which is already there in advance; it is a part of the mechanism whereby that situation or object is created' (1934, p. 78). At a yet earlier date, the German philosopher Adolf Reinach (1913), and before him the Scotsman Thomas Reid (1788), had attempted to analyse language in terms of social acts. Austin (1962) likewise noted that to ask a question, give an order, or make a promise is to perform an act, and he proceeded to argue that stating a proposition is also performing an act. Making a statement is no less a social act than apologising, bequeathing a watch, or naming a ship. After Austin's death, his thinking was further developed by his former pupil Searle, who propounded a taxonomy of speech acts that many subsequent writers have found useful. Searle (1979, pp.12-20) identified five basic categories of speech act: assertives, expressives, directives, commissives, and declaratives. In an assertive act, speakers or writers state a proposition about how things are, were, or will be;4 in an expressive, they express their feelings or attitudes; in a directive, they ask a question or attempt to get someone to do something; in a commissive, they commit archives in liquid times 96 geoffrey yeo information, records, and the philosophy of speech acts 1 These distinctions may be more intuitive to archivists working in civil-law jurisdictions than to archivists in common-law countries unfamiliar with notions of 'juridical acts' and 'juridical relevance'. However, the categorisation of 'narrative' and 'supporting' records that Duranti invented does not seem to have been widely adopted outside her own research and the work of the researchers she has directed. More recently, she has identified 'instructive' and 'enabling' as further categories that are said to be characteristic of digital environments (Duranti Preston, 2008, pp. 814, 819; Duranti, 2010, p. 1596). 2 For an account of prototype theory and its application to understandings of records, see Yeo (2008). 3 Scholars such as Zsolt Batori (2015) have also considered the application of speech act theory to images and visual resources, but these lie beyond the scope of this chapter. 4 In Searle's approach to speech act theory, other types of speech act besides assertives are assumed to have 'propositional content' (Searle, 1979, pp. 14-20; cf. Hanks, 2015, pp. 200-204), but in this chapter the term 'proposition' is used in its general sense of 'the content of an assertion'. 97

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