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
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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'.
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