Fall Colloquium Series: Hallie Liberto

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Please join FSU Philosophy for the next talk in our Fall 2026 Colloquium Series:

Speaker: Hallie Liberto (University of Maryland)

Title: Non-Committal Threats

Abstract:

Many philosophers argue that threats have no distinctive illocutionary force and often operate obscurely and ambiguously rather than through a mutually recognized speech act. When they do carry illocutionary force (the argument goes) they piggy-back on other speech acts - like assertions, directives, or warnings. However, of those who do think that some threats comprise a special kind of unified speech act, the most popular view is that they are a type of commissive, like a promise, but with dark content.

I am developing a competing, unified theory of threats as speech acts. However, in this paper (or colloquium, rather), I'm going to focus on just one part of that theory. i introduce and examine three kinds of non-commissive threats, which I call: terrorizing threats, target-making threats, and unbinding threats. I argue that the second two of these non-committal threats can be (and should be) theorized together with committal threats as different versions of the same speech act. I go on to explain how unbinding threats in particular can play a unique role in coercion, especially institutional coercion, and upset some standard assumptions about threat-making in moral philosophy.