Abstract
In "Intention and Convention in Speech Acts", Strawson influentially argued for a distinction between essentially conventional acts and communicative acts: conventional acts rely on extralinguistic conventions for their successful execution; communicativeacts do not. Drawing on Adolf Reinach's (1913) and Thomas Reid's (1785) conceptions of social acts, I propose to introduce a distinction within the category of communicative/unconventional acts, between those that are essentially social or second-personal and those that are not. The latter do not require the assurance of reception in order to be successful; the former, on the other hand, depend on joint attitudes for their realization. I will adopt the concept of second-personal communicative acts as a fundamental category in the classification of illocutionary acts, and highlight the benefits of basing this classification on second-personal aspects of communication.
