Texts, Textual Acts and the History of Science

The book presents the outcomes of an innovative research programme in the history of science and implements a Text Act Theory which extends Speech Act Theory, in order to illustrate a new approach to texts and textual communicative acts. It examines assertives (absolute or conditional statements, forecasts, insurance, etc.), directives, declarations and enumerations, as well as different types of textual units allowing authors to perform these acts: algorithms, recipes, prescriptions, lexical templates for terminological studies and enumerative structures. The book relies on the study of a broad range of documents of the past dealing with various domains: mathematics, zoology, medicine, lexicography. The documents examined come from scholarly sources from different parts of the world, such as China, Europe, India, Mesopotamia and are written in a variety of European languages as well as Chinese, Cuneiform and Sanskrit. This approach proves fruitful in both history of science and Text Act Theory.

The book presents the outcomes of an innovative research programme in the history of science and implements a Text Act Theory which extends Speech Act Theory, in order to illustrate a new approach to texts and textual communicative acts. It examines assertives (absolute or conditional statements, forecasts, insurance, etc.), directives, declarations and enumerations, as well as different types of textual units allowing authors to perform these acts: algorithms, recipes, prescriptions, lexical templates for terminological studies and enumerative structures. The book relies on the study of a broad range of documents of the past dealing with various domains: mathematics, zoology, medicine, lexicography. The documents examined come from scholarly sources from different parts of the world, such as China, Europe, India, Mesopotamia and are written in a variety of European languages as well as Chinese, Cuneiform and Sanskrit. This approach proves fruitful in both history of science and Text Act Theory.

Chapter 1. Prologue: Textual acts and the history of science; Karine Chemla & Jacques Virbel.- Part I. Speech acts and textual acts.- Chapter 2. Speech act theory and instructional texts; Jacques Virbel.- Chapter 3. The issue of textual genres in the medical literature produced in late imperial China; Florence Bretelle-Establet.- Chapter 4. Zoological nomenclature and speech act theory; Yves Cambefort.- Chapter 5. Ordering operations in square root extractions. Analyzing some early medieval Sanskrit mathematical texts with the help of speech act theory; Agathe Keller.- Part II. Enumerations as textual acts.- Chapter 6. The description of enumerations; Jacques Virbel.- Chapter 7. The enumeration structure of 爾雅 Ěryǎ's "Semantic Lists"; Michel Teboul.- Chapter 8. A tree-structured list in a mathematical series text from Mesopotamia; Christine Proust.- Chapter 9. Describing texts for algorithms: how they prescribe operations and integrate cases. Reflections based on ancient Chinese mathematical sources; Karine Chemla.- Chapter 10. A work on the degree of generality revealed in the organization of lists: Poincaré's classification of singular points of differential equations; Anne Robadey.