Support and evaluation

The notion of support is quite heterogeneous: We talk, for example, of pillars providing physical support to a ceiling, of empirical findings providing evidential support to hypotheses, and of one person providing financial support to another. The topic of this note is yet another kind of support, which has received relatively little attention-one person's support of another's action. In what follows I argue that support of this type is best construed (at least in some cases) as a speech act, and I discuss the relations of this kind of speech act to expressions of evaluative judgment.