Speech Act Theory the Founding Fathers

SPEECH ACT THEORY – THE FOUNDING FATHERS

Asist. univ. Maria Ştefănescu

Univ. "1 Decembrie 1919", Alba Iulia

The paper offers an account of the beginnings of speech act theory. It will focus mainly on the contributions of J. L. Austin, J. Searle and H.P. Grice.

1 REDISCOVERING ORDINARY LANGUAGE

About two thousand years ago, Aristotle noticed that language was indeterminate with regard to matters of truth and falsity - any linguistic expression was an instance of logos semantikos (i.e. it had a meaning, it signified something) but not all expressions were true or false (of the three types of logoi - apophatikos, pragmatikos and poetikos - only the first could be tested for its truth value). At the beginning of the twentieth century, the neo-positivist scholars of the Vienna Circle had forgotten much of Aristotle’s lesson. Rather discontented with the vagueness and potential ambiguity of everyday language, they set as their main task to translate ordinary sentences into a better (i.e. more logical) wording. R. Carnap even formulated the two necessary and sufficient conditions under which alone a sentence could be deemed significant: a proposition was “logically correct” and meaningful if and only if it could either be confirmed by empirical evidence or derived through successive inferences from correct premises. Obviously enough, Carnap’s position was strongly reductionistic and, in a peculiar way, dogmatic - it proclaimed the universal validity of certain criteria and claimed that any sentence which failed to meet them was, strictly speaking, meaningless.

Much of J. L. Austin’s epoch - making book, How to Do Things with Words (at first, a series of lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955) is directed against this oversimplified view of language. A central tenet of Austin’s theory is that no philosophical school can afford to study language in itself, without paying any attention to pragmatic aspects. To abstract artificially sentences and then propositions from real everyday talk and to confine one’s interest to them alone is to elude the great complexity of linguistic communication. Moreover, Austin claims, the distinctions which philosophers think up in their studies are much less valuable and subtle than those already made in ordinary speech. The right path towards giving a fairly accurate account of how language works does not involve the construction of artificial logical systems but rather “very detailed and minute studies of ordinary language - studies through which, it is hoped, its richness may be revealed by making explicit the distinctions of which we usually have only a confused knowledge and by describing the disparate functions of many sorts of linguistic expressions”1.

Austin’s first move in How to Do Things with Words is to question the validity of the long cherished assumption that the main function of language is to give a true or false description of objective reality. Empirical evidence compels him to conclude that there are actually numberless utterances to which one cannot ascribe any truth-value at all. When one apologizes or complains or promises something or proposes marriage or even performs one, he does not describe any preexistent state of affairs nor points to any external reality but rather produces a conventional referent by the very issuing of that particular utterance. In other words, there is a category of verbs - the so-called “performative verbs” (‘to bet’, ‘to request’, ‘to threat’, ‘to congratulate’, ‘to

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welcome’, ‘to declare war’, ‘to baptize’ a.s.o.) - which, when deployed with their performative function, actually do things. One’s promise, Austin says, will never be true or false but it can turn out to be felicitous or infelicitous. The success or failure of such utterances is a matter of collective accord and depends on the agreements observed by various sociolinguistic communities. One could not overemphasize the importance within the speech act theory of the notion of social convention (in fact, Austin even considered adopting the word ‘contractual’ instead of inventing the word ‘performative’). The ‘referent’ of “I now pronounce you husband and wife” is the conventional effect of a conventional procedure and the marriage will only be a fact if the ceremony is made under the previously specified appropriate circumstances. In How to Do Things with Words, Austin provides a list of what he calls the “felicity conditions” for any performative utterance:

“(A.1) There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances, and further,

(A.2) the particular persons and circumstances in a given case must be appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked.

(B.1) The procedure itself must be executed by all participants both correctly and

(B.2) completely.

(G.1) Where, as often, the procedure is designed for use by persons having certain thoughts or feelings for the inauguration of certain consequential conduct on the part of any participant, then a person participating in and so invoking the procedure must in fact have those thoughts or feelings, and the participants must intend so to conduct themselves and further,

(G.2) must actually so conduct themselves subsequently”2.

Austin’s distinction, with regard to the various types of infelicity, between the four rules A and B taken together and the two rules G, comes down to the difference between “misfires” (the cases when the intended action fails to come off owing to inappropriate circumstances) and “abuses” (when the act is executed but infelicitously - for instance, a promise made in bad faith).

A brief account is necessary of the steps through which “what starts off as a theory about some special and particular utterances ends up as a general theory of language “3. Austin’s technique of constantly questioning each seemingly firm conclusion makes him give up the idea that performatives are accidental aspects of speech in favour of the view that there is a large class of performative utterances which includes both explicit and implicit performatives; later on, the dichotomy constative - performative itself will be dislocated and replaced with an overall theory of illocutionary acts: “The doctrine of the performative/constative distinction stands on the doctrine of locutionary and: illocutionary acts in the total speech act as the special theory to the general theory. And the need for the general theory arises simply because the traditional ‘statement’ is an abstraction, an ideal, and so is its traditional truth/falsity”4.

Since statements are liable to every kind of infelicity to which performatives are liable (i.e. they can go wrong in various ways because of disabilities which make them unhappy without, however, making them true or false), one is bound to admit that, ultimately, stating is performing an act. The conclusion is given in the shape of a summary: “We first distinguished a group of things we do in saying something, which together we summed up by saying we perform a locutionary act, which is roughly equivalent to uttering a certain sentence with a certain sense and reference, which again is roughly equivalent to ‘meaning’ in the traditional sense. Secondly we said that we also perform illocutionary acts such as informing, ordering, warning, undertaking etc. , i.e. utterances which have a certain (conventional) force. Thirdly, we may also perform perlocutionary acts: what we bring about or achieve by saying something, such as convincing, persuading, deterring and even, say, surprising or misleading”5.

It is important to notice here Austin’s strong emphasis on the conventional nature of illocutionary force (the issue was to become a stumbling block for later speech act theories - see, for instance, Strawson’s criticism of Searle’s “amendments” to Grice’s theory of meaning). Whereas the perlocutionary effects are subjective and virtually unpredictable, the illocutionary force is determinate, in principle at least, because it has its roots in a conventional system of social interaction. The speech performance examined with reference to the context of interlocution - “the total speech act in the total speech situation” - is said to be “the only actual phenomenon which, in the last resort, we are engaged in elucidating “6. Austin’s profession of faith, pragmatist avant la lettre, is rendered more explicit when he distinguishes between illocutionary effects and perlocutionary results and focuses his attention on the former. The successfulness of a speech act hinges in part on securing uptake (the understanding of the meaning and of the force of the locution), taking effect and inviting a response; in other words, the triad speaker - utterance - hearer, placed within a social context, is only brought to life by the interplay of communicative intentions and effects.

2 SEARLE, THE CRUSADER

It is beyond doubt that the second great contribution to the development of speech act theory belongs to the American philosopher J. R. Searle. One could argue, nevertheless, that the two important books he publishes on the topic are also, in a way, a little of a hindrance to the progress of the theory. With strong determination, Searle sets to putting thing in order in the allegedly untamed field of speech act studies: he dismisses Austin’s characterizations in terms of loose “family relationships” and provides instead stern rules and rigidified necessary and sufficient conditions. His own account of his method will do as a good introduction: “The hypothesis then of this work [Speech Acts. An Essay in the Philosophy of Language] is that speaking a language is engaging in a rule - governed form of behaviour. To put it more briskly, talking is performing acts according to rules. In order to substantiate that hypothesis and explicate speech, I shall state some of the rules according to which we talk. The procedure which I shall follow is to state a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for the performance of particular kinds of speech acts and then extract from those conditions sets of semantic rules for the use of the linguistic devices which mark the utterances as speech acts of those kinds”1.

The big problem for Searle is how to link illocutionary force with such illocutionary force indicating devices (IFIDS) as performative verbs, word order, stress, intonation contour, punctuation, the mood of the verbs etc. In order to find a solution, he draws on Rawls’ distinction between regulative rules and constitutive rules: the former control antecedently/independently existing activities (eg. traffic regulations) whereas the latter create the activities themselves. Thus, Searle notices, in the case of a football game, if there were no rules of football there would be no sense at all in which the player’s behaviour could be described as playing football. Similar constitutive rules underlie the performance of each speech act and provide the necessary link between IFIDS and their corresponding illocutionary acts. This conclusion encourages Searle to postulate the existence of a set of adequacy conditions, different from those specified by Austin, the most important of which is called “the essential condition” and is said to work on the pattern “uttering IFID X counts as doing Y”. The other three prerequisites are the preparatory condition, the propositional content condition (it concerns real-world constraints on the meaning of utterances) and the condition on sincerity. Searle’s devising his own adequacy conditions does not separate him from Austin (despite S. Petrey’s opinion that the American philosopher privileges the present definition of the act performed - X counts as Y - over the prior social reality necessary for speech to act, in fact Searle does take into account the conventional nature of all constitutive rules2) but the sincerity condition is certainly a point on which the two philosophers are hardly at one. Unlike Austin, for whom subjective intentions do not matter and who is careful to specify that a promise remains a promise even if it is given in bad faith, Searle decides to direct attention to individual performance rather than collective production and to rank sincerity of intention among the sine qua non conditions for successful speech acts.

Under the Searlean revision, Austin’s theory undergoes further significant changes: although the central notions of illocution and perlocution are preserved with their initial meaning, the old locutionary act is split in two so that uttering words (morphemes, sentences etc.) is said to count as performing utterance acts, while referring and predicating will be equivalent to producing propositional acts. For many readers of Speech Acts, Searle’s strong emphasis on the propositional acts (the chapters about meaning and predication cover almost half of the volume) might look like a roundabout way of resurrecting the language - as - description theory. After all, the very first sentence of the book is “How do words relate to the world ?”. But, although he states that “to know the meaning of a general term and hence a predicative expression is to know under what conditions it is true/false of a given objects” (emphasis added)

and that “If a speaker asserts a proposition concerning an object he commits himself to there being the state of affairs in the world in which the predicate is true of the object (and mutatis mutandis for other kinds of speech acts). The predication indicates which state of affairs concerning the objects the speaker is committing himself to’’3, Searle is eager to specify that he keeps in mind a safe distinction between brute facts and institutional facts and is fully aware, unlike the supporters of extensionalism, that propositional acts can never occur, alone i.e. one cannot just refer or predicate without performing at the same time some other illocutionary act.