Understanding Speech Acts: An Explication of Illocutionary Acts by John Searle, Study Guides, Projects, Research of French Literature

Download Understanding Speech Acts: An Explication of Illocutionary Acts by John Searle and more Study Guides, Projects, Research French Literature in PDF only on Docsity! WHAT IS A SPEECH ACT? 1 2 What is a Speech Act? John Searle I. Introduction In a typical speech situation involving a speaker, a hearer, and an utterance by the speaker, there are many kinds of acts associated with the speaker’s utterance. The speaker will characteristically have moved his jaw and tongue and made noises. In addition, he will characteristically have performed some acts within the class which includes informing or irritating or boring his hearers; he will further characteristically have performed acts within the class which includes referring to Kennedy or Khrushchev or the North Pole; and he will also have performed acts within the class which includes making statements, asking questions, issuing commands, giving reports, greeting, and warning. The members of this last class are what Austin1 called illocutionary acts and it is with this class that I shall be concerned in this paper, so the paper might have been called ‘What is an Illocutionary Act?’ I do not attempt to defi ne the expression ‘illocutionary act’, although if my analysis of a particular illocutionary act succeeds it may provide the basis for a defi nition. Some of the English verbs and verb phrases associated with illocutionary acts are: state, assert, describe, warn, remark, comment, command, order, request, criticize, apologize, censure, approve, welcome, promise, express approval, and express regret. Austin claimed that there were over a thousand such expressions in English. By way of introduction, perhaps I can say why I think it is of interest and importance in the philosophy of language to study speech acts, or, as they are sometimes called, language acts or linguistic acts. I think it is essential to any specimen of linguistic communication that it involve a linguistic act. It is not, as has generally been supposed, the symbol or Source: Maurice Black (ed.), Philosophy in America, London: Allen and Unwin, 1965, pp. 221—239. 2 PRAGMATICS, DISCOURSE ANALYSIS AND SOCIO LINGUISTICS word or sentence, or even the token of the symbol or word or sentence, which is the unit of linguistic communication, but rather it is the production of the token in the performance of the speech act that constitutes the basic unit of linguistic communication. To put this point more precisely, the production of the sentence token under certain conditions is the illocutionary act, and the illocutionary act is the minimal unit of linguistic communication. I do not know how to prove that linguistic communication essentially involves acts but I can think of arguments with which one might attempt to convince someone who was sceptical. One argument would be to call the sceptic’s attention to the fact that when he takes a noise or a mark on paper to be an instance of linguistic communication, as a message, one of the things that is involved in his so taking that noise or mark is that he should regard it as having been produced by a being with certain intentions. He cannot just regard it as a natural phenomenon, like a stone, a waterfall, or a tree. In order to regard it as an instance of linguistic communication one must suppose that its production is what I am calling a speech act. It is a logical presupposition, for example, of current attempts to decipher the Mayan hieroglyphs that we at least hypothesize that the marks we see on the stones were produced by beings more or less like ourselves and produced with certain kinds of intentions. If we were certain the marks were a consequence of, say, water erosion, then the question of deciphering them or even calling them hieroglyphs could not arise. To construe them under the category of linguistic communication necessarily involves construing their production as speech acts. To perform illocutionary acts is to engage in a rule-governed form of behaviour. I shall argue that such things as asking questions or making statements are rule-governed in ways quite similar to those in which getting a base hit in baseball or moving a knight in chess are rule-governed forms of acts. I intend therefore to explicate the notion of an illocutionary act by stating a set of necessary and suffi cient conditions for the performance of a particular kind of illocutionary act, and extracting from it a set of semantical rules for the use of the expression (or syntactic device) which marks the utterance as an illocutionary act of that kind. If I am successful in stating the conditions and the corresponding rules for even one kind of illocutionary act, that will provide us with a pattern for analysing other kinds of acts and consequently for explicating the notion in general. But in order to set the stage for actually stating conditions and extracting rules for performing an illocutionary act I have to discuss three other preliminary notions: rules, propositions, and meaning. I shall confi ne my dis- cussion of these notions to those aspects which are essential to my main purposes in this paper, but, even so, what I wish to say concerning each of these notions, if it were to be at all complete, would require a paper for each; however, sometimes it may be worth sacrifi cing thoroughness for the sake of scope and I shall therefore be very brief. WHAT IS A SPEECH ACT? 5 (3) John, leave the room! (4) Would that John left the room. (5) If John will leave the room, I will leave also. Utterances of each of these on a given occasion would characteristically be performances of different illocutionary acts. The fi rst would, character- istically, be a question, the second an assertion about the future, that is, a prediction, the third a request or order, the fourth an expression of a wish, and the fi fth a hypothetical expression of intention. Yet in the performance of each the speaker would characteristically perform some subsidiary acts which are common to all fi ve illocutionary acts. In the utterance of each the speaker refers to a particular person John and predicates the act of leaving the room of that person. In no case is that all he does, but in every case it is a part of what he does. I shall say, therefore, that in each of these cases, although the illocutionary acts are different, at least some of the non- illocutionary acts of reference and predication are the same. The reference to some person John and predication of the same thing of him in each of these illocutionary acts inclines me to say that there is a common content in each of them. Something expressible by the clause ‘that John will leave the room’ seems to be a common feature of all. We could, with not too much distortion, write each of these sentences in a way which would isolate this common feature: ‘I assert that John will leave the room’, ‘I ask whether John will leave the room’, etc. For lack of a better word I propose to call this common content a proposition, and I shall describe this feature of these illocutionary acts by saying that in the utterance of each of (1)—(5) the speaker expresses the proposition that John will leave the room. Notice that I do not say that the sentence expresses the proposition; I do not know how sentences could perform acts of that kind. But I shall say that in the utterance of the sentence the speaker expresses a proposition. Notice also that I am distinguishing between a proposition and an assertion or statement of that proposition. The proposition that John will leave the room is expressed in the utterance of all of (1)—(5) but only in (2) is that proposition asserted. An assertion is an illocutionary act, but a proposition is not an act at all, although the act of expressing a proposition is a part of performing certain illocutionary acts. I might summarise this by saying that I am distinguishing between the illocutionary act and the propositional content of an illocutionary act. Of course, not all illocutionary acts have a proposititional content, for example, an utterance of ‘Hurrah!’ or ‘Ouch!’ does not. In one version or another this distinction is an old one and has been marked in different ways by authors as diverse as Frege, Sheffer, Lewis, Reichenbach and Hare, to mention only a few. 6 PRAGMATICS, DISCOURSE ANALYSIS AND SOCIO LINGUISTICS From a semantical point of view we can distinguish between the prop- ositional indicator in the sentence and the indicator of illocutionary force. That is, for a large class of sentences used to perform illocutionary acts, we can say for the purpose of our analysis that the sentence has two (not ne- cessarily separate) parts, the proposition indicating element and the func- tion indicating device.4 The function indicating device shows how the proposition is to be taken, or, to put it in another way, what illocutionary force the utterance is to have, that is, what illocutionary act the speaker is performing in the utterance of the sentence. Function indicating devices in English include word order, stress, intonation contour, punctuation, the mood of the verb, and fi nally a set of so-called performative verbs: I may indicate the kind of illocutionary act I am performing by beginning the sentence with ‘I apologize’, ‘I warn’, ‘I state’, etc. Often in actual speech situations the context will make it clear what the illocutionary force of the utterance is, without its being necessary to invoke the appropriate function indicating device. If this semantical distinction is of any real importance, it seems likely that it should have some syntactical analogue, and certain recent develop- ments in transformational grammar tend to support the view that it does. In the underlying phrase marker of a sentence there is a distinction between those elements which correspond to the function indicating device and those which correspond to the propositional content. The distinction between the function indicating device and the prop- osition indicating device will prove very useful to us in giving an analysis of an illocutionary act. Since the same proposition can be common to all sorts of illocutionary acts, we can separate our analysis of the proposition from our analysis of kinds of illocutionary acts. I think there are rules for expressing propositions, rules for such things as reference and predication, but those rules can be discussed independently of the rules for function indicating. In this paper I shall not attempt to discuss propositional rules but shall concentrate on rules for using certain kinds of function indicating devices. IV. Meaning Speech acts are characteristically performed in the utterance of sounds or the making or marks. What is the difference between just uttering sounds or making marks and performing a speech act? One difference is that the sounds or marks one makes in the performance of a speech act are characteristically said to have meaning, and a second related difference is that one is characteristically said to mean something by those sounds or marks. Characteristically when one speaks one means something by what WHAT IS A SPEECH ACT? 7 one says, and what one says, the string of morphemes that one emits, is characteristically said to have a meaning. Here, incidentally, is another point at which our analogy between performing speech acts and playing games breaks down. The pieces in a game like chess are not characteristically said to have a meaning, and furthermore when one makes a move one is not characteristically said to mean anything by that move. But what is it for one to mean something by what one says, and what is it for something to have a meaning? To answer the fi rst of these questions I propose to borrow and revise some ideas of Paul Grice. In an article entitled ‘Meaning’.5 Grice gives the following analysis of one sense of the notion of ‘meaning’. To say that A meant something by x is to say that ‘A intended the utterance of x to produce some effect in an audience by means of the recognition of this intention’. This seems to me a useful start on an analysis of meaning, fi rst because it shows the close relationship between the notion of meaning and the notion of intention, and secondly because it captures something which is, I think, essential to speaking a language: In speaking a language I attempt to communicate things to my hearer by means of getting him to recognize my intention to communicate just those things. For example, characteristically, when I make an assertion, I attempt to communicate to and convince my hearer of the truth of a certain proposition; and the means I employ to do this are to utter certain sounds, which utterance I intend to produce in him the desired effect by means of his recognition of my intention to produce just that effect. I shall illustrate this with an example. I might on the one hand attempt to get you to believe that I am French by speaking French all the time, dressing in the French manner, showing wild enthusiasm for de Gaulle, and cultivating French acquaintances. But I might on the other hand attempt to get you to believe that I am French by simply telling you that I am French. Now, what is the difference between these two ways of my attempting to get you to believe that I am French? One crucial difference is that in the second case I attempt to get you to believe that I am French by getting you to recognize that it is my purported intention to get you to believe just that. That is one of the things involved in telling you that I am French. But of course if I try to get you to believe that I am French by putting on the act I described, then your recognition of my intention to produce in you the belief that I am French is not the means I am employing. Indeed in this case you would, I think, become rather suspi- cious if you recognized my intention. However valuable this analysis of meaning is, it seems to me to be in certain respects defective. First of all, it fails to distinguish the different kinds of effects — perlocutionary versus illocutionary — that one may intend to produce in one’s hearers, and it further fails to show the way in which these different kinds of effects are related to the notion of meaning. 10 PRAGMATICS, DISCOURSE ANALYSIS AND SOCIO LINGUISTICS language, does not have absolutely strict rules. There are all sorts of odd, deviant, and borderline promises; and counter-examples, more or less bizarre, can be produced against my analysis. I am inclined to think we shall not be able to get a set of knock down necessary and suffi cient conditions that will exactly mirror the ordinary use of the word ‘promise’. I am confi ning my discussion, therefore, to the centre of the concept of promising and ignoring the fringe, borderline, and partially defective cases. I also confi ne my discussion to full-blown explicit promises and ignore promises made by elliptical turns of phrase, hints, metaphors, etc. Another diffi culty arises from my desire to state the conditions without certain forms of circularity. I want to give a list of conditions for the per- formance of a certain illocutionary act, which do not themselves mention the performance of any illocutionary acts. I need to satisfy this condition in order to offer an explication of the notion of an illocutionary act in general, otherwise I should simply be showing the relation between dif- ferent illocutionary acts. However, although there will be no reference to illocutionary acts, certain illocutionary concepts will appear in the analysans as well as in the analysandum; and I think this form of circularity is unavoidable because of the nature of constitutive rules. In the presentation of the conditions I shall fi rst consider the case of a sincere promise and then show how to modify the conditions to allow for insincere promises. As our inquiry is semantical rather than syntactical, I shall simply assume the existence of grammatically well- formed sentences. Given that a speaker S utters as sentence T in the presence of a hearer H, then, in the utterance of T, S sincerely (and non-defectively) promises that p to H if and only if: (1) Normal Input and Output Conditions obtain. I use the terms ‘input’ and ‘output’ to cover the large and indefi nite range of conditions under which any kind of serious linguistic communication is possible. ‘Output’ covers the conditions for intelligible speaking and ‘input’ covers the conditions for understanding. Together they include such things as that the speaker and hearer both know how to speak the language; both are conscious of what they are doing; the speaker is not acting under duress or threats; they have no physical impediments to communication, such as deafness, aphasia, or laryngitis; they are not acting in a play or telling jokes, etc. (2) S expresses that p in the utterance of T. This condition isolates the pro- positional content from the rest of the speech act and enables us to con- centrate on the peculiarities of promising in the rest of the analysis. (3) In expressing that p, S predicates a future act A of S. In the case of promising the function indicating device is an expression whose scope includes certain features of the proposition. In a promise an act must be WHAT IS A SPEECH ACT? 11 predicated of the speaker and it cannot be a past act. I cannot promise to have done something, and I cannot promise that someone else will do something. (Although I can promise to see that he will do it.) The notion of an act, as I am construing it for present purposes, includes refraining from acts, performing series of acts, and may also include states and conditions: I may promise not to do something, I may promise to do something repeatedly, and I may promise to be or remain in a certain state or condition. I call conditions (2) and (3) the propositional content conditions. (4) H would prefer S’s doing A to his not doing A, and S believes H would prefer his doing A to his not doing A. One crucial distinction between promises on the one hand and threats on the other is that a promise is a pledge to do something for you, not to you, but a threat is a pledge to do something to you, not for you. A promise is defective if the thing promised is something the promisee does not want done; and it is further defective if the promisor does not believe the promisee wants it done, since a non-defective promise must be intended as a promise and not as a threat or warning. I think both halves of this double condition are necessary in order to avoid fairly obvious counter-examples. One can, however, think of apparent counter-examples to this condition as stated. Suppose I say to a lazy student ‘If you don’t hand in your paper on time I promise you I will give you a failing grade in the course’. Is this utterance a promise? I am inclined to think not; we would more naturally describe it as a warning or possibly even a threat. But why then is it possible to use the locution ‘I promise’ in such a case? I think we use it here because ‘I promise’ and ‘I hereby promise’ are among the strongest function indicating devices for commitment provided by the English language. For that reason we often use these expressions in the performance of speech acts which are not strictly speaking promises but in which we wish to emphasize our commitment. To illustrate this, consider another apparent counter-example to the analysis along different lines. Sometimes, more commonly I think in the United States than in England, one hears people say ‘I promise’ when making an emphatic assertion. Suppose, for example, I accuse you of having stolen the money. I say, ‘You stole that money, didn’t you?’ You reply ‘No, I didn’t, I promise you I didn’t’. Did you make a promise in this case? I fi nd it very unnatural to describe your utterance as a promise. This utterance would be more aptly described as an emphatic denial, and we can explain the occurrence of the function indicating device ‘I promise’ as derivative from genuine promises and serving here as an expression adding emphasis to your denial. In general the point stated in condition (4) is that if a purported promise is to be non-defective the thing promised must be something 12 PRAGMATICS, DISCOURSE ANALYSIS AND SOCIO LINGUISTICS the hearer wants done, or considers to be in his interest, or would prefer being done to not being done, etc.; and the speaker must be aware of or believe or know, etc. that this is the case. I think a more elegant and exact formulation of this condition would require the introduction of technical terminology. (5) It is not obvious to both S and H that S will do A in the normal course of events. This condition is an instance of a general condition on many different kinds of illocutionary acts to the effect that the act must have a point. For example, if I make a request to someone to do something which it is obvious that he is already doing or is about to do, then my request is pointless and to that extent defective. In an actual speech situation, listeners, knowing the rules for performing illocutionary acts, will assume that this condition is satisfi ed. Suppose, for example, that in the course of a public speech I say to a member of my audience ‘Look here, Smith, pay attention to what I am saying’. In order to make sense of this utterance the audience will have to assume that Smith has not been paying attention or at any rate that it is not obvious that he has been paying attention, that the question of his paying attention has arisen in some way; because a condition for making a request is that it is not obvious that the hearer is doing or about to do the thing requested. Similarly with promises. It is out of order for me to promise to do something that it is obvious I am going to do anyhow. If I do seem to be making such a promise, the only way my audience can make sense of my utterance is to assume that I believe that it is not obvious that I am going to do the thing promised. A happily married man who promises his wife he will not desert her in the next week is likely to provide more anxiety than comfort. Parenthetically I think this condition is an instance of the sort of phenomenon stated in Zipf’s law. I think there is operating in our language, as in most forms of human behaviour, a principle of least effort, in this case a principle of maximum illocutionary ends with minimum phonetic effort; and I think condition (5) is an instance of it. I call conditions such as (4) and (5) preparatory conditions. They are sine quibus non of happy promising, but they do not yet state the essen- tial feature. (6) S intends to do A. The most important distinction between sincere and insincere promises is that in the case of the insincere promise the speaker intends to do the act promised, in the case of the insincere promise he does not intend to do the act. Also in sincere promises the speaker believes it is possible for him to do the act (or to refrain from doing it), but I think the proposition that he intends to do it entails that he thinks it is possible to do (or refrain from doing) it, so I am not stating that as an extra condition. I call this condition the sincerity condition. WHAT IS A SPEECH ACT? 15 I call rules (2) and (3) preparatory rules. They are derived from the preparatory conditions (4) and (5). Rule 4. P is to be uttered only if S intends to do A. I call this the sincerity rule. It is derived from the sincerity condition (6). Rule 5. The utterance of P counts as the undertaking of an obligation to do A. I call this the essential rule. These rules are ordered: Rules 2—5 apply only if Rule 1 is satisfi ed, and Rule 5 applies only if Rules 2 and 3 are satisfi ed as well. Notice that whereas rules 1—4 take the form of quasi-imperatives, i.e. they are of the form: utter P only if x, rule 5 is of the form: the utterance of P counts as Y. Thus rule 5 is of the kind peculiar to systems of constitutive rules which I discussed in section II. Notice also that the rather tiresome analogy with games is holding up remarkably well. If we ask ourselves under what conditions a player could be said to move a knight correctly, we would fi nd preparatory conditions, such as that it must be his turn to move, as well as the essential condition stating the actual positions the knight can move to. I think that there is even a sincerity rule for competitive games, the rule that each side tries to win. I suggest that the team which ‘throws’ the game is behaving in a way closely analogous to the speaker who lies or makes false promises. Of course, there usually are no propositional content rules for games, because games do not, by and large, represent states of affairs. If this analysis is of any general interest beyond the case of promising then it would seem that these distinctions should carry over into other types of speech act, and I think a little refl ection will show that they do. Consider, e.g., giving an order. The preparatory conditions include that the speaker should be in a position of authority over the hearer, the sincerity condition is that the speaker wants the ordered act done, and the essential condition has to do with the fact that the utterance is an attempt to get the hearer to do it. For assertions, the preparatory conditions include the fact that the hearer must have some basis for supposing the asserted proposition is true, the sincerity condition is that he must believe it to be true, and the essential condition has to do with the fact that the utterance is an attempt to inform the hearer and convince him of its truth. Greetings are a much simpler kind of speech act, but even here some of the distinctions apply. In the utterance of ‘Hello’ there is no propositional content and no sincerity condition. The preparatory condition is that the speaker must have just encountered the hearer, and the essential rule is that the utterance indicates courteous recognition of the hearer. 16 PRAGMATICS, DISCOURSE ANALYSIS AND SOCIO LINGUISTICS A proposal for further research then is to carry out a similar analysis of other types of speech acts. Not only would this give us an analysis of concepts interesting in themselves, but the comparison of different analyses would deepen our understanding of the whole subject and incidentally provide a basis for a more serious taxonomy than any of the usual facile categories such as evaluative versus descriptive, or cognitive versus emotive. Notes 1. J. L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words, Oxford 1962. 2. This distinction occurs in J. Rawls, ‘Two Concepts of Rules’, Philosophical Review, 1955, and J. R. Searle, ‘How to Derive “Ought” from “Is”’, Philosophical Review, 1964. 3. The formulation ‘X counts as Y ’ was originally suggested to me by Max Black. 4. In the sentence ‘I promise that I will come’ the function indicating device and the propositional element are separate. In the sentence ‘I promise to come’, which means the same as the fi rst and is derived from it by certain transformations, the two elements are not separate. 5. Philosophical Review, 1957. 6. Philosophical Investigations, Oxford 1953, para. 510.