In this chapter, I explain the basics of speech act theory in the version that best suits our purpose, i.e., in Searle and Vanderveken (Foundations of illocutionary logic. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985) formulation. I also explain with illustrations the notion of declarative illocutionary acts, by means of which we can generate institutional facts by means of illocutions. I also discuss the notion of illocutionary commitment and illocutionary consistency and argue that they provide a promising tool to deal with Kripke’s cases of contingent a priori truths. This chapter is meant as a theoretical tool that will be applied in Chap. 10.
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This is not to deny that there are other approaches with alternative taxonomies, e.g., the one more recently presented in Roberts (2018). For a survey of alternative approaches and taxonomies to the one here favored, see Green (2017).
Talking about a “composition” here does not mean that these two acts are produced separately and then combined; on the contrary, Austin conceives locutionary and illocutionary as occurring originally combined in an illocutionary act, and the locutionary act is conceivable only as an abstraction from the latter.
“There are not, as Wittgenstein (on one possible interpretation) and many others have claimed, an infinite or indefinite number of language games or uses of language. Rather, the illusion of limitless uses of language is engendered by an enormous unclarity about what constitutes the criteria for delimiting one language game or use of language from another. If we adopt illocutionary point as the basic notion on which to classify uses of language, then there are a rather limited number of basic things we do with language: we tell people how things are, we try to get them to do things, we commit ourselves to doing things, we express our feelings and attitudes, and we bring about changes through our utterances.” (1979a, p. 29)
Actually, Searle’s view on the basic elements changes over time. There are four elements in Searle (1969), twelve in Searle (1979a) (though many of them do not have a clear relevance in the determination of different forces), and seven in Searle and Vanderveken (1985). The latter work has a fuller formal development.
As Searle and Vanderveken remark (1985, p. 16), sometimes the mode of achievement and the strength of the illocutionary point are interdependent, e.g., an order (issued by invoking the speaker’s authority) has a stronger degree of strength of the illocutionary point (getting the interlocutor to do something) than requesting.
Searle (1979a) notices that it would be desirable to build a taxonomy solely in terms of the direction of fit, but sees no way of doing this. That is to say, his taxonomy needs to use the other dimensions in order to do justice to the variety of illocutionary acts. For an attempt to build an alternative taxonomy based only on the direction of fit, see Roberts (2018).
For the peculiarities of assertions within mathematics, see Ruffino et al. (2020).We characterize the illocutionary point as taking responsibility for a future action instead of performing a future action because there might be unfulfilled promises that are, nevertheless, promises.
Many such acts correspond to what Austin called “behabitive”, i.e., they express an appreciation in view of other people’s (or the speaker’s own) actions.
In Searle’s original formulation (1979a) there is no sincerity conditions, but in (1985) Searle and Vanderveken recognize that some declarative acts might require a psychological state such as, e.g., belief.
Vanderveken (1990a, p. 140).“In these examples it seems clear that to utter the sentence (in, of course, the appropriate circumstances) is not to describe my doing of what I should be said in so uttering to be doing or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it. None of the utterances cited is either true or false: I assert this as obvious and do not argue it. It needs argument no more than that ‘damn’ is not true or false: it may be that the utterance ‘serves to inform you’—but that is quite different. To name the ship is to say (in the appropriate circumstances) ‘I name, etc.’. When I say, before the registrar or altar, etc., ‘I do’, I am not reporting on a marriage: I am indulging on it.[…]I propose to call it performative sentence or a performative utterance, or, for short, ‘a performative’.[…] The name is derived, of course, from ‘perform’, the usual verb with the noun ‘action’: it indicates that the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action—it is not normally thought of as just saying something.”(1962, pp. 6–7) Though many people agree with Austin that performative utterances are actions denoted by the corresponding verbs, fewer agree that such utterances are neither true nor false.
E.g., in most (but not all) cases, the verb is in the first person, present tense and indicative mood. E.g., ‘I promise…’ is performative, but ‘He promises…’ is not; ‘I promised…’ is a report, but not a performative; similarly with ‘Do I promise…?’. Most performative utterances admit the accretion of ‘hereby’ without changing their intuitive meaning. E.g.,
$$\displaystyle \beginAs said before, the distinction between locutionary and illocutionary act is, for Austin, also artificial and made only for theoretical purposes since, in a speech situation, a locutionary act only occurs as part or aspect of an illocutionary act.
This claim inspired what would be later called the Performative Hypothesis (or Performative Deletion Analysis), i.e., the hypothesis that any utterance of a sentence in ordinary communication has a performative verb in its deep structure that is not necessarily evident in the surface structure (e.g., Ross, 1970, and Sadock, 1974). The Hypothesis was severely criticized both by philosophers (e.g., Searle, 1979b) and linguists (e.g., Levinson, 1983) based on overwhelming empirical counterevidence.
For a critical view of the latter taxonomy, and a study of its roots in Austin’s, see Sadock (2002).This binomial here is not to be confounded with the descriptivist/anti-descriptivist theories of reference of singular terms, which label something quite different.
Austin includes yet another category of “infelicities” which he calls abuses, i.e., those cases in which some appropriate psychological state is missing like, e.g., a promise without the intention of fulfilling it (p. 18).
E.g., Hartnack (1963), Black (1963), Harris (1978), Taylor and Wolf (1981), Recanati (1987), Jary (2007).
The list of defenders of the descriptivist interpretation also include Kempson (1975), Edmondson (1979, 1983), Leech (1976), Spielmann (1980) and Wiggins (1971).
In the first situation, it is defective because S could only apologize to another person, but not to an object. In the second situation, it is presumably defective because, strictly speaking, S’s apology only makes sense regarding S’s own actions, but not someone else’s actions.
Harris describes the situation in the following way:There is no way out of this dilemma for the descriptivist: his interpretation automatically commits him to one or other of two self-defeating explanations of how to assign a truth value to what S says. No parallel problem in such cases emerges for the non-descriptivist, for the simple reason that for him the question of whether a performative utterance is true or false does not arise. (1978, p. 310)
Harris’ dilemma gave rise to an interesting discussion (mainly among linguists) concerning the prospects of the descriptivist interpretation. Edmondson (1979, 1983) seeks to escape the dilemma (and, hence, to save descriptivism) by introducing a distinction between the semantics and the pragmatics of performatives, i.e., on some occasions (like those illustrating Harris’ dilemma) a statement like ‘I apologize’ might be true, although pragmatically the act of apologizing was not successful. So, meaning and truth of performative utterances are, in his view, independent from success in achieving the illocutionary point. Wachtel (1980) goes in the same direction by distinguishing the “going through the motions of performing a speech act” (which gives the semantic content of a performative utterance and its truth-conditions) from the satisfaction of its felicity conditions (which is neither contained nor implied by “going through the motions of performing a speech act”). Taylor and Wolf (1981) complained that Edmondson’s (and, by extension, also Wachtel’s) attempt to escape the dilemma makes the descriptivist’s position even worse because it relies on the assumption that one might correctly describe an illocutionary act as ‘he ϕed’ even though the felicity conditions of ϕing are not fulfilled (and, hence, the act was not carried on). Finally, Rajagopalan (1984) sees both positions as compatible insofar as they talk about distinct aspects of an illocutionary act: the semantic aspect (descriptive interpretation) and the act itself (anti-descriptive interpretation).
Declarative acts are such thatWe thus achieve the world-to-word direction of fit, but we achieve that direction of fit by way of representing the world as having been changed, that is, by way of word-to-world direction of fit. (Searle, 2008, p. 451)
Recanati (1987) has a similar account, but with some differences. He divides performatives into three big classes: directives, commissives and declarations. The main feature of directives and commissives is that bringing about the state of affairs represented in the propositional content is intended to be the responsibility of the speaker and hearer, respectively, while in the case of a declaration, bringing about this state of affairs is meant to be nobody’s responsibility, but simply an immediate consequence of the declaration itself.
E.g., Hedenius (1963), Lewis (1970), Bach and Harnish (1979), Ginet (1979) and García-Carpintero (2013).
Pagin (2004) and Jary (2007) follow Searle in this criticism.Of course my declaration will be unsuccessful (despite the flat-earthers’ unshakable faith), but the fact is that a declaration comes into existence by the use of a performative.
Although many people see the latter fact as extraordinary because it involves abstract entities (numbers and operations). I mean here by ‘ordinary’ facts that exist independently of a linguistic act.
In Searle (2009) he presses the point and formulates what he describes as a “very strong theoretical claim”:
The claim that I will be expounding and defending in this book is that all of human institutional reality is created and maintained in existence by (representations that have the same form as) S[tatus] F[unction] Declarations, including the cases that are not speech acts in the explicit form of Declarations. (p. 13)
Sometimes Searle talks of institutions instead of institutional facts as a “system of constitutive rules, and such a system automatically creates the possibility of institutional facts” (2009, p. 10). But the difference between institutions (such as universities) and institutional facts (such as academic degrees) seems to be just a matter of complexity: institutions are complex institutional facts that can be explored to generate, in a systematic way, new institutional facts. As I interpret him, they are, at the bottom, the same kind of entity.
See Vanderveken (1990, p. 29, 152).In the less known work of Adolf Reinach (1913), from the beginning of the twentieth century on the foundations of the civil law, we find passages like the following that seem to anticipate, in some ways, the idea that the performance of one illocutionary act may, as a matter of necessity, give rise to the existence (actual or just potential) of other illocutionary acts:
There is no doubt that the causal relation is no necessary “relation of ideas.” But it would be a mistake to extend this principle to every relationship obtaining between temporally existing things. The case which is now before us is the best proof of this. A “cause” which can generate claim and obligation is the act of promising. From this act, as we shall show more exactly, proceed claim and obligation; we can bring this to evidence when we consider clearly what a promise is, and achieve the intuition (erschauen) that it lies in the essence of such an act to generate claim and obligation under certain conditions. And so it is by no means experience in the sense of observation (Erfahrung) which instructs us, not even indirectly, about the existential connection of these legal entities; we have rather to do here with a self-evident and necessary relation of essence. (1913, p. 15)
