Speech act Austin & Searle

Austin

The modern study of speech acts begins with Austin’s (1962) engaging monograph

How to Do Things with Words, the published version of his William James Lectures delivered at Harvard in 1955. This widely cited work starts with the observation that certain sorts of sentences, e.g., I christen this ship the Joseph Stalin; I now pronounce you man and wife, and the like, seem designed to do something, here to christen and wed, respectively, rather than merely to say something. Such sentences Austin dubbed performatives, in contrast to what he called constatives, the descriptive sentences that until Austin were the principal concern of philosophers of language – sentences that seem, pretheoretically, at least, to be employed mainly for saying something rather than doing something.

While the distinction between performatives and constatives is often invoked in work on the law, in literary criticism, in political analysis, and in other areas, it is a distinction that Austin argued was not ultimately defensible.

The point of Austin’s lectures was, in fact, that every normal utterance has both a descriptive and an effective aspect: that saying something is also doing something.

Locutions, illocutions, and perlocutions

In place of the initial distinction between constatives and performatives, Austin substituted a three-way contrast among the kinds of acts that are performed when language is put to use, namely the distinction between locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts, all of which are characteristic of most utterances, including standard examples of both performatives and constatives.

Locutionary acts, according to Austin, are acts of speaking, acts involved in the construction of speech, such as uttering certain sounds or making certain marks, using particular words and using them in conformity with the grammatical rules of a particular language and with certain senses and certain references as determined by the rules of the language from which they are drawn.

Illocutionary acts, Austin’s central innovation, are acts done in speaking (hence illocutionary), including and especially that sort of act that is the apparent purpose for using a performative sentence: christening, marrying, and so forth. Austin called attention to the fact that acts of stating or asserting, which are presumably illocutionary acts, are characteristic of the use of canonical constatives, and such sentences are, by assumption, not performatives.

Furthermore, acts of ordering or requesting are typically accomplished by using imperative sentences, and acts of asking whether something is the case are properly accomplished by using interrogative sentences, though such forms are at best very dubious examples of performative sentences. In Lecture XXI of Austin (1962), the conclusion was drawn that the locutionary aspect of speaking is what we attend to most in the case of constatives, while in the case of the standard examples of performative sentences; we attend as much as possible to the illocution.

The third of Austin’s categories of acts is the perlocutionary act, which is a consequence or by-product of speaking, whether intended or not. As the name is designed to suggest, perlocutions are acts performed by speaking. According to Austin, perlocutionary acts consist in the production of effects upon the thoughts, feelings, or actions of the addressee(s), speaker, or other parties, such as causing people to refer to a certain ship as the Joseph Stalin, producing the belief that Sam and Mary should be considered man and wife, convincing an addressee of the truth of a statement, causing an addressee to feel a requirement to do something, and so on.

    Austin (1962: 101) illustrates the distinction between these kinds of acts with the (now politically incorrect) example of saying “Shoot her!,” which he trisects as follows:

Act (A) or Locution

He said to me “Shoot her!” meaning by shoot “shoot” and referring by her to “her.”

Act (B) or Illocution

He urged (or advised, ordered, etc.) me to shoot her.

Act (C) or Perlocution

He persuaded me to shoot her.

Austin classifies illocutionary acts into five types, i.e., verdictives, exercitives, commissives, behabitives, and expositives. Although it is often argued that Austin’s classification is not complete and those coined categories are not mutually exclusive, Austin’s classification is best seen as an attempt to give a general picture of illocutionary acts: what types of illocutionary act one can generally perform in uttering a sentence. One can exercise judgment (Verdictive), exert influence or exercise power (Exercitive), assume obligation or declare intention (Commissive), adopt attitude, or express feeling (Behabitive), and clarify reasons, argument, or communication (Expositive). The long list of illocutionary verbs in each class also illustrates how many subtly differentiated illocutionary acts exist in a language like English. The fact that Austin includes the same word in two different classes and he does not regard it as a problem suggests that it is not an issue for Austin which class a particular illocutionary verb/act actually belongs to. The importance of introducing this classification of illocutionary acts is rather to explicate, as we explained above, what type of illocutionary act one can generally perform by uttering a sentence; and, with additional specifications, how much more diversified illocutionary acts are than we are usually aware of. The purpose of the classification of illocutionary acts, if interpreted in this manner, is compatible with Austin’s beliefs as a major proponent of Ordinary Language Philosophy, which is typically expressed in remarks such as the following:

our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connexions they have found worth marking, in the lifetimes of many generations: these surely are likely to be more numerous, more sound, since they have stood up to the long test of the survival of the fittest, and more subtle, at least in all ordinary and reasonably practical matters, than any that you or I are likely to think up in our arm-chairs of an afternoon — the most favored alternative method. (Austin 1961: 182)

To Summarize:

Felicity conditions: expected or appropriate circumstances for a speech act to be recognized as intended I sentence you to six months in prison - performance will be infelicitous if the speaker is not a judge in a courtroom

General conditions: language is understood, no play-acting, nonsense

Content conditions: e.g. for promises/warnings the content of the utterance must be about a future event (promise: the event will be an act by the speaker)

Preparatory conditions: pre-existing conditions about the event, e.g., promise: event will not happen by itself, event will be beneficial warning: it's not clear if the hearer knows that the event will occur, the event will not have a beneficial effect

Sincerity conditions: attitude of the speaker, e.g., promise: speaker genuinely intends to carry out the future action warning: speaker genuinely believes the future event will not have a beneficial effect

Essential conditions: change of state in the speaker, e.g., promise: change of state from non-obligation to obligation to carry out action warning: change of state from non-information of bad future event to information

SEARLE

In Searle 1969, 24-25, the author presents a theory which is a development of the account presented in Austin 1962. Searle claims that four acts are characteristically performed in the utterance of a sentence:

a. Uttering words (morphemes, sentences) = performing utterance acts

b. Referring and predicating = performing propositional acts

c. Stating, questioning, commanding, promising etc. = performing illocutionary acts

       In general, Searle’s theory of speech acts is just Austin’s systematized, in part rigidified, with sallies into the general theory of meaning, and connections to other philosophical issues. Austin thought that one could come to an interesting classification through taxonomy of performative verbs, but Searle seeks some more abstract scheme based on felicity conditions. In fact, he proposes that there are just five basic kinds of action that one can perform in speaking, by means of the following five types of utterance:

1. Representatives, which commit the speaker to the truth of the expressed proposition (paradigm cases: asserting, concluding, etc.)

2. Directives, which are attempts by the speaker to get the addressee to do something (paradigm cases: requesting, questioning)

3. Commissives, which commit the speaker to some future course of action (paradigm cases: promising, threatening, offering)

4. Expressive, which express a psychological state (paradigm cases: thanking, apologizing, welcoming, and congratulating)

5. Declarations, which effect immediate changes in the institutional state of affairs and which tend to rely on elaborate extra – linguistic institutions (paradigm cases: excommunicating, declaring war, christening, firing from employment)

    To Searle, as with Austin, the illocutionary act is directly achieved by the conventional force associated with the issuance of a certain kind of utterance in accord with a conventional procedure. In contrast, a perlocutionary act is specific to circumstances of issuance, and is therefore not conventionally achieved just by uttering that particular utterance, and includes all those effects, intended or unintended, often indeterminate, that some particular utterance in some particular situation may cause.