Page 420 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Pragmatics and Speech Act Theory
1100 hours' or 'Clean the latrines at 1100 hours.' But it would ordinarily be infelicitous for a private soldier to address such utterances to his/her colonel; the resulting performative would be, in Austin's words, 'null and void.' Similarly the participants in a mar- riage ceremony must be as they are described above, otherwise the marriage will be 'null and void.' No- one but a monarch (or their appointed agent) can legitimately utter (3) if Caspar is truly to be knighted. And only an umpire, referee, or their delegated minions have the power to declare a ball out of play; neither a television commentator, nor one of the play- ers, has the power to make a declaration such as (5) stick without the umpire's say-so. (A.2) also covers such peculiarities as a driver saying to his car 'I bet you a dollar you run out of petrol before we get to a garage' because a car is not a suitable addressee for a bet.
In Speech Acts (1969:63-67), John Searle identified preparatory conditions on a number of illocutionary acts, and we now turn our attention to his proposals. Searle identifies one of the preparatory conditions on promising as follows:
H would prefer S to do A (i.e., carry out the promised act) to his not doing A, and S believes that H would prefer S's doing A to his not doing A.
S can only make the promise in the light of the second of these conjuncts. H's preferences lie outside of linguistic considerations, although it is likely that they are relevant to the perlocutionary effect of S's utter- ance. Linguists should ignore the first conjunct of Searle's preparatory condition on promising, and all comparable statements. The second preparatory con- dition on promising which Searle identifies is the fol- lowing:
ItisnotobvioustobothSandHthatSwilldoAinthe normal course of events.
This condition, and all comparable statements within the preparatory conditions on other illocutionary acts, can be subsumed under the general conventions of the Gricean cooperative principle, in particular themaxim of quantity (cf. Allan 1986: ch. 1; Grice 1975; Levinson 1983:241), and it would be redundant to include state- ments of such preparatory conditions within the defi- nitions of every illocutionary act. Hence, Searle's preparatory conditions on promising can be pruned to:
S believes that H would prefer S's doing A to S's not doing A.
If one examines promises in more detail, it turns out that this needs rewording (cf. Allan 1986); but it will suffice to exemplify the preparatory condition on promising. Among other (pruned) preparatory con- ditions identified by Searle are those on:
(a) (b) (c) (d)
requests—S believes H is able to do the act requested;
assertions—S has evidence (reasons for believ- ing etc.) the truth of p;
thanks—S is grateful to H for having done deedD;
advice—S believes there is reason for H to do
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A and that it will benefit H. Preparatory conditions identify the particular cir- cumstances and, perhaps, participants appropriate to performing a given illocutionary act. As Searle and Vanderveken (1985:17) point out: 'In the performance of a speech act the speaker presupposes the satisfaction of all the preparatory conditions.' More precisely, they are what Seuren calls 'projections' of U (see Seuren 1985: 272 ff). They are special clauses of the generally applicable cooperative conditions on utter-
ances.
Austin's conditions (B.l-2) are executive
conditions. (B.I) states that the procedure invoked by the illocutionary act 'must be executed by all par- ticipants correctly.' Austin (1975:36) exemplifies (B. 1) with 'I bet you the race won't be run today' said when more than one race was arranged for that day. If S knew there was more than one race, then s/he would be violating the cooperative maxim of manner by being ambiguous instead of saying precisely what s/he meant. The utterance would, in addition, violate the maxim of quantity if S knew there was more than one race, but didn't bother to make this clear. And if S didn't know, but did suspect that there would be more than one race on the day in question, then in making this utterance s/he would be violating the cooperative maxim of quality by failing to advert H of this suspicion. So these particular examples of mis- executions can all be dealt with under the generally applicable maximsof the cooperative principle. In any case, such misexecutions do not render the illo-
cutionary act invalid, as Austin suggests they do. Under the circumstances described above, H can jus- tifiably reply Til take you on, provided you tell me what race you mean,' thereby demonstrating that the utterance addressed to H has successfully achieved the illocutionary point of offering a bet; the misexecutions ('misfires') Austin described don't affect this.
Some other misexecutions envisaged by Austin can also be dismissed, e.g., suppose the priest baptising a child, by a slip of the tongue, or an inconvenient hiccup, actually said (6) instead of (1):
pronounce marry [hiccup]
you in the name of the Father and
of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. (6)
Austin claims that in such circumstances the baptism would not be effected; but this is questionable. Such accidental quirks as slips of the tongue, or hiccups, should be dismissed as irrelevant performance vari- ables (cf. Chomsky 1965:4).