Page 421 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Declaratory speech acts bring about states of affairs such as baptism, marriage, knighting, job appoint- ment/termination, consecrating, sentencing, etc., or express decisions on states of affairs. Because they rely for their success on S being sanctioned by the community, institution, committee, or even a single person within the group to perform the acts under stipulated conditions, a safeguard such as the fol- lowing executive condition is needed:
At the time of utterance, S, being of sound mind, con- sciously intends his/her utterance U to count as a dec- laration that A.
Suppose that S is a person sanctioned to terminate H's employment, and S says to H 'You're fired!'; H would most probably be held not to have been fired if S were found to be insane, talking in his/her sleep or in a drunken stupor, or kidding, etc. at the time of uttering those words. An alternative to having such an executive condition is to impose this constraint as a preparatory condition on the utterance; e.g., the preparatory conditions on a verdictive (S declares the verdict that p) should look something like the fol- lowing:
Members of group G are sanctioned to declare verdicts onasetoftopicsTinasetofsituationsK;and(i)Sisa member of G; (ii) at the time of uttering U, S is of sound mind; (iii) the verdict that p is on a topic which is a member of T; (iv) the situation of utterance is a member ofK.
These would be the preparatory conditions on, for example, a tennis umpire declaring a ball Out!, or a jury foreman announcing a guilty verdict; notice that G, T, and K are different for the two verdictives. Provided one recognizes the relevance of a condition such as (ii) within a specification for declaratory acts, it hardly matters whether one follows the Austinian tradition and calls it an executive condition or includes it within the preparatory conditions.
Austin's (B.2) states that the procedure invoked by the illocutionary act must be executed completely; and Austin saw this as a condition on the effectiveness of the illocution. Thus, an example of a (B.2) mis- execution would be where a clergyman says 7 . . . ' and chokes to death; and here it is true the baptism wouldn't have taken place. But this is a quintessential performance hitch, and no rule of language can or should be expected to cope with it. Another example, suggested by Austin, is that the act performed by S uttering, 'I bet you $10 that horse will win' is mis- executed if no-one takes up the bet. However, this is a failure to achieve the desired perlocutionary effect; the illocutionary point remains good, because if no- one takes up the bet S can legitimately continue 'Well, I offered a bet and I guess it's my loss if no-one takes me up on it, since I'm sure to win'; or when the horse has lost, H can respond with 'You bet me $10 that horse would win, and now I wish I'd taken you up on
it.' It can be concluded that Austin's condition (B.2) is not a condition on the performance of the illo- cutionary act, but rather on the perlocutionary effect of the utterance—and this lies outside the scope of a linguistic account of speech acts.
(F.l) is the sincerity condition, which can be ident- ified with the cooperative maxim of quality: 'Where the procedure is designed for use by persons having certain thoughts or feelings, or 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.' For example, someone uttering, 'I promise to take you to a movie tomorrow' would not be making a sincere promise unless s/he intended taking H to a movie. This is called a 'false promise'; and a contravention of the sincerity con- dition usually leads to an illocutionary act being described as false. Thus a 'false apology' is an insincere one, e.g., saying'/ 'm sorry' when it is clear no sorrow is felt. False sympathy is sympathy not felt, although professed. False advice is advice given, but not what it purports to be. Austin (1975:50) notes that the sincerity condition is applicable to statements, too: 'Suppose I did say "the cat is on the mat" when it is not the case that I believe the cat is on the mat; what should we say? Clearly it is a case of insincerity.' Following Searle (1968), one needs to take account of thefactthatthewordstatementisambiguous between 'act of stating' ('statementac,') and 'what is stated' ('statement^,.,'). The two senses are contrasted in (7).
The 'statementac,' of the 'statement0/!7>c,' that all men are mortal takes one second. (7)
The gerund stating is synonymous with 'statement^,' but not with 'statement,,^,,' and in (7) can replace the one but not the other. The sincerity condition Austin spoke of applies only to the 'statement^,,' cf. 'His falsely stating that the cat is on the mat when he knows it to be up a tree is despicable.' In observing the cooperative maxim of manner, we normally say 'falsely (or truly) stating' when referring to the sin- cerity of the act, but to assign a truth value to the 'statement0/!/<,c,' we usually speak of 'a true or false statement,' thus minimizing possible ambiguity. The distinction between 'statementflc,' and 'statemento6>c/' corresponds to a distinction between what S believes and asserts (or implies) to be the case as against what actually is the case; a similar distinction can be made for other speech acts. Consider just one other example: promising. Suppose S were to sincerely say 'I promise to give you my mother's ring when we get home.' On arriving home S finds his house burgled and the ring stolen, and so is prevented from fulfilling his promise because the facts are incompatible with what S sin- cerely believed to obtain. In such a case, it might be noted that in Austin's terminology the illocutionary
Felicity Conditions
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