Page 476 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Pragmatics and Speech Act Theory
Austin J L 1962 How To Do Things With Words. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Bach K, Harnish R M 1977 Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
Chomsky N 1975 Reflections on Language. Pantheon, New York
Gernsbacher M A 1991 Language Comprehension as Struc- ture Building.Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ
Recanati F 1988 Meaning and Force. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Searle J R 1969 Speech Acts. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
K.
1. The Speech Act as an Aspect of Social Interactive Behavior
A speech act is created when speaker/writer S makes an utterance U to hearer/reader H in context C. Speech acts are a part of social interactive behavior and must be interpreted as an aspect of social inter- action (cf. Labov and Fanshel 1977:30). In the words of Habermas (1979:2), S utters something under- standably; gives H something to understand; makes him/herself thereby understandable; and comes to an understanding with another person. Habermas indi- cates further requirements on S: that S should believe the truth of what is said, so that H can share S's knowledge (cf. Grice's (1975) maxim of quality; see Cooperative Principle); S should 'express his/her inten- tions in such a way that the linguistic expression rep- resents what is intended (so that [H] can trust [S])'— compare Grice's maxims of quantity and manner; S should 'perform the speech act in such a way that it conforms to recognized norms or to accepted self- images (so that [H]can be in accord with [S]in shared value orientations)' (1979:29). Additionally, S and H 'can reciprocally motivate one another to recognize validity claims because the content of [S's] engagement is determined by a specific reference to a thematically stressed validity claim, whereby [S], in a cognitively testable way, assumes with a truth claim, obligations
to provide grounds [,] with a lightness claim, obli- gations to provide justification, and with a truth- fulness claim, obligations to prove trustworthy' (Habermas 1979:65).
2. J. L. Austin
Interest in speech acts stems directly from the work of J. L. Austin, and in particular from the William James Lectures which he delivered at Harvard in 1955, pub- lished posthumously as How to Do Things with Words in 1962 (revised 1975). Austin came from the Oxford school of 'ordinary language philosophers,' which also spawned Geach, Ryle, Strawson, Grice, and
Allan
Searle. It was intellectually engendered by Witt- genstein, who observed (e.g., 1963: Sect. 23) that log- icians have had very little or nothing to say about many of the multiplicityof structures and usages in natural language. Austin's concern with speech acts exhibits an informal, often entertaining, philosopher's approach to some uses of ordinary language.
Austin insisted on a distinction between what he called constatives, which have truth values, and per- formatives which(according to him)do not (cf.Austin
1962, 1963). The distinction between truth-bearing and non-truth-bearing sentences has a long history. Aristotle noted that 'Not all sentences are statements [apophantikos]; only such as have in them either truth or falsity. Thus a prayer is a sentence, but neither true nor false [therefore a prayer is not a statement]' (On Interpretation 17a, 1). Later, the Stoics distinguished a judgment or proposition (axidma) as either true or false whereas none of an interrogation, inquiry, imperative, adjurative, optative, hypothetical, nor vocative has a truth value (cf. Diogenes Laertius 1925:65-68). For more than two millennia, logicians and language philosophers concentrated their energies on statements and the valid inferences to be drawn from them to the virtual exclusion of other prep- ositional types (questions, commands, etc.). Austin was reacting to this tradition (cf. Hare 1971: ch. 6):
The constative utterance, under the name so dear to philosophers, of statement, has the property of being true or false. The performative utterance, by contrast, can never be either: it has its own special job, it is used to perform an action. To issue such an utterance is to per- form the action—an action, perhaps, which one scarcely could perform, at least with so much precision, in any other way. Here are some examples:
I name this ship 'Liberte.' I apologise.
I welcome you.
I advise you to do it.
(Austin 1963: 22) Austin's point is that in making such utterances under
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Speech Act Theory: Overview