Assorted Acts, Speeches and Writings
Your contribution may be further edited by our staff, and its publication is subject to our final approval. Unfortunately, our editorial approach may not be able to accommodate all contributions. Our editors will review what you've submitted, and if it meets our criteria, we'll add it to the article. Please note that our editors may make some formatting changes or correct spelling or grammatical errors, and may also contact you if any clarifications are needed. Speech act theory philosophy. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Learn More in these related Britannica articles: Austin and his student John Searle.
Habermas argued that human beings have a fundamental interest in coming to agreement with each other in open rational dialogue. He also held that, in ordinary speech situations, people commit themselves to the…. See also pragmatics; semantics. Ludwig Wittgenstein , Austrian-born British philosopher, regarded by many as the greatest philosopher of the 20th century.
Austin , British philosopher best known for his individualistic analysis of human thought derived from detailed study of ordinary language. So, in general, understanding an utterance is not merely a matter of decoding it. A specifically communicative intention is a reflexive intention, of the sort characterized by H. This is an intention part of whose content is that it be recognized, indeed be recognized partly on the basis that this is intended.
Accordingly, it is an intention whose fulfillment consists in its recognition. This feature distinguishes acts of communication from most sorts of acts, whose success does not depend on anyone's recognizing the intention with which they are performed. One cannot succeed in running a marathon just by virtue of someone's recognizing one's intention to do so, but one can succeed in stating something, requesting something, etc. This is success at the illocutionary level. It is a further matter, a condition on the success of perlocutionary act, whether the addressee believes what one states or does what one requests.
Now Austin did not take into account the central role of speakers' intentions and hearers' inferences. He supposed that the successful performance of an illocutionary act is a matter of convention, not intention. Indeed, he held that the use of a sentence with a certain illocutionary force is conventional in the peculiar sense that this force can be 'made explicit by the performative formula'.
Strawson argues that in making this claim Austin was overly impressed by the special case of utterances that affect institutional states of affairs, and should have not taken them as a model of illocutionary acts in general. Austin was especially struck by the character of explicit performative utterances, in which one uses a verb that names the very type of act one is performing.
For them he developed an account of what it takes for such acts to be performed successfully and felicitously, classifying the various things that can go wrong as 'flaws', 'hitches', and other sorts of 'infelicities'. It is only in certain conventionally designated circumstances and by people in certain positions that certain utterances can have the force they do.
For example, only in certain circumstances does a jury foreman's pronouncement of 'Guilty' or 'Not guilty' count as a verdict, a legislator's 'Aye' or 'Nay' as a vote, and a baseball umpire's cry of 'Y'er out' as calling a runner out. In these cases it is only by conforming to a convention that an utterance of a certain form counts as the performance of an act of a certain sort. However, as Strawson argues, most illocutionary acts succeed not by conformity to convention but by recognition of intention.
Strawson's argument raises a serious problem for theories inspired by Austin's view. Consider, for example, the theory advanced by John Searle, who proposes to explain illocutionary forces by means of 'constitutive rules' conventions for using 'force-indicating' devices, such as performative verbs and sentential moods.
The problem is that the same sorts of illocutionary acts that can be performed by means of such devices can be performed without them. For example, one does not have to use a performative, as in 'I demand that you be quiet', or the imperative mood, as in 'Be quiet! Clearly a theory that relies on rules for using such devices is not equipped to explain the illocutionary forces of utterances lacking such devices.
No such difficulty arises for a theory according to which most illocutionary acts are performed not with an intention to conform to a convention but with a communicative intention. Pretheoretically, we think of an act of communication, linguistic or otherwise, as an act of expressing oneself. This rather vague idea can be made more precise if we get more specific about what is being expressed.
- Auf Wellenlänge (German Edition);
- !
- ;
- Speech act - Wikipedia.
Take the case of an apology. If you utter, '[I'm] sorry I didn't call back' and intend this as an apology, you are expressing regret for something, in this case for not returning a phone call. An apology just is the act of verbally expressing regret for, and thereby acknowledging, something one did that might have harmed or at least bothered the hearer. An apology is communicative because it is intended to be taken as expressing a certain attitude, in this case regret. It succeeds as such if it is so taken. In general, an act of communication succeeds if it is taken as intended.
That is, it must be understood or, in Austin's words, 'produce uptake'. With an apology, this a matter of the addressee recognizing the speaker's intention to be expressing regret for some deed or omission. Using a special device such as the performative 'I apologize' may of course facilitate understanding understanding is correlative with communicating , but in general this is unnecessary. Communicative success is achieved if the speaker chooses his words in such a way that the hearer will, under the circumstances of utterance, recognize his communicative intention.
So, for example, if you spill some beer on someone and say 'Oops' in the right way, your utterance will be taken as an apology for what you did. In saying something one generally intends more than just to communicate--getting oneself understood is intended to produce some effect on the listener.
Speech act theory
However, our speech act vocabulary can obscure this fact. When one apologizes, for example, one may intend not merely to express regret but also to seek forgiveness. Seeking forgiveness is, strictly speaking, distinct from apologizing, even though one utterance is the performance of an act of both types.
As an apology, the utterance succeeds if it is taken as expressing regret for the deed in question; as an act of seeking forgiveness, it succeeds if forgiveness is thereby obtained. Speech acts, being perlocutionary as well as illocutionary, generally have some ulterior purpose, but they are distinguished primarily by their illocutionary type, such as asserting, requesting, promising and apologizing, which in turn are distinguished by the type of attitude expressed.
The perlocutionary act is a matter of trying to get the hearer to form some correlative attitude and in some cases to act in a certain way. For example, a statement expresses a belief and normally has the further purpose of getting the addressee form the same belief. A request expresses a desire for the addressee to do a certain thing and normally aims for the addressee to intend to and, indeed, actually do that thing.
A promise expresses the speaker's firm intention to do something, together with the belief that by his utterance he is obligated to do it, and normally aims further for the addressee to expect, and to feel entitled to expect, the speaker to do it. Statements, requests, promises and apologies are examples of the four major categories of communicative illocutionary acts: This is the nomenclature used by Kent Bach and Michael Harnish, who develop a detailed taxonomy in which each type of illocutionary act is individuated by the type of attitude expressed in some cases there are constraints on the content as well.
There is no generally accepted terminology here, and Bach and Harnish borrow the terms 'constative' and 'commissive' from Austin and 'directive' from Searle. They adopt the term 'acknowledgment', over Austin's 'behabitive' and Searle's 'expressive', for apologies, greetings, congratulations etc.
Here are assorted examples of each type: Bach and Harnish spell out the correlation between type of illocutionary act and type of expressed attitude. In many cases, such as answering, disputing, excusing and agreeing, as well as all types of acknowledgment, the act and the attitude it expresses presuppose a specific conversational or other social circumstance. For types of acts that are distinguished by the type of attitude expressed, there is no need to invoke the notion of convention to explain how it can succeed. The act can succeed if the hearer recognizes the attitude being expressed, such as a belief in the case of a statement and a desire in the case of a request.
Any further effect it has on the hearer, such as being believed or being complied with, or just being taken as sincere, is not essential to its being a statement or a request. For example, only in certain circumstances does a jury foreman's pronouncement of 'Guilty' or 'Not guilty' count as a verdict, a legislator's 'Aye' or 'Nay' as a vote, and a baseball umpire's cry of 'Y'er out' as calling a runner out.
In these cases it is only by conforming to a convention that an utterance of a certain form counts as the performance of an act of a certain sort. However, as Strawson argues, most illocutionary acts succeed not by conformity to convention but by recognition of intention. Strawson's argument raises a serious problem for theories inspired by Austin's view. Consider, for example, the theory advanced by John Searle, who proposes to explain illocutionary forces by means of 'constitutive rules' conventions for using 'force-indicating' devices, such as performative verbs and sentential moods.
The problem is that the same sorts of illocutionary acts that can be performed by means of such devices can be performed without them.
Latest Podcast Episode
For example, one does not have to use a performative, as in 'I demand that you be quiet', or the imperative mood, as in 'Be quiet! Clearly a theory that relies on rules for using such devices is not equipped to explain the illocutionary forces of utterances lacking such devices. No such difficulty arises for a theory according to which most illocutionary acts are performed not with an intention to conform to a convention but with a communicative intention.
Pretheoretically, we think of an act of communication, linguistic or otherwise, as an act of expressing oneself.
The key insight provided by Winograd and Flores is that the state-transition diagram representing the SOCIAL Illocutionary negotiation of the two parties involved is generally much, much simpler than any model representing the world in which those parties are making claims; in short, the system tracking the status of the 'conversation for action' need not be concerned with modeling all of the realities of the external world. One may, in appropriate circumstances, request Peter to do the dishes by just saying, "Peter! Promisings and other social acts - their constituents and structure. Develops the distinction between performative and constative utterances into the first systematic account of speech acts. Speech acts, whatever the medium of their performance, fall under the broad category of intentional action, with which they share certain general features see ACTION.
This rather vague idea can be made more precise if we get more specific about what is being expressed. Take the case of an apology. If you utter, '[I'm] sorry I didn't call back' and intend this as an apology, you are expressing regret for something, in this case for not returning a phone call. An apology just is the act of verbally expressing regret for, and thereby acknowledging, something one did that might have harmed or at least bothered the hearer. An apology is communicative because it is intended to be taken as expressing a certain attitude, in this case regret.
It succeeds as such if it is so taken. In general, an act of communication succeeds if it is taken as intended. That is, it must be understood or, in Austin's words, 'produce uptake'. With an apology, this a matter of the addressee recognizing the speaker's intention to be expressing regret for some deed or omission. Using a special device such as the performative 'I apologize' may of course facilitate understanding understanding is correlative with communicating , but in general this is unnecessary.
Communicative success is achieved if the speaker chooses his words in such a way that the hearer will, under the circumstances of utterance, recognize his communicative intention. So, for example, if you spill some beer on someone and say 'Oops' in the right way, your utterance will be taken as an apology for what you did. In saying something one generally intends more than just to communicate--getting oneself understood is intended to produce some effect on the listener. However, our speech act vocabulary can obscure this fact.
Assorted Acts, Speeches and Writings - Kindle edition by Various. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like. But when we revert to his own speeches and writings, we at once perceive WHY, as long . HOW the passions act upon our perceptions, and by what process the The colleagues whom he had assorted at the same boards, stared at each.
When one apologizes, for example, one may intend not merely to express regret but also to seek forgiveness. Seeking forgiveness is, strictly speaking, distinct from apologizing, even though one utterance is the performance of an act of both types. As an apology, the utterance succeeds if it is taken as expressing regret for the deed in question; as an act of seeking forgiveness, it succeeds if forgiveness is thereby obtained.
Speech acts, being perlocutionary as well as illocutionary, generally have some ulterior purpose, but they are distinguished primarily by their illocutionary type, such as asserting, requesting, promising and apologizing, which in turn are distinguished by the type of attitude expressed. The perlocutionary act is a matter of trying to get the hearer to form some correlative attitude and in some cases to act in a certain way. For example, a statement expresses a belief and normally has the further purpose of getting the addressee form the same belief.
A request expresses a desire for the addressee to do a certain thing and normally aims for the addressee to intend to and, indeed, actually do that thing. A promise expresses the speaker's firm intention to do something, together with the belief that by his utterance he is obligated to do it, and normally aims further for the addressee to expect, and to feel entitled to expect, the speaker to do it.
Statements, requests, promises and apologies are examples of the four major categories of communicative illocutionary acts: This is the nomenclature used by Kent Bach and Michael Harnish, who develop a detailed taxonomy in which each type of illocutionary act is individuated by the type of attitude expressed in some cases there are constraints on the content as well.
There is no generally accepted terminology here, and Bach and Harnish borrow the terms 'constative' and 'commissive' from Austin and 'directive' from Searle. They adopt the term 'acknowledgment', over Austin's 'behabitive' and Searle's 'expressive', for apologies, greetings, congratulations etc. Here are assorted examples of each type: Bach and Harnish spell out the correlation between type of illocutionary act and type of expressed attitude.
In many cases, such as answering, disputing, excusing and agreeing, as well as all types of acknowledgment, the act and the attitude it expresses presuppose a specific conversational or other social circumstance. For types of acts that are distinguished by the type of attitude expressed, there is no need to invoke the notion of convention to explain how it can succeed. The act can succeed if the hearer recognizes the attitude being expressed, such as a belief in the case of a statement and a desire in the case of a request.
Any further effect it has on the hearer, such as being believed or being complied with, or just being taken as sincere, is not essential to its being a statement or a request. Thus an utterance can succeed as an act of communication even if the speaker does not possess the attitude he is expressing: Communicating is as it were just putting an attitude on the table; sincerity is actually possessing the attitude one is expressing.
Correlatively, the hearer can understand the utterance without regarding it as sincere, e. Getting one's audience to believe that one actually possesses the attitude one is expressing is not an illocutionary but a perlocutionary act. As Austin observed, the content of a locutionary act what is said is not always determined by what is meant by the sentence being uttered. Moreover, what is said does not determine the illocutionary act s being performed. We can perform a speech act 1 directly or indirectly, by way of performing another speech act, 2 literally or nonliterally, depending on how we are using our words, and 3 explicitly or inexplicitly, depending on whether we fully spell out what we mean.
These three contrasts are distinct and should not be confused. The first two concern the relation between the utterance and the speech act s thereby performed.
In indirection a single utterance is the performance of one illocutionary act by way of performing another. For example, we can make a request or give permission by way of making a statement, say by uttering 'I am getting thirsty' or 'It doesn't matter to me', and we can make a statement or give an order by way of asking a question, such as 'Will the sun rise tomorrow? In the case of nonliteral utterances, we do not mean what our words mean but something else instead.
With nonliterality the illocutionary act we are performing is not the one that would be predicted just from the meanings of the words being used, as with likely utterances of 'My mind got derailed' or 'You can stick that in your ear'. Occasionally utterances are both nonliteral and indirect.
For example, one might utter 'I love the sound of your voice' to tell someone nonliterally ironically that she can't stand the sound of his voice and thereby indirectly to ask him to stop singing.