Speech Acts

First published Tue Jul 3, 2007

From “Green, Mitchell, "Speech Acts", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2009 Edition),

Edward N. Zalta (ed.), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2009/entries/speech-acts/

Speech acts are a staple of everyday communicative life, but only became a topic of

sustained investigation, at least in the English-speaking world, in the middle of the

Twentieth Century.[1] Since that time “speech act theory” has been influential not only

within philosophy, but also in linguistics, psychology, legal theory, artificial

intelligence, literary theory and many other scholarly disciplines.[2] Recognition of the

importance of speech acts has illuminated the ability of language to do other things

than describe reality. In the process the boundaries among the philosophy of language,

the philosophy of action, the philosophy of mind and even ethics have become less

sharp. In addition, an appreciation of speech acts has helped lay bare an implicit

normative structure within linguistic practice, including even that part of this practice

concerned with describing reality. Much recent research aims at an accurate

characterization of this normative structure underlying linguistic practice.

1. Introduction

One way of appreciating the distinctive features of speech acts is in contrast with

other well-established phenomena within the philosophy of language. Accordingly in

this entry I will consider the relation among speech acts and: semantic content,

grammatical mood, speaker-meaning, logically perfect languages, perlocutions,

performatives, presuppositions, and implicature. This will enable us to situate speech

acts within their ecological niche.

Above I shuddered with quotation marks around the expression ‘speech act theory’. It

is one thing to say that speech acts are a phenomenon of importance for students of

language and communication; another to say that we have a theory of them. While, as

we shall see below, we are able to situate speech acts within their niche, having a

theory of them would enable us to explain (rather than merely describe) some of their

most significant features. Consider a different case. Semantic theory deserves its

name: For instance, with the aid of set-theoretic tools it helps us tell the difference

between good arguments and bad arguments couched in ordinary language. By

contrast, it is not clear that “speech act theory” has comparable credentials. One such

credential would be a delineation of logical relations among speech acts, if such there

be. To that end I close with a brief discussion of the possibility, envisioned by some,

of an “illocutionary logic”.

2. Content, Force, and How Saying Can Make It So

Construed as a bit of observable behavior, a given act may be done with any of a

variety of aims. I bow deeply before you. So far you may not know whether I am

paying obeisance, responding to indigestion, or looking for a wayward contact lens.

So too, a given utterance, such as ‘You'll be more punctual in the future,’ may leave

you wondering whether I am making a prediction or issuing a command or even a

threat. The colloquial question, “What is the force of those words?” is often used to

elicit an answer. In asking such a question we acknowledge a grasp of what those

words mean. However, given the dizzying array of uses of ‘meaning’ in philosophy

and related cognitive sciences, I will here refer instead to content. While different

theories of content abound (as sets of possible worlds, sets of truth conditions,

Fregean senses, ordered n-tuples, to name a few), the phenomenon is relatively clear:

What the speaker said is that the addressee will be more punctual in the future. The

addressee or observer who asks, “What is the force of those words?” is asking, of that

content, how it's to be taken–as a threat, as a prediction, or as a command. The

addressee is not asking for a further elucidation of that content.

Or so it seems. Perhaps whether the utterance is meant as a threat, a prediction or a

command will depend on some part of her content that was left unpronounced?

According to this suggestion, really what she said was, “I predict you'll be more

punctual,” or “I command you to be more punctual,” as the case may be. Were that so,

however, she'd be contradicting herself in uttering ‘You'll be more punctual in the

future’ as a prediction while going on to point out, ‘I don't mean that as a prediction.’

While such a juxtaposition of utterances is surely odd, it is not a self-contradiction,

any more than “It's raining but I don't believe it,” is a self-contradiction when the left

conjunct is put forth as an expression of belief. What is more, ‘I predict you'll be more

punctual,’ is itself a sentence with a content, and will be being put forth with some

force or other when–as per our current suggestion—the speaker says it in the course of

making a prediction. So that sentence, ‘I predict you'll be more punctual’ is put forth

with some force–say as an assertion. This implies, according to the present

suggestion, that really the speaker said, ‘I assert that I predict that you'll be more

punctual.’ Continuing this same style of reasoning will enable us to infer that

performance of a single speech act requires saying–though perhaps not pronouncing—

infinitely many things. That is reason for rejecting the hypothesis that implied it, and

for the rest of this entry I will assume that force is no part of content.

2.1 The Independence of Force and Content

In chemical parlance, a radical is a group of atoms normally incapable of independent

existence, whereas a functional group is the grouping of those atoms in a compound

that is responsible for certain of the compound's properties. Analogously, it is often

remarked that a proposition is itself communicatively inert; for instance, merely

expressing the proposition that snow is white is not to make a move in a “language

game”. Rather, such moves are only made by putting forth a proposition with an

illocutionary force such as assertion, conjecture, command, etc. The chemical analogy

gains further plausibility from the fact that just as a chemist might isolate radicals held

in common among various compounds, the student of language may isolate a common

element held among ‘Is the door shut?’, ‘Shut the door!’, and ‘The door is shut’. This

common element is the proposition that the door is shut, queried in the first sentence,

commanded to be made true in the second, and asserted in the third. According to the

chemical analogy, then:

Illocutionary force : propositional content :: functional group : radical

In light of this analogy we may see, following Stenius 1967, that just as the grouping

of a set of atoms is not itself another atom or set of atoms, so too the forwarding of a

proposition with a particular illocutionary force is not itself a further component of

propositional content.

Encouraged by the chemical analogy, a central tenet in the study of speech acts is that

content may remain fixed while force varies. Another way of putting the point is that

the content of one's communicative act underdetermines the force of that act. That's

why, from the fact that someone has said, “You'll be more punctual in the future,” we

cannot infer the utterance's force. The force of an utterance also underdetermines its

content: Just from the fact that a speaker has made a promise, we cannot deduce what

she has promised to do. For these reasons, students of speech acts contend that a given

communicative act may be analyzed into two components: force and content. While

semantics studies the contents of speech acts, pragmatics studies, inter alia, their

force. The bulk of this entry may be seen as an elucidation of force.

Need we bother with such an elucidation? That A is an important component of

communication, and that A underdetermines B, do not justify the conclusion that B is

an important component of communication. Content also underdetermines the decibel

level at which we speak but this fact does not justify adding decibel level to our

repertoire of core concepts for the philosophy of language. Why should force be

thought any more worthy of admission to this set of core concepts than decibel level?

One reason for an asymmetry in our treatment of force and decibel level is that the

former, but not the latter, seems to be a component of speaker meaning: Force is a

feature not of what is meant but of how it is meant; decibel level, by contrast, is a

feature at most of the way in which something is said. This point is developed in

Section 6 below.

2.2 Can Saying Make it So?

Speech acts are not to be confused with acts of speech. One can perform a speech act

such as issuing a warning without saying anything: A gesture or even a minatory

facial expression will do the trick. So too, one can perform an act of speech, say by

uttering words in order to test a microphone, without performing a speech act.[3] For a

first-blush delineation of the range of speech acts, then, consider that in some cases

we can make something the case by saying that it is. Alas, I can't lose ten pounds by

saying that I am doing so, nor can I persuade you of a proposition by saying that I am

doing so. On the other hand I can promise to meet you tomorrow by uttering the

words, “I promise to meet you tomorrow,” and if I have the authority to do so, I can

even appoint you to an office by saying, “I hereby appoint you.” (I can also appoint

you without making the force of my act explicit: I might just say, “You are now

Treasurer of the Corporation.” Here I appoint you without saying that I am doing so.)

A necessary and, perhaps, sufficient condition of a type of act's being a speech act is

that acts of that type can–whether or not all are—be carried out by saying that one is

doing so.

Saying can make it so, but that is not to suggest that any old saying by any speaker

constitutes the performance of a speech act. Only an appropriate authority, speaking at

the appropriate time and place, can: christen a ship, pronounce a couple married,

appoint someone to an administrative post, declare the proceedings open, or rescind

an offer. Austin, in How To Do Things With Words, spends considerable effort

detailing the conditions that must be met for a given speech act to be

performed felicitously. Failures of felicity fall into two classes: misfires and abuses.

The former are cases in which the putative speech act fails to be performed at all. If I

utter, before the QEII, “I declare this ship the Noam Chomsky,” I have not succeeded

in naming anything simply because I lack the authority to do so. My act thus misfires

in that I've performed an act of speech but no speech act. Other attempts at speech acts

might misfire because their addressee fails to respond with an appropriate uptake: I

cannot bet you $100 on who will win the election unless you accept that bet. If you

don't accept that bet, then I have tried to bet but have not succeeded in betting.

Some speech acts can be performed–that is, not misfire—while still being less than

felicitous. I promise to meet you for lunch tomorrow, but haven't the least intention of

keeping the promise. Here I have promised all right, but the act is not felicitous

because it is not sincere. My act is, more precisely, an abuse because although it is a

speech act, it fails to live up to a standard appropriate for a speech act of its kind.

Sincerity is a paradigm condition for the felicity of speech acts. Austin foresaw a

program of research in which individual speech acts would be studied in detail, with

felicity conditions elucidated for each one.[4]

Here are three further features of the “saying makes it so” condition. First, the saying

appealed to in the “saying makes it so” test is not an act of speech: My singing in the

shower, “I promise to meet you tomorrow for lunch,” when my purpose is simply to

enjoy the sound of my voice, is not a promise, even if you overhear me. Rather, the

saying (or singing) in question must itself be something that I mean. We will return in

Section 6 to the task of elucidating the notion of meaning at issue here.

Second, the making relation that this “saying makes it so” condition appeals to needs

to be treated with some care. My uttering, “I am causing molecular agitation,” makes

it the case that I am causing molecular agitation. Yet causing molecular agitation is

not a speech act on any intuitive understanding of that notion. One might propose that

the notion of making at issue here marks a constitutive relation rather than a causal

relation. That may be so, but as we'll see in Section 5, this suggests the controversial

conclusion that all speech acts depend for their existence on conventions over and

above those that imbue our words with meaning.

Finally, the saying makes it so condition has a flip side. Not only can I perform a

speech act by saying that I am doing so, I can also rescind that act later on by saying

(in the speech act sense) that I take it back. I cannot, of course, change the past, and so

nothing I can do on Wednesday can change the fact that I made a promise or an

assertion on Monday. However, on Wednesday I may be able to retract a claim I

made on Monday. I can't take back a punch or a burp; the most I can do is apologize

for one of these infractions, and perhaps make amends. By contrast, not only can I

apologize or make amends for a claim I now regret; I can also take it back. Likewise,

you may allow me on Wednesday to retract the promise I made to you on Monday. In

both these cases of assertion and promise, I am no longer beholden to the

commitments that the speech acts engender in spite of the fact that the past is fixed.

Just as one can, under appropriate conditions, perform a speech act by saying that one

is doing so, so too one can, under the right conditions, retract that very speech act.

2.3 Seven Components of Illocutionary Force

Searle and Vanderveken 1985 distinguish between those illocutionary forces

employed by speakers within a given linguistic community, and the set of all possible

illocutionary forces. While a certain linguistic community may make no use of a force

such as conjecturing or appointing, these two are among the set of all possible forces.

(These authors appear to assume that while the set of possible forces may be infinite,

it has a definite cardinality.) Searle and Vanderveken go on to define illocutionary

force in terms of seven features, claiming that every possible illocutionary force may

be identified with a septuple of such values. The features are:

1. Illocutionary point: This is the characteristic aim of each type of speech act. For

instance, the characteristic aim of an assertion is to describe how things are; the

characteristic point of a promise is to commit oneself to a future course of action.

2. Degree of strength of the illocutionary point: Two illocutions can have the same

point but differ along the dimension of strength. For instance, requesting and insisting

that the addressee do something both have the point of attempting to get the addressee

to do that thing; however, the latter is stronger than the former.

3. Mode of achievement: This is the special way, if any, in which the illocutionary

point of a speech act must be achieved. Testifying and asserting both have the point of

describing how things are; however, the former also involves invoking one's authority

as a witness while the latter does not. To testify is to assert in one's capacity as a

witness. Commanding and requesting both aim to get the addressee to do something;

yet only someone issuing a command does so in her capacity as a person in a position

of authority.

4. Propositional content conditions: Some illocutions can only be achieved with an

appropriate propositional content. For instance, I can only promise what is in the

future and under my control. I can only apologize for what is in some sense under my

control and already the case. For this reason, promising to make it the case that the

sun did not rise yesterday is not possible; neither can I apologize for the truth of

Snell's Law.

5. Preparatory conditions: These are all other conditions that must be met for the

speech act not to misfire. Such conditions often concern the social status of

interlocutors. For instance, a person cannot bequeath an object unless she already

owns it or has power of attorney; a person cannot marry a couple unless she is legally

invested with the authority to do so.

6. Sincerity conditions: Many speech acts involve the expression of a psychological

state. Assertion expresses belief; apology expresses regret, a promise expresses an

intention, and so on. A speech act is sincere only if the speaker is in the psychological

state that her speech act expresses.

7. Degree of strength of the sincerity conditions: Two speech acts might be the same

along other dimensions, but express psychological states that differ from one another

in the dimension of strength. Requesting and imploring both express desires, and are

identical along the other six dimensions above; however, the latter expresses a

stronger desire than the former.

Searle and Vanderveken suggest, in light of these seven characteristics, that each

illocutionary force may be defined as a septuple of values, each of which is a “setting”

of a value within one of the seven characteristics. It follows, according to this

suggestion, that two illocutionary forces F1 and F2 are identical just in case they

correspond to the same septuple.

…

5. Mood, Force and Convention

Just as content underdetermines force and force underdetermines content; so too even

grammatical mood together with content underdetermine force. ‘You'll be more

punctual in the future’ is in the indicative grammatical mood, but as we have seen that

fact does not determine its force. The same may be said of other grammatical moods.

Although I overhear you utter the words, ‘shut the door’, I cannot infer yet that you

are issuing a command. Perhaps instead you are simply describing your own intention,

in the course of saying, “I intend to shut the door.” If so, you've used the imperative

mood without issuing a command. So too with the interrogative mood: I overhear

your words, ‘who is on the phone.’ Thus far I don't know whether you've asked a

question. After all, you may have so spoken in the course of stating, “John wonders

who is on the phone.” Might either or both of initial capitalization or final punctuation

settle the issue? Apparently not: What puzzles John is the following question: Who is

on the phone?

Mood together with content underdetermine force. On the other hand it is a plausible

hypothesis that grammatical mood is one of the devices we use, together with

contextual clues, intonation and so on to indicate the force with which we are

expressing a content. Understood in this weak way, it is unexceptionable to construe

the interrogative mood as used for asking questions, the imperatival mood as used for

issuing commands, and so on. So understood, we might go on to ask how speakers

indicate the force of their speech acts given that grammatical mood and content

cannot be relied on alone to do so...

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Further Reading

Dummett, M. Origins of Analytic Philosophy (Harvard).

Furberg, M. 1971. Saying and Meaning: A Main Theme in J. L. Austin's

Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell.

Grewendorf, G. and G. Meggle (eds.) 2002: Speech Acts, Mind and Social

Reality (Dordrecht: Kluwer).

Holdcroft, D. 1978. Words and Deeds: Problems in the Theory of Speech

Acts. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Lepore, E. and van Gulick, R. (eds). 1991. John Searle and his Critics. Oxford:

Blackwell.

Warnock, G. Ed. 1973: Essays on J. L. Austin. Oxford: Oxford University

Press.

Warnock, G. 1989: J. L. Austin. New York: Routledge.