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What Is to Be Done With Austin?
Nancy Bauer
So far then we have merely felt the firm ground of prejudice slide away beneath our feet. But now how, as philosophers, are we to proceed?
How to Do Things With Words, 13
We must at all costs avoid over-simplification, which one might be tempted to call the occupational disease of philosophers if it were not their occupation.
How to Do Things With Words, 38
I.
I have been struggling for a long time now with the question of what to do with J. L. Austin, and particularly with the book How to Do Things With Words. I first read Austin when I was studying with Stanley Cavell in graduate school, and so from the start I have been struck by the profound inadequacy of the usual way in which Austin is read—that is, as a theorist who failed to grasp that what our words do is, roughly speaking, an epiphenomenal effect of language, an effect parasitic on what words inherently say. But over the years I have come to sense that even Cavell, especially in recent work, underestimates the potential radicality of Austin’s writing.[1]
The occasion for my struggling publicly with the question of what to do with Austin is a book I am writing called How to Do Things With Pornography, in which I pick on certain feminist philosophers—philosophers, that is, of my own ilk—for failing to allow their feminist bearings to change the way they do philosophy and to raise their aspirations for the enterprise. The writers I worry about constitute an unusual group: excellent women philosophers who have managed not only to gain respect for their mainstream work but also to dare to risk their own professional status by refusing to hold their feminist commitments apart from their philosophizing. What concerns me is the way that they hold their political commitments and their philosophizing together. They believe that the role of philosophers in the feminist cause is to underwrite preordained political positions via philosophical argumentation and theorizing. In my book I focus on the work of Rae Langton, Jennifer Hornsby, and others who support their views as well as their sense of how philosophy might be politically efficacious. A couple of the book’s chapters comprise a study and a critique of the work that Langton, Hornsby, and others have done in an attempt to vindicate the anti-pornography views of Catharine MacKinnon, particularly her notorious claim that pornography doesn’t merely cause men to treat women poorly but actively and inherently discriminates against women by subordinating and silencing them.[2] Judges, lawyers, politicians, free-speech advocates, and philosophers have charged that this claim is incoherent insofar as it suggests that pornography, inert speech (in the legal sense of the term), can do something all by itself, even absent what the courts like to call “mental mediation” on the part of its users. The project of Langton and Hornsby is to use How to Do Things With Words to show that speech is not inherently inert, that when used under the right conditions it possesses what Austin called “illocutionary force,” that is, the power to get things done. The argument is that if such conditions obtain in the case of pornographic speech, then MacKinnon’s claim that pornography doesn’t just cause harm to women but constitutes a form of harm to them is perfectly coherent.
One of the concerns I have about this project is that it’s not clear why MacKinnon’s political position stands in need of philosophical bolstering. Whether one agrees with MacKinnon or not depends on whether one thinks that pornography brings about the bad consequences she thinks it does, not whether the idea that porn inherently does bad things is incoherent. This fact, in my view, helps explain why the project of using Austin to justify MacKinnon, despite its having been undertaken by some of the most prominent of feminist philosophers, is almost unknown outside of the circle of their immediate peers. I also believe that the claims of Langton, Hornsby, and others about what pornography does are in various ways misguided and that these claims are not lent support even from the reading of Austin that their proponents exploit to prop them up. But at the heart of my criticism of this project is my conviction that this reading of Austin is seriously impoverished; indeed, my view is that its proponents’ allegiance to this reading blinds them to the question, much more salient on my way of reading Austin, of what sort of illocutionary force their own writing as feminist philosophers possesses, or fails to possess.
My view is that Langton et al. evince precisely the same ignorance or repression about how words do things that, I believe, it was Austin’s central project to combat. This hermeneutical irony is trumped, in my view, by a further real-world one: Langton et al.’s way of appropriating Austin helps ensure the political ineffectiveness of their writing. What philosophers ought to be taking away from Austin’s book, what is epitomized brilliantly in its title alone, is a sense of the extent to which we philosophers are prone, particularly in our study of how language works, to ignore the question both of what sorts of things our words do and how they do them—that is, the conditions under which philosophical speech acts might come off as we intend them to. In fact, philosophers tend to write as though the only things our words have a prayer of doing, aside from making claims that aspire to track the truth, is persuading other people, ordinarily other philosophers and theoretically minded academicians, to adopt our views. Persuasion, of course is a possible effect of our words on others, not something that they do by virtue of being the words they are, uttered in the circumstances they are uttered in. In Austin’s lingo, persuasion is a “perlocution,” not an illocution. So what I am claiming here is that philosophers these days tend to write as though their own words were devoid of illocutionary force, I do not exempt myself from the tendency of writing, perhaps even in this very essay, in the way I’m putting into question here. But if there is something I wish to persuade you of, it is that to the extent that we philosophers wish our words to do things in the real world, outside of the narrow circle of journals and presses that provide a medium through which we try merely to persuade each other, we ought to take seriously the question of what sort of illocutionary force—or lack thereof—philosophical writing possesses. This imperative, I will claim, makes itself manifest in Austin’s writing only if we abjure the temptation to read Austin in the narrow theoretical way that Langton, Hornsby, et al. read him—a way that renders us unable to register the extent to which Austin can help us to see how our own writing endlessly risks being—if I can put it this way—humanly inert.
This is a very harsh and, in some respects, unfair charge to lay at the feet of Langton et al. For in inheriting Austin the way they do, they are far from unique. As far as I can tell, virtually all people who consider themselves analytic philosophers of language read How to Do Things With Wordsas they do. According to this reading, Austin is attempting to provide us with a modest theory, one not about how language in general works but limited to an exploration of just one its many features: illocutionary force. And this feature is thought be something that Austin himself should have recognized as dependent on other features of language that are theoretically more basic. For though the capacity of language to do things is not void of philosophical interest, the real business of philosophy is to produce a theory of how language works in and of itself—that is to say, prior to any use to which it gets put. You can’t understand how language does anything until you understand its capacity to represent the world. After that, you can do what philosophers of language call pragmatics. Some philosophers of language understand Austin to have been pleading the case for putting pragmatics on a par with the more basic enterprises of syntax and semantics. But no one takes him to be suggesting anything more radical than that. And everyone agrees that, at its roots, what Austin offers us in How to Do Things With Words is best understood as a theory about how language does things.
My view is that this understanding of Austin’s views evinces a deep failure to grasp what’s most important about what Austin was doing. Austin’s aim, it seems to me, was not to enliven, enrich, or expand what philosophers call pragmatics. It was to destroy the picture of language on which engaging in an independent enterprise called “pragmatics” makes any sense.[3] “Illocutionary force” is not a fancy name for what pragmatics is interested in.[4] To the contrary, it identifies a dimension of our sentences apart from which they not only would not do anything but also would not mean anything—or at least would mean things in drastically impoverished ways and so not mean what we need them to mean. Whenever a person speaks or writes she performs the illocution of committing herself to her words. As Austin puts it early in How to Do Things With Words, “our word is our bond” (10). And to offer our bond to the world is, always, to perform the illocutionary acts of inviting others to grasp what we mean, to risk being misunderstood, and to make ourselves vulnerable to the judgments of others. I am suggesting, then, that in How to Do Things With Words Austin is claiming that because words must do things in order to mean things, and because in doing things with our words we stake ourselves in the world and position ourselves with respect to other people, no philosophy of language that aspires to make a difference in the world will ignore the extent to which linguistic competence is inherently an ethical matter.[5] Or at least so I shall try to persuade you.
II.
The central claim in what follows is this: it’s best not to read How to Do Things With Words as a theory, of speech acts or of anything else. The enterprise of trying to support this claim seems doomed even before I flesh it out, however, since in How to Do Things With Words Austin identifies himself point blank as doing theory. Indeed, he says that he’s constructing two theories, a general theory (of illocutions) and a special one (of what he calls performatives, that is, illocutions that explicitly announce themselves as illocutions, such as “I hereby pronounce you husband and wife). But my claim is not that there is no theory in How to Do Things With Words. Rather, the claim is that the theory that Austin takes himself to be constructing is less philosophically interesting or momentous—in my bolder moments I believe that that Austin thinks it’s less momentous—than what he is doing in How to Things With Words, which, I believe, is proposing a way to tie the way we talk to our capacity for taking responsibility for our actions. The theory is a means for us to grasp something philosophically deep about what it is for us to use words, not a philosophical end-in-itself. So the theory might be wrong-headed in its particulars and yet still do something important philosophically.
I am claiming, to put the point in another way, that Austinian theory, in its aims and achievements, is very unlike the sort of theorizing that predominates in present-day philosophy of language, whose raison d’être is to get things right. I have in mind those philosophers who are striving to produce comprehensive semantic theory by providing the apparatus for identifying the truth-conditions of well-formed sentences taken literally.[6] In order eventually to throw my own reading of Austin in relief, I’m going to start by comparing it with the (largely dismissive) understanding of Austin’s project that these philosophers are inclined to accept. Philosophers who subscribe to what I’ll call “the mainstream reading” are of course inclined to read How to Do Things With Words as a theoretical end-in-itself. Austin’s ground-floor theoretical claim, it is supposed, is that your garden-variety utterance involves the issuing of a locution (something that has meaning), an illocution (something that constitutes an act), and a perlocution (something that has an effect on its auditors); and that these three facets of the utterance are at least in principle distinct. This means that, theoretically, at least, what an utterance means varies independently of what it does and of what effects it has on its auditors. Now, in reflecting on why the mainstream reading goes astray in the way it does, it struck me that this ground-floor theoretical claim very often gets aligned with a basic—and hugely influential—theoretical distinction of Paul Grice’s, namely, the difference between what an utterance means and what a speaker means in using an utterance.[7] “Sentence meaning,” it is assumed, is more or less what Austin meant, or should have meant, in pointing to an utterance’s locutionary dimension; the illocutionary dimension is a function of “speaker meaning.”[8] an utterance’s locutionary dimension; “speaker meaning,” its illocutionary one. Once you make this elision, it will look as though the point of Austin’s book is simply to gesture in the direction of a sideshow research program, that of investigating speaker meaning. Austin will be seen as having avoided the oldest and hardest and most important nut in the philosophy of language, the question of how sentences manage to make sense and hook on to the world. And it will look as though what he’s handing us instead is a problem that merely piggybacks on this old one, namely, how it is that saying a sentence that has sense and hooks on to the world can do something.
What I’m identifying as the foundation of this understanding of Austin strikes its adherents as screamingly obvious, not even worth justifying: that whatever a speech act actually does in the world must be “parasitic” on what it says. If people don’t grasp the “locutionary act” that a coherent utterance effects, then nothing is going to get done with it.[9] So, regardless of what his philosophical aspirations may have been, Austin cannot be doing more in How to Do Things With Words than attempting to extend our philosophical attention beyond the project of pinning down the semantics of natural language to the question of how locutions end up getting things done.
It is worth slowing down here to look at exactly how contemporary philosophers of language construe Austin in Gricean terms. I’m going to do this in two steps. First, I’m going to go over a set of assumptions that virtually all mainstream philosophers of language accept. Then I’m going to schematize how these assumptions shape the conventional understanding of Austin’s theory of speech acts.
First, then, let’s look at the set of assumptions that constitute the lens through which How to Do Things With Words is read by the mainstream:
(1)The point of philosophizing about language must be to produce a viable theory of what it is to understand and use a language: a theory of linguistic competence.
(2)Any comprehensive viable theory will have three distinct though closely related branches: syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Insofar as pragmatics helps us understand speaker meaning and the nature of speech acts, it can’t kick in until semantics has had its say. In general, you can't say anything philosophically interesting about the pragmatics of an utterance apart from first getting the semantics right, or at least right enough.
(3)When we do semantic theorizing, we assume that there is such a thing as a "normal" use of language, viz., one in which speakers intend to communicate with each other about how things are in the world. The main goal of philosophical semantics is to explain how sentences provide the means for speakers to do this. This means that the fundamental task for philosophers of language is to attend to what they call “literal” uses of utterances, that is, uses in which what sentences mean can largely be determined a priori from, e.g., the meaning of words and syntactical rules.
(4)Following Tarski, we are to understand the “meaning” of a sentence as whatever would have to be the case in order for the sentence to be true. “Snow is white” is the claim that snow is in fact white, and “snow is white” is true if and only if snow is in fact white.
(5)Some sentence meanings are ambiguous. We can disambiguate certain ambiguous utterances and pin down their meaning in "normal" instances by heeding the context of the utterance. Suppose someone says, “He had a ball.” The way to figure out what this sentence means is to find out who “he” is, and whether he (a) possessed a spherical object or (b) threw a formal dance party or (c) had a wonderful time.
(6)However, there are lots of non-ambiguous sentences, such as, “It has always been the case that the planet Mars has been either dry or not dry.”[10]
(7)On occasion, we will need to know something about a speaker’s intentions in order to pin down the meaning of the sentence he or she has uttered A woman walks into a coffee shop and tells the waiter, “Bring me a cup of coffee.” Understanding that the woman is ordering a cup of brewed coffee (and not, say, a dry, one-cup measure full of coffee beans) requires grasping the woman’s intentions.