Proceedings of the International Conference Ljubljana, Yugoslavia, November 15, 1990

Proceedings of the International Conference Ljubljana, Yugoslavia, November 15, 1990

Speech Acts:

Fiction or Reality?

Proceedings of the International Conference Ljubljana, Yugoslavia, November 15, 1990

Igor Ž. Žagar, editor

IPrA Distribution Centre for Yugoslavia
Institute for Social Sciences

Contents

Igor Ž. Žagar: Foreword

Marina Sbisa: At the Origns of Illocution

Jelica Sumič-Riha: The Concept of the Performative and Its Reality

Janez Justin: The Role of Speech Acts in the Social Construction of Knowledge

Jef Verschueren: A Pragmatie Model for the Dynamics of Communication

Olga Kunst Gnamuš: Politeness as an Effect of the Interaction Between the Form and Context of a Request and the Context of Utterance

Carla Bazzanella, Claudia Caffi, Marina Sbisa: Scalar Dimension of Illocutionary Force

Igor Ž. Žagar: How to Do Things with Words - The Polyphonic Way

Anne Ellrup Nielsen, Henning Nolke: Persuasion Disguised as Description

Jelena Mežnarič: Fiction: Feature Structures

Foreword

At the third international pragmatic conference in Barcelona in July 1990 the idea came about to institute the IPrA Distribution Centre in Yugoslavia as well as had already been done in some other countries of the socialist block. Talking with some Yugoslav members of the Internation al Pragmatics Association that participated in the conference, we carne to an agreement that for various reasons it would be most appropriate if the centre operated in Ljubljana, more particularly at the Institute for Sociology (today the Institute for Social Sciences at the Faculty for Sociology. Political Sciences and Journalism), which already had similar organizational experiences.

Immediately after the conference in Barcelona we undertook the preparations and inaugurated the IPrA Distribution Centre for Yugoslavia by organizing the international conference, papers from which are contained in these proceedings. We decided for the topic of speech acts because they represent probably the most elaborated and analyzed field language Pragmatics in Yugoslavia, especially in Slovenia. The purpose of the conference was both to present different approaches towards the treatment of speech acts, as well as the treatment of different speech phenomena from the standpoint of the theory or theories of speech acts. Arrangement of papers in the proceedings is befitting to this as well: from. study of Austin s concept of illocution, through its later transformations and applications, all the way to transcending and transcendence of the concept of illocutionary act.

The proceedings also bring forth some papers which were not presented at the conference in November because of the absence of the authors, but it would be a pity, however, were they omitted.

At this point I would like to show gratitude once again to the Ministry

• Research and Technology of the Republic of Slovenia, and especially to its secretary Peter Tancig, who financially supported the publishing

• these proceedings., and the secretary general of IPrA Jef Verschueren, who kindly responded to our invitation for participation at the conference.

Igor Ž. Žagar

At the Origins of Illocution

Marina Sbisa', University of Trieste, Italy

J.L. Austin's book "How to Do Things with Words" has been often read as a self-defeating pursuit of Performatives (cf. Fann (ed.) 1969: 351-468). According to these readings, the aim of the book is to investigate the performative-constative distinction in order to discover the real nature of performative utterances. So a neat distinction is proposed and discussed in detail, only to be blurred and dropped. It is then substituted with another distinction, the Locution-Illocution-Perlocution distinction, which, however, is unable to answer the initial question about performative utterances. In my opinion, this reading of "How to Do Things with Words" is completely mistaken.

The development of pragmatics has gradually meant that attention has been shifted from the definition of Performatives to Speech Act Theory. In fact, the second half of "How to Do Things with Words" gives a first formulation to the notion of speech act, specifying a number of ways in which uttering words is, or counts as, acting. In particular, we find the notion of "illocutionary act" there for the first time, which has since then been discussed and applied so often in pragmatics. Readings of "How to Do Things with Words" that focus on speech act theory can still share with those which focus on the pursuit of Performatives the belief that Austin's reasons for affirming that uttering is acting lie in his failure to discover a criterion for Performatives.

Certainly, Austin provides us with some arguments against the performative-constative distinction. In particular, he argues that constatives (statements) are felicitous or infelicitous as much as other speech acts, i.e. the so-called performative utterances: the various ways in which

they entail, imply, or presuppose other statements, are - according to Austin's analysis - parallel to the ways in which performatives are connected with their felicity conditions. However, this argument does not seem to be used by Austin as an objection to himself, an obstacle to his own theory: rather, it serves directly the aim of showing that "in order to explain what can go wrong with statements we cannot just concentrate on the proposition involved" and that therefore it is necessary to introduce the notion of speech act (1975: 52). Unfortunately, it is not clear whether it was because of this argument or because of other,

independent reasons that Austin came to think that the performative/constative distinction had to be rejected. Likewise, his search for a criterion of performativity (1975: 55-65) may be read as a real search that misses its point, therefore suggesting that a change of conceptual framework is needed, or as an argument in favour of rejecting a given conceptual framework (a kind of reductio ad absurdum). Thus, the origin of the notion of Illocution, as. well as of the overall project of Austin's work on speech acts, remains unclear.

While working on the Second Edition of "How to Do Things with Words", I obtained some illuminating insights into this origin. Here, I shall briefly discuss these insights, hoping that they might be useful to new (and perhaps also old) readers of "How to Do Things with Words".

From a historical point of view, it is clear from the Manuscript of "How to Do Things with Words" that Austin had stopped believing in the performative-constative distinction long before giving the William James Lectures at Harvard in 1955. It could even be doubted whether he ever maintained that distinction: what is proposed in the earlier article "Other Minds" (cf. Austin 1970: 97-103) is not a distinction between performatives and constatives in general, but a contrast between each (explicit) performative utterance and the statement it seems to be. Incidentally, Austin never refuted his first analysis of such a contrast; he only complicated it, by also taking into account uses of 1st person present indicative active formulas that do not describe an act of the speaker's but are not performatives either (e.g.. "suiting the action to the word", 1975: 65, 81-82). The question that Austin raises by introducing the performative/constative distinction (1975: 3-5) is quite different, and much more general: is it correct to oppose a class of utterances that perform actions and are felicitous or infelicitous, to a class of utterances that state something and are true or false? There is no hint in the Manuscript to suggest that Austin ever gave a positive answer to such a question.

The Manuscript consists in a collection of notes used by Austin in his lectures from 1951 to 1956. Some sheets coming from earlier sets of notes (but not all of them) seem to have been combined with the notes written in 1955 for use in the Harvard lectures. In the notes belonging to the 1951-52 set, it is apparent that at that time Austin was already concerned with investigating the relations between uttering and acting, and sketching the Locution-Illocution-Perlocution distinction. The "sea-change" from the performative/constative distinction to the theory of speech acts (Austin 1975:150) had already occurred. And Austin seems to have been quite conscious of this, if we may trust some

fragments of introductory notes probably belonging to these same years (still unpublished because not delivered at Harvard), where he expresses enthusiasm for some kind of philosophical insight related to the debate on performatives, as well as caution about what he calls "the ramifications of the doctrine" (i.e. its implications for other fields of philosophy).

This suggests rather strongly that the origins of Illocution do not lie in the argumentations against the performative/constative distinction that are explicitly exposed in "How to Do Things with Words", but in some other thought or project conceived by Austin before writing (in 195152) what seems to be the earliest version of his book.

Such a hypothesis, of course, might simply have a historical or psychological relevance. But it also has a heuristic value: reading Austin's Manuscript in its light, it is possible to identify a number of cues that, taken together, suggest a wider reconstruction of the job that Illocution was intended to do in the context of philosophical problems. And this is perhaps relevant to theory, at least indirectly. It amounts to asking ourselves if, in Austin's opinion, it was important to decide whether the performative/constative distinction was to he accepted or rejected, for which aims such a decision was important., and what the consequences might be for other philosophical problems.

It should be kept in mind that Austin, who is now known mainly as a philosopher of language, was primarily a philosopher, and in particular an ordinary language philosopher who tried to reformulate and answer traditional philosophical questions through the analysis of ordinary linguistic usage. He was involved in epistemological and ethical debates, as is shown by his articles "Other Minds", "Truth",' A Plea for Excuses", "Ifs and Cans" (in Austin 1970) and by his book "Sense and Sensibilia (1962). Ii should not be surprising if his notion of Illocution (and the overall project of speech act theory) turns to serve some philosophical aim other (and wider) than replacing the performative/constative distinction in the analysis of performative utterances.

Now, in some introductory notes not delivered at Harvard, Austin hints, in a rather critical way, at certain philosophical uses that had been made of the notion of performative utterance. He says that, while he himself had some such uses in mind, he approves of some and disapproves of others. In particular, he maintains that the performative utterance has been used "fairly freely" (or even in "happy go-lucky ways) in discussions of ethical and epistemological problems. He finds that these uses have revealed the "inadequacies" or "deficiencies" of his own theory, as well as of the conceptual framework it shared with much of the philosophical work contemporary to it, and argues the need for a reconsideration of this framework.

The dissatisfaction with the philosophical uses of the notion of performative utterance must have played some role in Austin's formulation. of the theoretical framework of speech acts: certainly, in his mind, a notion the use of which had proved to lead to philosophical confusions was a badly formulated one, to be rejected or reformulated. So what were then the philosophical uses of the performative that caused Austin's dissatisfaction and stimulated his search for a new theoretical framework?

It seems we must look for them in the fields of ethics and of epistemology: but these are so wide as to make our search nearly hopeless. However, in the Manuscript there are two notes of Austin's which mention some examples of philosophical analyses, of an ethical and an epistemological character respectively, in which the notion of performative utterance was actually used. A note that lists a number of topics to be discussed, all more or less related to differences and similarities between so-called performatives and statements, mentions (as targets for criticism) P.F. Strawson's analysis of true and the debate on the analysis of good. Another note (which, by the way, seems to be one of the earliest in the Manuscript) mentions the "performatory aspect" of some words such as know, good, and true, which however are said not to be "wholly" performatory.

This may seem too little for the reconstruction of an entire philosophical scene. But know, good and true are the key-words of three philosophical debates which it is not difficult to identify. Austin himself had given a performative analysis of know (in "Other Minds", 1946; cf. 1970: 97-103), affirming that:

To suppose that "I know" is a descriptive phrase, is only one example of the descriptive fallacy, so common in philosophy. (...) Utterance of obvious ritual phrases, in the appropriate circumstances, is not describing the action we are doing, but doing it (...) (1970:103)

Later, P.F. Strawson (1949) proposed analyzing true as a performative word, which does not contribute to the meaning of the utterance in which it appears, but is used to perform the act of confirming. As to the analysis of "good", analytical philosophy had been discussing ethical emotivism, i.e. the proposal to define good in terms of its use in expressing emotions, and was going to elaborate prescriptivism (cf.Hare 1952), i.e. the analysis of good as recommending something.

Both in the case of emotivism and in the case of prescriptivism, the meaning of the word good was reduced to the function it was said to play in linguistic activity.

Austin's opinions about emotivist and prescriptivist analyses of good can be easily' guessed from his few polemical hints to the Value/Fact dichotomy (e.g. "the value/fact fetish", 1975:151; "value or fact, so far as these are distinguishable", 1975: 153). Moreover, in the final pages of "How to Do Things with Words", he proposes to apply the notion of Illocution to the analysis of good (1975: 163-64). Unfortunately, what is said there is not enough to clarify which analysis of good he was willing to outline. It is, however, clear enough that he did not take sides, either with emotivism or with prescriptivism.

More information is available, on the other hand, about Austin's opinions on the analysis of true. He criticized Strawson's performative analysis in his article "Truth" (1950; cf. 1970: 117-33) and a long debate followed (cf. at least: Strawson 1971: 190-213, 234-49; Austin 1970: 154-74; Davidson 1984: 37-54). In this debate, Austin defended both the claim that true contributes to the meaning of the utterance in which it occurs (namely, is not redundant) and his particular version of the "correspondence theory" of truth.

Finally, Austin's own analysis of 1 know was never explicitly refuted in his later writings (apart from the criticism expressed in an unpublished note we already referred to). However, in the final list of performative utterances included in the last lecture of "How to Do Things with Words", know is accompanied by a question mark (1975:162). Moreover, the provisional definition of the performative utterance in the first Lecture seems to incorporate the criticism we found expressed in the unpublished note, stating that

the uttering of the sentence is, or is a part of, the doing of an action, which again would not normally be described as, or as "just", saying something. (1975: 5)

Here the small, incidental addition "or as 'just"' introduces from the very beginning the idea that performative utterances can both perform an action and say something: an idea which was quite extraneous to Austin by the time he wrote "Other Minds".

What these three philosophical contexts have in common is the temptation to reduce the meaning of some linguistic expression to the act performed by its use. The notion of performative utterance, as introduced in "Other Minds", was itself a brilliant example of how a philosopher can get rid of the puzzling meaning of some word or phrase.

The philosophical manoeuvre employed there, invoking performativity, could appear as innocent as far as it presents itself as a merely local one, not affecting general philosophical assumptions (cf. Austin's own restrictions on his analytical considerations in 1970: 98n). But the repeated use of such a manoeuvre cannot but have general implications: it confirms the traditional dichotomic distinction between saying and acting (i.e., between Theory and Practice!), and legitimates the idea of the cognitive use of language being identified with the issuing of utterances that are not actions, excluding those which are actions from the realm of meaning. This is exactly what Austin must have felt to be wrong. Hence the need for a more general framework, giving to both saying and acting their appropriate places within the overall speech act.

In the discussion of Strawson's analysis of true, Austin's criticism to what we might call "performative reductionism" is explicitly expounded, and takes the form of a proposal to distinguish two different levels in the use of the same utterance:

I agree that to say that ST (it is true that the cat is on the mat) "is" very often, and according to the all-important linguistic occasion, to confirm tstS (the statement that the cat is on the mat) or to grant it or what not; but this cannot show that to say that ST is not also and at the same time to make an assertion about tstS. (1970: 133)

What we find here is not yet the proposal of distinguishing the locutionary and the illocutionary act, but a provisional answer to the same question that this distinction will answer later. The train of thought that will lead Austin to formulate the Locution- Illocution-Perlocution distinction has already begun: he is already seeking to draw distinctions among different actional levels within the same speech act. I therefore hypothesize that the notion of Illocution was formulated by Austin in order to describe a certain conventional actional level within the total speech act, without implying that by such a speech act nothing is said, and thus avoiding performative reductionism.

Did the notion of Illocution succeed in performing the philosophical role for which it was formulated? It has probably served as a tool against the fashion of proposing reductionist performative analyses. But it has not been used to give new solutions to problems such as the analysis of true or of good. Austin himself does not seem to have done enough work in this direction.

It appears from the various sets of notes in the Manuscript that Austin's theoretical effort concentrated more and more on one of the consequences of the new theoretical framework of speech acts: the redescription of assertions as illocutionary acts. His attempts at such a redescription muss have aroused many resistances, open and covert, so that he was led to dedicate more and more attention to it. The "revolution in philosophy" arising from the developments of the "descriptive fallacy", among which the discovery of performative utterances, that Austin mentions in the first lecture of "How to Do Things with Words", is perhaps to be understood as that bundle of potential philosophical consequences arising from assertion being redescribed as an illocutionary act (and maybe from truth becoming a feature of the speech act). Without taking account of Austin's corresponsibility for, and then resistance to, performative reductionism, as well as the role played by this resistance in the origin of Illocution, it is perhaps impossible to make full sense of the following passage: