Illocutionary Acts and Sentence Meaning

William P. Alston

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781501700415
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Analytic Philosophy

What is it for a sentence to have a certain meaning? This is the question that the distinguished analytic philosopher William P. Alston addresses in this major contribution to the philosophy of language. His answer focuses on the given sentence's potential to play the role that its speaker had in mind, what he terms the usability of the sentence to perform the illocutionary act intended by its speaker.Alston defines an illocutionary act as an act of saying something with a certain "content." He develops his account of what it is to perform such acts in terms of taking responsibility, in uttering a sentence, for the existence of certain conditions. In requesting someone to open a window, for example, the speaker takes responsibility for its being the case that the window is closed and that the speaker has an interest in its being opened.In Illocutionary Acts and Sentence Meaning, Alston expands upon this concept, creating a framework of five categories of illocutionary act and going on to argue that sentence meaning is fundamentally a matter of illocutionary act potential; that is, for a sentence to have a particular meaning is for it to be usable to perform illocutionary acts of a certain type. In providing detailed and explicit patterns of analysis for the whole range of illocutionary acts, Alston makes a unique contribution to the field of philosophy of language—one that is likely to generate debate for years to come.

PART I

THE NATURE OF ILLOCUTIONARY ACTS

CHAPTER ONE

The Stratification of Linguistic Behavior

My first task in this book is to develop an account of illocutionary acts (IA’s). That will involve (a) making explicit what it is to perform an illocutionary act of a certain type and (b) surveying and classifying the variety of such acts. But before addressing myself to that I must indicate the territory I will be examining. ‘Illocutionary act’ is a technical philosophical term. We cannot enter onto a discussion of illocutionary acts without a preliminary location of such acts, the way we can tackle knowledge or truth or causation on the basis of the working grasp of these concepts every normal human being has. While doing that we will look at the relations of illocutionary acts to speech acts of other sorts.

Since all twentieth-century discussion of speech acts stems from J. L. Austin’s seminal work, How to Do Things with Words, it would be natural to begin with a look at how Austin, who coined the term ‘illocutionary act’, identifies that category. But, as will appear shortly, Austin’s account is rife with ambiguities and puzzles. Hence I prefer to begin by setting out my way of locating illocutionary acts, then using that as a guide through the twists and turns of Austin’s discussion.

i. Types of Speech Acts

I begin with a brief survey of types of speech acts, the variety of things people do in speaking.¹ The types in which I am interested can all be exemplified in a single utterance. If a person uttered ‘The gate is unlocked’ the following might all be correct reports of what she did at that time.

A.

1. U said ‘The gate is unlocked’.²
2. U asserted that the gate was unlocked.
3. U told Smith that the gate was unlocked.
4. U got it across to Smith that the gate was unlocked.
5. U made me wonder who had been here recently.

In one and the same breath the speaker did all these things and perhaps many more. This phenomenon of performing acts of many different types with the same bodily movements is by no means confined to speech. If a person presses a button at a certain moment, he may thereby do all the following and much more.

B.

1. P pressed a button.
2. P closed a circuit.
3. P started an engine.
4. P followed instructions.

Before I undertake to separate out illocutionary acts from this panoply of linguistic doings, we must deal with the question of how to talk about situations in which a number of nonequivalent specifications can be given of what someone did in a single bodily movement. Should we say that the agent performs a number of different actions, as many as there are nonequivalent specifications, or should we say that the various reports make explicit different aspects of one and the same action? When U said ‘The gate is unlocked’, told Smith that the gate was unlocked, and made me wonder who had been here recently, did she thereby do three different things, or were these all aspects of one thing she did? This is a question about the individuation of actions. Ordinary speech pulls us in both directions. On the one hand, it seems right to say that “U did all the different things I listed”. On the other hand, it seems right that her saying ‘The gate is unlocked’ was a case of telling Smith that the gate was unlocked, thereby suggesting that these are two ways of characterizing the same action.

Both modes of individuation are represented in contemporary action theory, the former by, for example, Goldman 1970, the latter by, for example, Davidson 1980. The issues are complex and not to be resolved quickly. Fortunately my enterprise does not require me to do so. I can sidestep the controversy because my central concern is not with actions as concrete events but with act types, concepts, descriptions, reports, or properties. From this battery of terms, which could be extended, I choose types, concepts, and reports, between which I will freely oscillate. Thus my concern here is to elucidate illocutionary act types (concepts or reports) and to distinguish them from other speech act types (concepts or reports). However many actions I attributed to Ms. A in the above example, it is clear that I listed a number of different, nonsynonymous reports, reporting the carrying out of different act types and using different act concepts to do so. At the end of the next section I shall offer an apologia for my apparently using the Goldman criterion of act individuation and provide a mechanism for neutralizing its ontological implications.

ii. Illocutionary Acts

In looking over the above list of types of action one might perform in uttering ‘The gate is unlocked’, we can see that for some of them, in attributing an action of that type to a speaker we make explicit what the person said (in a sense of ‘what she said’ that does not mean “what sentence she uttered”). The items of which this is true are ‘U asserted that the gate is unlocked’ and ‘U told Smith that the gate is unlocked’. In other terms these specify the content of the utterance. The familiar device of oratio obliqua reports (“indirect speech”) contains an enormous wealth of resources for doing this. Here is a small sample.

C.

1. U told H that U had left his lights on.
2. U predicted that the strike would be over soon.
3. U suggested to H that they go to a movie.
4. U asked H for a match.
5. U advised H to sell her utilities stock.
6. U promised H to read her paper.
7. U expressed considerable enthusiasm for H’s proposal.
8. U reminded H that it was almost nine o’clock.
9. U exhorted H to try to finish before the end of the week.
10. U congratulated H on his performance.
11. U announced that the meeting had been canceled.
12. U admitted that the gate was open.

The list could be continued indefinitely.

Let’s think for a moment about the suggestion that all the items on the list make explicit what the speaker said, in a sense in which that does not involve direct quotation. The most straightforward way of defending that idea would be to claim that in each case we can restate the report, using ‘say’ as the main verb. Where the original was not already in the verb + propositional complement form, as in 4., some reshuffling will be necessary. This gives us:

D.

1. U said to H that H had left his lights on.
2. U said that the strike would be over soon.
3. U said to H that they might go to a movie.
4. U said that he would appreciate it if H gave him a match.
5. U said to H that it would be a good idea for H to sell her utilities stock.
6. U said to H that he would read her paper.
7. U said that B’s proposal was wonderful.
8. U said that in case H hadn’t noticed, it was nine o’clock.
9. U said that H should try to finish before the end of the week.

And so on. It would be very neat if we could maintain that these reformulations simply have the effect of making the main verb less specific while keeping everything else the same. Sometimes this is what happens. Thus 6a is neutral between promising and simply expressing an intention, while 6. makes a definite commitment to the former; otherwise the content is the same. In other cases, however, we have to beef up the propositional content to compensate for the weakening of the main verb if we are to have anything approximating the original; this is the case with 4., 5., 7., 8., and 9. Indeed, as we move through the list, it becomes increasingly implausible to suppose that we can exactly reformulate the oratio obliqua report with ‘say’ as the main verb. We can most felicitously do the job with ‘say’, where the illocutionary act reported is of an assertive sort—assert, predict, admit, insist, and the like.³ Otherwise the report is bent out of shape if we try to do it that way. That being the case, I will kick away this ladder, having climbed up it part way. Rather than continue to rely on the formulation in terms of “what the speaker said”, I will take as my guiding star the idea that an illocutionary act report is an oratio obliqua report that it is plausible to regard as giving the content of the utterance.

The identification of illocutionary acts by content specifying oratio obliqua reports is a very different way of introducing the term from that employed by Austin. In a bit I will discuss Austin’s treatment and consider how it is related to mine. The previous few paragraphs spell out the way in which I have identified illocutionary acts since 1963.

Following Searle 1969 I analyze an illocutionary act into a “propositional content” and an “illocutionary force”. A full-blown oratio obliqua report contains a main verb and an attached “content-specifying” phrase. We may take the former to indicate the illocutionary force and the latter to indicate the propositional content Thus in ‘A predicted that the strike would soon be over’, the illocutionary force is that of predicting and the propositional content is that the strike will soon be over. In A asked B to give him a match’, the illocutionary force is that of requesting and the propositional content is that B gives A a match. I do not assume that this technique gives obvious results in all cases. Thus in A expressed enthusiasm for B’s proposal’, we have a choice between taking expressing as the illocutionary force and that A is enthusiastic about B’s proposal as the propositional content, and taking expressing enthusiasm for as the illocutionary force and that B put forward a certain proposal as the propositional content. But in general the application is clear.

Reactions to this material have made it clear to me that it is common to reserve ‘content’ for what I have just called ‘propositional content’. In that usage admitting that the strike is over, announcing that the strike is over, and denying that the strike is over would have the same content, and the illocutionary force does not belong to the content. That is not the way I am using ‘content’ in application to utterances. In my usage the content includes anything that U seeks to communicate, anything a hearer (H) must grasp in order to understand what the speaker is saying. And that definitely includes illocutionary force as well as propositional content. If I took you to be announcing that the strike is over rather than denying that the strike is over or admitting that the strike is over, I would have failed to understand you completely.

The distinctive contours of the illocutionary act category can be best appreciated by contrasting it with other sorts of speech acts. Go back to U who uttered the sentence ‘The gate is unlocked’ at time t. Here is a more extended list of what might be a correct report of what she did at t.

E.

1. U made vocal sounds.
2. U spoke with a Brooklyn accent.
3. U said ‘The gate is unlocked’.
4. U asserted that the gate was unlocked.
5. U told Smith that the gate was unlocked.
6. U explained how the dog got out.
7. U contradicted what Smith had just said.
8. U tried to make conversation.
9. U got it across to Smith that the gate was unlocked.
10. U succeeded in irritating me.
11. U prevented Smith from concentrating on his measurements.

From this list only 4. and 5. would count as oratio obliqua reports, at least if we require of such reports that they make explicit the specific “content” of the utterance. Other items fail this test for a variety of reasons. Items 1. and 2. are solely concerned with acoustic features of the utterance. Item 3. tells us what sentence was uttered but not what was done with it. On hearing 3. we may assume that U was making the most common standard use of the sentence, but that has not been made explicit. Items 6. and 7. are in the right direction but are insufficiently specific to bring out just what U said to explain that the dog got out or to contradict what Smith had just said. Item 8. specifies U’s ultimate goal without making explicit what U said to achieve that goal. And items 9.–11. have to do with consequences of B’s utterance rather than with its content.

Of the various types of speech acts reported in this list the ones we shall be most interested in, in addition to illocutionary acts, are sentential acts, which like 4. consist in the utterance of a certain sentence, and (again following Austin’s terminology), perlocutionary acts, those that, like 12.-15., essentially involve an utterance’s having a certain effect. As the list indicates, many types of speech act fall outside this trichotomy, but they will not be of concern to us here.

It is worth noting that not all ...