John Searle

Speech acts

Searle’s early work in the philosophy of language was an outgrowth of his study at Oxford under the ordinary-language philosopher J.L. Austin. In his 1955 William James Lectures at Harvard University, published posthumously as How to Do Things with Words (1962), Austin criticized the tendency of analytic philosophers, especially adherents of the school of logical positivism, for supposing that there is only one basic kind of language use: that of making descriptive utterances (in speech or in writing) that are either true or false depending on how the world is. Focusing as they did on scientific discourse, the logical positivists went so far as to claim that an utterance is meaningful only if it is a tautology or such that it can be confirmed or disconfirmed (in principle) through experience; all other utterances are literally nonsense (see verifiability principle). Austin pointed out that descriptive utterances (which he called “constatives”) hardly exhaust the range of meaningful uses of language. They are only one of many kinds of performative utterance, or speech act (Austin called them “illocutionary acts”), which consist of social acts performed by means of linguistic utterances in appropriate circumstances. Other examples are orders, requests, promises, greetings, resignations, warnings, and dozens more. For most speech acts, the utterance through which the act is performed—e.g., “I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth”—is neither true nor false, though the performance may be infelicitous in various ways, as when a person who is not authorized to name the ship cracks a champagne bottle against the bow and utters “I name this ship the Generalissimo Stalin.”

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Dimensions and taxonomy

In his first major work, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (1969), Searle treated speech acts much more systematically than Austin had. He proposed that each kind of speech act can be defined in terms of a set of rules that identify the conditions that are individually necessary and collectively sufficient for “sincerely and non-defectively” performing an act of that kind. Among the rules for promising, for example, are that the speaker (S) predicate a future act (A) of himself, that S intend to carry out A, that the hearer (H) prefer that S carry out A, that it not be obvious to both S and H that S would carry out A in the normal course of events, and that S intend to place himself under an obligation to carry out A.

At a more general level, Searle identified three basic dimensions with respect to which different kinds of speech vary from one another: the illocutionary point of the act, insofar as it is an act of a certain type; what he called the act’s “direction of fit”; and the psychological state expressed by the act. For example, the illocutionary point of a statement, insofar as it is a statement, is to present the world as being a certain way, and the illocutionary point of an order, insofar as it is an order, is to get the hearer to do something.

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A speech act’s direction of fit characterizes the way in which acts of that type are related to the world. A statement has a “word-to-world” fit because it constitutes an attempt by the speaker to make his words “match” the world in a certain sense. In contrast, a promise has a world-to-word fit because it constitutes an undertaking on the part of the speaker to make the world match his words. (Searle also recognized a “null” direction of fit for speech acts, such as greetings and thanks, that match neither words to the world nor the world to words.)

Finally, the expressed psychological state of a speech act is the belief, desire, intention, or other mental state that a speaker necessarily expresses by performing an act of that type. The statement “It is raining” expresses the speaker’s belief that it is raining; the order “Get me some raisins” expresses the speaker’s desire that the hearer get him some raisins; and the promise “I’ll be there” expresses the speaker’s intention to be there. The expressed psychological state of a speech act is distinct from its propositional content; in the examples above, the propositional contents of the acts are, respectively, that it is raining, that the hearer gets the speaker some raisins, and that the speaker will be there.

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Using these dimensions, Searle developed an elaborate speech act taxonomy, consisting at its highest level of five categories: (1) assertives (e.g., statements, descriptions, and predictions), (2) directives (e.g., orders, requests, and direction giving), (3) commissives (e.g., promises, oaths, and bets), (4) expressives (e.g., greetings, congratulations, and thanks), and (5) declarations (e.g., excommunications, hirings, and declarations of war). Searle considers his taxonomy to be superior to Austin’s, in part because Austin’s was not based on a definite set of basic dimensions and so resulted in inconsistent and overlapping classifications of speech acts.

Searle also introduced the notion of an indirect speech act, in which the speaker performs one kind of speech act by means of performing another. An example is the statement “You are standing on my foot,” used as a means of requesting or demanding that the hearer get off one’s foot.

According to Searle, speech acts do not function in isolation. They are embedded within a “Network” of unarticulated beliefs and other mental states and within a “Background” of capacities, all of which must exist if the illocutionary point of the act is to be served. For example, the promise “I’ll buy you dinner” presupposes that the speaker understands what dinner is, what money is, and what restaurants are and that he knows how to conduct himself in a restaurant and how to eat and drink.

Speech act theory is important in the philosophy of language not only for having demonstrated the wide range of meaningful uses of language but also for yielding insight into fundamental issues such as the distinction between speaker meaning and conventional meaning, the nature of reference and predication, the division between semantic and pragmatic (use-generated) aspects of communicated meaning, and the scope of linguistic knowledge.