Abstract
In “How Performatives Work”, John Searle abandons the analysis of speech acts that he had presented in Speech Acts and Expression and Meaning. He resurrects the idea of a performative, a concept that I should have thought J. L. Austin deconstructed once and for all.2 Austin replaced his own defective theory of performatives with a theory of illocutionary acts. This latter theory was greatly improved by Searle, and so I believe that his adoption of a new theory is a philosophically retrograde move.
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Notes
’ I want to thank Michael Crawford, Max Rosenkrantz, and David Sosa for commenting on a draft of this paper.
The fact that Kent Bach, Carl Ginet, Robert Harnish, J. O. Urmson and other distinguished philosophers of language still defend the concept prevents me from saying that Austin did deconstruct the concept once and for all. For references, see “How Performatives Work.” Linguistics and Philosophy 12 (1989): 535–558, reprinted in: Harnish, Robert (ed.). Basic Topics in the Philosophy of Language. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1994: 94-95. Page references to this article come from the latter source and are embedded in the text.
Declarations can be divided into the nonassertive ones, which have only word-and-world direction of fit, and assertive declaratives, such as, “acquit” and “find guilty”, which also have a word-to-world direction of fit. But this distinction is not needed in this article.
At some metaphysically benthic level, the intuition is that the illocutionary force of an utterance is the form of the utterance and the proposition is the matter. Since an Aristotelian form is what makes a thing to be the kind of thing it is, there can be only one illocutionary force for any proposition.
Searle in fact does not adopt this way of dealing with the cases discussed because he believes that the indicative mood functions as indicating assertive force.
Expression and Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979: 17.
Foundations of Illocutionary Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985: 3.
Foundations of Illocutionary Logic, p. 3.
Foundations of Illocutionary Logic, p. 211. See also Intentionality, pp. 166-167.
A. P. Martinich, Communication and Reference. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1984: 67–69.
Foundations of Illocutionary Logic, p. 56.
“A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts.” Expression and Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979: 16–17.
I think that the concept of a performative is not theoretically sound and was rightly superseded by Searle’s original theory of speech acts.
“Sentences Verifiable by Their Use.” Analysis 12 (1962): 86–89.
Nonetheless, Searle now concedes that performatives are indirectly statements with truth-values.
Searle’s acceptance of the false presupposition leads to another unhappy consequence. He holds that, in addition to being declarations, all performatives are assertions. In analyzing the use of the sentence, “I order you to leave”, he says, “S both said that he ordered me to leave and made it the case that he ordered me to leave. Therefore, he made a true statement.” See “How Performatives Work,” p. 90; and, p. 89.
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Martinich, A. (2002). On the Proper Treatment of Performatives1 . In: Grewendorf, G., Meggle, G. (eds) Speech Acts, Mind, and Social Reality. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 79. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0589-0_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0589-0_7
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