Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language

Reference: John R. Searle (1969). Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge University Press. Source file: Searle 1969 - Speech Acts.pdf. URL

Summary

Searle’s foundational monograph gives speech-act theory its first systematic, philosophically defended treatment. Extending Austin’s How to Do Things with Words, it argues that the minimal unit of linguistic communication is neither the symbol nor the sentence but the production of the symbol in the performance of a speech act. Searle develops a constitutive-rule analysis of illocutionary acts, codifies the felicity conditions of paradigm acts (promising, referring, predicating, asserting), and uses the framework to attack the fact/value distinction, deriving “ought” from “is” via the institutional fact of promising.

The book introduces the now-canonical machinery that McCarthy’s Elephant 2000 - A Programming Language Based on Speech Acts imports as programming-language primitives: the force/content distinction F(p), propositional-content conditions, preparatory conditions, sincerity conditions, and essential conditions. It is also the direct ancestor of Foundations Of Illocutionary Logic, which formalises what Searle here develops discursively.

Key Ideas

• Speech acts as the unit of meaning: producing a sentence under appropriate conditions is performing an illocutionary act; meaning reduces to a recursive theory of these acts.
• Force vs. content F(p): every utterance factors into illocutionary force (assert, promise, request, …) and propositional content.
• Constitutive rules: rules of the form “X counts as Y in context C” create institutional facts (promises, marriages) rather than merely regulating antecedent behaviour.
• Felicity conditions for promising (canonical analysis): propositional-content, preparatory, sincerity, and essential conditions — the template every later ACL performative inherits.
• Reference and predication as distinct speech acts, each with their own rules.
• Institutional facts and the is/ought derivation via promising as a constitutive practice.

Connections

• Elephant 2000 - A Programming Language Based on Speech Acts — McCarthy’s direct source for the speech-act vocabulary of Elephant
• Foundations Of Illocutionary Logic — Searle & Vanderveken 1985, formalises the present book
• Speech Act Theory
• Speech Acts
• Performatives
• Illocutionary Force
• Sincerity Conditions
• Preparatory Conditions
• Agent Communication And Institutional Reality
• KQML
• FIPA-ACL
• Agent Communication Languages
• Commitment-based Semantics

Conceptual Contribution

• Claim: Linguistic communication is irreducibly act-theoretic: the minimal unit of meaning is the illocutionary act, analysable by constitutive rules and felicity conditions, and this analysis extends to reference, predication, and the generation of institutional facts.
• Mechanism: Case studies of promising, referring, and asserting yield a recursive schema F(p) with four condition-types (propositional-content / preparatory / sincerity / essential). The schema is then redeployed to distinguish regulative from constitutive rules and to dissolve the classical is/ought problem by showing that uttering “I promise” institutionally constitutes an obligation.
• Concepts introduced/used: Performatives, Illocutionary Force, Sincerity Conditions, Preparatory Conditions, Speech Act Theory, Institutional Reality, Commitment-based Semantics
• Stance: foundational / philosophical
• Relates to: Imported wholesale by Elephant 2000 - A Programming Language Based on Speech Acts as the philosophical basis for speech-act I/O; formalised by Foundations Of Illocutionary Logic; re-examined for multi-agent systems in Agent Communication And Institutional Reality and operationalised in KQML / FIPA-ACL performative sets. McCarthy explicitly departs from Searle by adopting a design stance on these primitives — see Abstract Performative.

Tags

#speech-acts #philosophy-of-language #foundational #searle #performatives