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What is it to Understand a Directive Speech Act?

Reference: Andreas Dorschel (1989). Australasian Journal of Philosophy 67(3): 319-340. URL (DOI: 10.1080/00048408912350161). No open-access PDF located; publisher page HTML-only. Cited in McCarthy’s Elephant 2000 - A Programming Language Based on Speech Acts.

Summary

Dorschel investigates what it takes for a hearer to understand a directive speech act (command, request, order). The dominant programme — truth-conditional semantics extended to directives via “conditions of fulfilment”, “compliance”, or “satisfaction” (Searle, Vanderveken, and others) — treats understanding a directive as grasping the conditions under which the world would be made to fit the words. Dorschel argues this parallel to truth-conditional assertoric semantics is defective: directive understanding is not grasp of satisfaction conditions alone but requires the hearer to recognise the speaker’s authority-claim and the social-normative context within which compliance would count as compliance.

The paper is cited in McCarthy’s Elephant 2000 as philosophical backing for treating directive speech acts (requests, offers, permissions) as having authority/normative preconditions that a program’s specification must respect — the “authority” strand of Elephant’s happy-performance criterion.

Key Ideas

  • Critique of compliance-conditional semantics: satisfaction conditions (world-to-word direction of fit) do not by themselves explain what a hearer grasps when understanding a directive.
  • Authority-claim as part of illocutionary uptake: recognising a directive involves recognising the speaker’s claim to be in a position to direct — a normative precondition, not merely a truth-theoretic one.
  • Social-institutional context: compliance is constituted relative to institutional roles; directive understanding requires tracking those roles.
  • Parallel to assertion is misleading: the symmetry between truth-conditional assertoric semantics and compliance-conditional directive semantics papers over the normative asymmetry between word-to-world and world-to-word acts.

Connections

Conceptual Contribution

  • Claim: Understanding a directive speech act cannot be reduced to grasping its conditions of compliance; it requires the hearer to recognise the speaker’s authority-claim and the social-institutional context within which compliance counts as compliance.
  • Mechanism: By analysing cases where the compliance conditions are transparent yet the directive is not understood (because the authority-claim is unrecognised or rejected), Dorschel dissociates satisfaction-conditional grasp from directive understanding, forcing the normative layer into the analysis.
  • Concepts introduced/used: Performatives, Illocutionary Force, Direction of Fit, Speech Act Theory, Institutional Reality
  • Stance: critical / philosophical
  • Relates to: Provides a philosophical bridge between pure illocutionary-logic accounts (Foundations Of Illocutionary Logic) and institutional-reality accounts (Agent Communication And Institutional Reality). In the ACL trajectory, the Dorschel critique anticipates the standard complaint against mentalistic ACL semantics (sincerity-condition appeals presuppose exactly the authority/commitment layer they try to reduce) and motivates the commitment-based turn formalised in later ACL work.

Tags

#speech-acts #directives #philosophy-of-language #authority #dorschel

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