Abstract
Suppose I make an utterance, intending it to be a command. You don’t take it to be one. Must one of us be wrong? In other words, must each utterance have, at most, one illocutionary force? Current debates over the constitutive norm of assertion and over illocutionary silencing, tend to assume that the answer is yes—that each utterance must be either an assertion, or a command, or a question, but not more than one of these. While I think that this assumption is intuitive, I will argue in this paper that it is not sustainable. I’ll argue that this assumption makes it hard to explain what determines illocutionary force in a consistent and non-ad hoc way. I will demonstrate this is not fatal for the notion of illocutionary force writ large by offering some alternatives.
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Notes
This reinforces, according to Kessler, a commonsense view reported by Tracey Maclin in her 2008 article. She says, “everyone... knows that a police ‘request’ to search a bag or automobile is understood by most persons as a command” (Maclin 2008, p. 28).
In addition to helpful reviews from anonymous reviewers, I am grateful for comments on drafts of this paper from audiences at Northwestern University’s PhLing Group, the Yale-UConn Language Working Group, and from Daniel Skibra, Michael Glanzberg, and Michael P. Lynch.
This does not mean that it is always obvious or determinate what force an utterance has—it may be that the one unique force is indeterminate. Notice, though, that a single indeterminate force is still unique, even if it is indeterminate whether it is a command or a question—it isn’t both a determinate command and a determinate question.
Or, even more precisely, each utterance has, at most, one primary force. I’ll return to primary/secondary forces below.
One way, for example, to understand Williamson’s project is to fill in the details of the distinction between conjecturing and asserting that Searle posits.
Austin might mean that a locutionary act has at least one illocutionary force, here, but much of the subsequent literature does not seem to take him this way.
It is possible to merely inquire after salt-passing abilities, but it is conventional to use this utterance to make a request.
Searle does not invoke grammatical form but rather what the sentence “literally says” (Searle 1975, p. 62). I find this talk of literality confusing so have substituted the grammatical form. Literal meaning, in Searle’s sense, could be substituted in this discussion without loss of argumentative power.
I’m grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.
My suggestion is not that Austin is committed to monism, only that one might reasonably assume monism when using tools from Austin. I do think that Searle probably is committed to monism, unless he is willing to countenance more than one primary force, secondary force, etc. However accurately this matches Austin and Searle’s own views, most subsequent literature has been inspired by their work to assume monism.
From here on, in the paper, I’ll ignore the direct/indirect speech act distinction except where explicitly relevant. If necessary, read “primary force” for “force” when considering the monist’s commitment.
This is not to say that all those who believe that speakers’ intentions fix illocutionary force are monists—indeed you might think that a speaker could intend an utterance to have two forces—the question at hand, however, is how to determine the unique force if indeed there is one.
As will become clear, I don’t think this offers incontrovertible evidence about illocutionary force. Consider the sexual harasser who intends to joke—we certainly don’t think his intentions are the end of the story on his speech action.
This first reason is directed at a simple—perhaps simplistic—view according to which a speaker’s prior intention fixes the force of her speech. Of course not all speech is deliberate or premeditated. Sometimes speakers form their intention on the fly, as it were (Searle 1983). In the rest of this section I canvass other reasons to doubt that speaker intention fixes illocutionary force, and these address unpremeditated yet intentional speech.
It is, perhaps, contentious, that a child who doesn’t understand promising can make a promise. It is implausible, however, that full understanding of the practice is necessary for the speech act to go through. The literature on promising is complicated, and accounts of the necessary and sufficient conditions for a promise vary. See, for example Shockley (2008), Dannenberg (2015), and Schlesinger (2011).
Perhaps it is strange that I would form an intention to knight someone if I didn’t believe myself to have the social power to do so, but agents have odd intentions all the time. If I’m suffering under a momentary delusion, and so believe myself to be queen for bad reasons, I’ll lack justification for my belief (on most accounts of justification). In this case, I’ll have the requisite intention, but lack the knowledge relevant to the case.
This depends on your understanding of both dispositions and concrete social changes. The similarities and differences between the two requirements might be interesting to draw out, but doing so is beyond the scope of this paper.
And it might be that some monistic views can meet some versions of the epistemic constraint but not others. A committed monist, willing to do the work of addressing the concerns raised in this paper, might find it useful to explore the interaction of her preferred monistic account and the epistemic constraint(s) it can meet.
I am grateful to an anonymous referee for this idea.
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for help with this section.
The details will be important, here, especially to be sure that the relative force facts aren’t themselves subject to the kinds of concerns raised against the monist. It would also be interesting to see how these views could meet the epistemic constraint. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for pointing these questions out, and look forward to considering them in future work.
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Johnson, C.R. Investigating illocutionary monism. Synthese 196, 1151–1165 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1508-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1508-7