Abstract
This paper addresses the following question: Can one and the same utterance token, in one unique speech situation, intentionally and conventionally perform a plurality of illocutionary acts? While some of the recent literature has considered such a possibility (Sbisà, in: Capone, Lo Piparo, Carapezza (eds) Perspectives on pragmatics and philosophy. Springer, Cham, pp 227–244, 2013; Johnson in Synthese 196(3):1151–1165, 2019), I build a case for it by drawing attention to common conversational complexities unrecognized in speech acts analysis. Traditional speech act theory treats communication as: (1) a dyadic exchange between a Speaker and a Hearer who (2) trade illocutionary acts endowed with one and only one primary force. I first challenge assumption (2) by discussing two contexts where plural illocutionary forces are performed in dyadic discussions: dilemmatic deliberations and strategic ambiguity. Further, I challenge assumption (1) by analyzing poly-adic discussions, where a speaker can target various participants with different illocutionary acts performed via the same utterance. Together, these analyses defend illocutionary pluralism as a significant but overlooked fact about communication. I conclude by showing how some phenomena recently analyzed in speech act theory—back-door speech acts (Langton, in: Fogal, Harris, Moss (eds) New work on speech acts. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 144–164, 2018) and dog-whistles (Saul, in: Fogal, Harris, Moss (eds) New work on speech acts. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 360–383, 2018)—implicitly presuppose illocutionary pluralism without recognizing it.
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Notes
Sbisà challenges the idea that Austin’s theory of (speech) action posits basic unity of action under mere plurality of descriptions: “there is no reduction of the different effects of one and the same gesture to one and the same basic action, rather, descriptions of these different effects pick out different actions. We perform more than one action with one and the same gesture, insofar as that produces more than one effect” (Sbisà, 2007, p. 467). Here, however, she admits such plurality in the context of discussing perlocutionary effects and only later considers this possibility for illocutionary acts too (Sbisà, 2013).
Such uses are generally possible thanks to what Clark & Carlson call the equipotentiality principle in multi-party conversations: “When a speaker directs what he says at several hearers at once, not knowing which of them he is actually addressing, each hearer has an equal potential of being an addressee. So the speaker must have the same intentions toward all the hearers; he cannot have special intentions toward any individual hearer” (Clark & Carlson, 1982, pp. 354ff.).
Is it really “conventionally recognizable”? Well, that depends on one’s definition of convention, one of the key areas of contention within speech act theory (Lepore & Stone, 2015; Sbisà, 2007, 2009; Strawson, 1964) and philosophy more broadly (Gilbert, 2008; Lewis, 1969). I cannot enter this debate here, but for my argument to work, convention, at a minimum, requires some form of collective recognition of standard, expected behavior. (Not coincidently, this recognition also underlies overt communicative intentions, as discussed in Sect. 5.) Collective recognition is typically based on some historically repetitive and patterned behavior which, while arbitrary, is functional in resolving some social coordination issues; as such, it generates collective expectations of conformity that might lead to sanctioning transgressors. Moreover, beyond the strictly linguistic conventions and social/institutional conventions (Austin, 1962; Bach & Harnish, 1979; Strawson, 1964; Urmson, 1977), there seem to be a rich field of in-between conventions: e.g., speech genre conventions or informal situational conventions, related to a recognized type of social/communicative activity such as eating out in a restaurant or buying things at a grocer’s (Levinson, 1979). I am assuming these latter conventions operate in many of the examples adduced here.
Empirical conversation analysts (e.g., Pomerantz, 1984) and speech act theorists (e.g., Lance & Kukla, 2013) have long argued that speech acts such as requests or invitations can be fulfilled or rejected, but fulfillments are preferred. According to Lepore & Stone (2018), this preference is conventionally built into the ordinary semantics of acts such as requests. On all these accounts, as dispreferred responses, rejections and other non-fulfilments characteristically require a justification, a why-not reason (which might also be accompanied by regret and a remedial solution, precisely the way Barbara’s apology is glossed here).
Similarly, Sbisà’s (2013, p. 241) “It’s cold here” example involves an assertion at level 1, a complaint at level 2, and a suggested, weak request (e.g., to close the window) at level 3.
Another approach to what can be called locutionary speech act pluralism—but without using this terminology—is due to Egan (2009), who argues for an audience-sensitive understanding of semantic content. The basic general idea is that “[t]here are cases in which a single utterance semantically conveys different propositions to different members of its audience” (Egan, 2009, p. 251). For instance, an utterance such as “Jesus loves you” can mean ‘Jesus loves Frank’ for Frank and ‘Jesus loves Daniel’ for Daniel. As elaborated by Egan, “[w]hat seems to be happening here is what we might think of as a sort of shotgun assertion, in which different asserted contents are going out to different audience members, rather than a single content going out to all of them. Each audience member gets their own assertion-pellet, loaded with its own proprietary content” (2009, p. 261). While Egan briefly discusses speech acts other than assertion—performatives and commands (2009, pp. 270–271)—he exclusively focuses on the locutionary aspect of speech acts. Crucially, however, all these phenomena are grounded in “the possibility of multiple simultaneous audience members” (Egan, 2009, p. 260), that is, in what I below define as a polylogue.
This is not to say that perlocutionary pluralism doesn’t pose philosophical problems which are worthy of serious discussion. As already projected by Austin (1957, 1962, Lectures VIII–IX), profound questions regarding the nature of consequences of our speech acts—including long chains of consequences, unintended consequences, and multiple, possibly incompatible consequences of a single act—as well as our responsibility for them, can and should be raised. Thank you to an anonymous reviewer for pressing this point.
Of course, this situation is also trilemmatic due to the very possibilities yes/no questions such as “Shall we go out to collect samples?” project: a cooperative speaker can answer (1) “yes”, (2) “no”, or, less preferably, (3) “I don’t know”, “Why ask me?”, “I know who knows”, “Not now…” or some such.
Another plausible interpretation is that there is sameness in basic phatic meaning, while various rhetic contents and illocutionary forces are contextually inter-determined (Witex, 2015b; cf. Green, 2018; Hanks, 2018). Either way, assuming this variety can occur in one and the same context, my arguments for illocutionary pluralism hold. (Witek still adheres to the assumption of illocutionary monism, as his variety requires different contexts of utterance.).
Obviously, here as elsewhere there is a relation between locutionary and illocutionary ambiguity. These two aspects cannot be seamlessly disentangled, as already recognized by Austin (1962; see Witek, 2015b). Locutionary elements—e.g., performative verbs or the indicative/interrogative/imperative mood—can limit or even determine the illocutionary force. For classic discussion, see Strawson (1964) and Searle (1968); for an ongoing debate, Green (2018) and Hanks (2018).
See Egan (2009) for a semantically focused discussion of similar cases. Especially the distinction between a single collective “blanket” command, issued to the group as a whole, and a “shotgun” command, amounting to “many different commands that can be complied with individually” is relevant here (Egan, 2009, p. 271). Egan describes the latter phenomenon in terms of “the multiplication of speech acts” or “utterance proliferation.”.
For the notion of “illocutionary games,” see Witek (2015a). Witek combined key insights from Austin (1962) and Lewis (1979) to show how the rules of appropriateness, rules of direct kinematics, and rules of accommodation function in a public conversational score understood as “illocutionary score.” This should be a particularly fruitful way to elaborate the dynamic of polylogues, provided the intricate questions of relations between the public score and shared scores, as well as common ground and shared grounds, are satisfactorily treated.
See Levinson (1979) for a challenge to the very possibility of demarcating communicative from social activities in the first place.
It is instructive, in this context, to see how Bach & Harnish (1979) struggle to interchangeably use the concepts of “hearer” and “audience” (e.g., on p. 97). As argued above, speech act theory’s “hearer,” the unique addressee of a unique speech act, is by no means coextensive with the actual audience of a given utterance.
It shouldn’t escape our attention that Bach & Harnish place “deliberate ambiguity” squarely within the class of covert collateral acts—while in Sect. 4.1.2 I treated an illocutionary version of deliberate, strategic ambiguity as a good example of illocutionary pluralism in the context of dyadic exchange. Given the details of my case and the theoretical arguments adduced here and in Sect. 4.1.2, I don’t see any threatening inconsistency here.
Although Saul (2018, p. 373) mentions Bach & Harnish’s “covert speech acts,” as we have seen, for them these are merely covert acts of speech collateral to the performance of proper illocutionary acts. Similarly to Langton, she might be using the notion of “speech act” here in a sui generis way: these are not Austinian “total speech acts” with overt intentions and conventional effects, but rather acts that perform certain jobs of speech acts, e.g., they have identifiable perlocutionary consequences (and, perhaps, retrospectively reconstructible illocutionary forces).
This, of course, has been repeatedly challenged, with one distinct position being “nihilism about illocutionary force” (Johnson, 2019, p. 1162) based on the idea that all there is to linguistic communication are semantic contents (locutions) and their effects (perlocutions), whether psychological or situational; see, e.g., Cappelen (2011) and Hanks (2018). Arguments justifying the existence of illocutionary forces are part and parcel of most any work in speech act theory (recently, e.g., Green, 2018), but they can be briefly summarized as follows: “One main contribution of Austin’s work was to point out that there is a difference between utterances that cannot be captured by grammar or distal effects. Illocutionary force captures that difference neatly and easily” (Johnson, 2019, p. 1163).
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Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the International Workshop “Perspectives on Speech as Action”, University of Trieste, Italy (November 2018); the ArgLab Research Colloquium, Nova Institute of Philosophy, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal (November 2018); and the 3rd European Conference on Argumentation “Reason to Dissent”, University of Groningen, The Netherlands (June 2019). I thank participants in these events—and especially Marina Sbisà, Maciej Witek, Mitch Green, Pedro Abreu, Javier González de Prado, and Erich Rast—for their inspiring comments. Anonymous reviewers for Synthese let me reflect on and clarify a number of key details of my argument. This work has been supported by COST Action CA17132, funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union.
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Lewiński, M. Illocutionary pluralism. Synthese 199, 6687–6714 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03087-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03087-7