Abstract
In the article ‘Other Minds’ we find the first allusions to the doctrine of speech-acts in J. L. Austin’s published writing.1 There he clearly recognizes some of the performative features of the verb to promise, but only to claim that the same characteristics apply to another verb, of far greater philosophical importance, namely to know. In the light of his later and more developed theory it appears, however, that this latter verb is by no means a performative in the technical sense of the word.2 Nevertheless, since even mistakes are often instructive in philosophy, and Austin’ mistakes are likely to be more so than most, it might be interesting to look into the reason for his original erroneous belief. Yet this study is not intended to be a mere piece of exegesis. I am going to show that some of the features of know that Austin picks out indeed hold true, but require another explanation, which also casts light on the behavior of many related verbs, including a major group of the real performatives.
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Notes
Philosophical Papers, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1961, pp. 44–84.
Although Austin still includes it among the ex positives, albeit with a question-mark: How to Do Things with Words, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1962, p. 161.
See my ‘Verbs and Times’ in Linguistics in Philosophy, Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 1967, pp. 97–121.
‘Other Minds’, op. cit., p. 67.
Ibid., p. 68.
Ibid., p. 68.
Ibid., p. 69.
Ibid., p. 67.
Here I follow H. P. Grice’s ‘The Causal Theory of Perception’ reprinted in Perceiving, Sensing and Knowing (ed. R. Swartz), New York, Dobleday, 1965, pp. 438–472.
Cf. Alvin Goldman, ‘A Causal Theory of Knowing’, Journal of Philosophy 44 (1967), 357–372.
‘On What One Knows’ in Res Cogitans, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1972, Chapter V, pp. 89–119.
Ibid., p. 95–96.
Paul Kiparsky and Carol Kiparsky, ‘Fact’, reprinted in Semantics (Danny D. Steinberg and Leon A. Jakobovits eds.), Cambridge, The University Press, 1971, pp. 344–369. Notice, however, that my views, both as to the criteria and the results, are quite different from theirs.
His prediction, and similar phrases, are actually triply ambiguous, i.e., between the action (which takes place at a certain time), the fact (which does not), and the product (which is true or false).
I first reported on the idea of half-factives in ‘Escaping from the Cave: a Reply to Dunn and Suter’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 8 (1978), 79–87.
John R. Searle, ‘A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts’ in Language, Mind and Knowledge (Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. VII, ed. Keith Gunderson), Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1975, pp. 344–369.
Res Cogitans, Chapter III.
Which fact necessitates certain revisions in Paul Grice’s theory of meaning. Most commonly the aim of an expositive speech act is the sharing of knowledge rather than the mere production of belief. And this is particularly true in the absence of an explicit performative verb. See his ‘Meaning’, Philosophical Review 66 (1957), 377–388.
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© 1980 D. Reidel Publishing Company
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Vendler, Z. (1980). Telling the Facts. In: Searle, J.R., Kiefer, F., Bierwisch, M. (eds) Speech Act Theory and Pragmatics. Texts and Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-8964-1_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-8964-1_13
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