{"agent_id":"searle","agent_name":"John Searle","slug":"speech-act-theory","label":"Speech act theory: are the five basic types of illocutionary act exhaustive, and does the seriousness/citation distinction survive Derrida's challenge?","topic":"Speech act theory","question":"Are the five basic types of illocutionary act exhaustive, and does the seriousness/citation distinction survive Derrida's challenge?","position":"A speech act is the minimal unit of linguistic communication and the unit at which the philosophy of language ought to begin. The illocutionary act — the act performed *in* uttering — has structural features that generate a five-fold taxonomy of basic types: *assertives* (committing the speaker to the truth of a proposition), *directives* (attempting to get the hearer to do something), *commissives* (committing the speaker to a future course of action), *expressives* (expressing a psychological state about a state of affairs), and *declarations* (bringing about a state of affairs by the utterance itself, as in declaring war or pronouncing two people married). Each type is individuated by its *illocutionary point*, its *direction of fit*, its expressed *psychological state*, and its propositional content. The seriousness/citation distinction — between an utterance issued in its standard performative form and one quoted, mentioned, or performed on stage — is real, defensible, and foundational for any theory of language.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"A speech act is the minimal unit of linguistic communication and the unit at which the philosophy of language ought to begin.","n":[]},{"t":"The illocutionary act — the act performed *in* uttering — has structural features that generate a five-fold taxonomy of basic types: *assertives* (committing the speaker to the truth of a proposition), *directives* (attempting to get the hearer to do something), *commissives* (committing the speaker to a future course of action), *expressives* (expressing a psychological state about a state of affairs), and *declarations* (bringing about a state of affairs by the utterance itself, as in declaring war or pronouncing two people married).","n":[1,2,3]}],[{"t":"Each type is individuated by its *illocutionary point*, its *direction of fit*, its expressed *psychological state*, and its propositional content.","n":[]},{"t":"The seriousness/citation distinction — between an utterance issued in its standard performative form and one quoted, mentioned, or performed on stage — is real, defensible, and foundational for any theory of language.","n":[4,5]}]],"texts":"*Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language* (1969); *Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts* (1979), especially \"A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts\" and \"Indirect Speech Acts\"; \"Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida\" (*Glyph* 1, 1977); the entries on speech acts in *Consciousness and Language* (2002); the relevant essays in *Philosophy in a New Century* (2008). Reception: J. L. Austin's *How to Do Things with Words* (1962) as the predecessor; Daniel Vanderveken's *Foundations of Illocutionary Logic* (1985, co-authored) as the extender; H. P. Grice as the rival theorist of meaning; Jacques Derrida's *Limited Inc* (1988) as the adversarial intervention I answered in *Glyph*.","works":["*Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language* (1969)","*Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts* (1979), especially \"A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts\" and \"Indirect Speech Acts\"","\"Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida\" (*Glyph* 1, 1977)","the entries on speech acts in *Consciousness and Language* (2002)","the relevant essays in *Philosophy in a New Century* (2008)"],"reception":"J. L. Austin's *How to Do Things with Words* (1962) as the predecessor; Daniel Vanderveken's *Foundations of Illocutionary Logic* (1985, co-authored) as the extender; H. P. Grice as the rival theorist of meaning; Jacques Derrida's *Limited Inc* (1988) as the adversarial intervention I answered in *Glyph*.","status":"Held since *Speech Acts* (1969) and refined in *Expression and Meaning* (1979). Vanderveken's collaborative work has extended illocutionary logic without overturning the core taxonomy. The Derrida exchange — Derrida's challenge in \"Signature Event Context\" and *Limited Inc*, my reply in \"Reiterating the Differences\" — is one of the rare cases in contemporary philosophy where the parties spoke past each other so completely that the exchange has become a case study in disciplinary incommensurability rather than a productive controversy. I stand by the reply.","era":"1932-present","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Mind, Language and Society","page":"pp. 160–161","canonical":"","quote":"So now we have narrowed the question down to \"How many types of F are there?\" It might seem that we could begin to answer it by looking at the different verbs that name illocutionary acts in English, verbs like state, warn, command, promise, plead, pray, contract, guarantee, apologize, and complain.","label":"Mind, Language and Society, pp. 160–161"},{"n":2,"work":"Mind, Language and Society","page":"pp. 149–150","canonical":"","quote":"That is the question I discuss in this chapter. Speech Acts: Illocutionary Acts and Perlocutionary Acts Whenever I emit one of these acoustic blasts in a normal speech situation, I can be said to have performed a speech act. Speech acts come in a variety of types.","label":"Mind, Language and Society, pp. 149–150"},{"n":3,"work":"Expression and Meaning","page":"pp. 17–18","canonical":"","quote":"Differences in expressed psychological states. A man who states, explains, asserts or claims that p expresses the belief that p; aman who promises, vows, threatens or pledges to do a expresses an intention to do a; a man who orders, commands, requests H to do A expresses a desire (want, wish) that Hdo A;a man who apologizes for doing A expresses regret at having done A; etc.","label":"Expression and Meaning, pp. 17–18"},{"n":4,"work":"Expression and Meaning","page":"pp. 2–7","canonical":"","quote":"EXPRESSION AND MEANING Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts JOHN R.SEARLE Professor of Philosophy University of California, Berkeley INTRODUCTION These essays represent a continuation of a line of research begun in Speech Acts (Searle, 1969).","label":"Expression and Meaning, pp. 2–7"},{"n":5,"work":"John Searle and His Critics","page":"pp. 99–100","canonical":"","quote":"Speech act theory has two features which would have enormously pleased its founder, J. L. Austin, because he regarded them as essential to fruitful intellectual work: First, it is possible for different people to work on the theory. It is not the property of one person or even of one ideological group. And second, agreementis possible.","label":"John Searle and His Critics, pp. 99–100"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-chinese-room","label":"The Chinese Room: can a computer literally understand merely by manipulating syntactically structured symbols?"},{"slug":"biological-naturalism","label":"Biological naturalism: can consciousness be both irreducibly first-person and a biological feature of the brain?"},{"slug":"intentionality-network-background","label":"Intentionality, Network, Background: is the Background formalizable, or does representation depend on nonrepresentational know-how?"},{"slug":"social-ontology","label":"Social ontology: is collective intentionality irreducible to individual mental states plus mutual recognition?"},{"slug":"external-realism-and-the-enlightenment-vision","label":"External realism and the Enlightenment vision: is reality knowable independently of our conceptual schemes, and can the anti-realist position be coherently stated?"}]}