P. F. Strawson (1964), The Philosophical Review 73(4):439–460 — DOI-10.2307/2183301
Key takeaways
- Not every illocution is conventional. A verdict, an umpire giving a batsman out, an introduction and a surrender are acts done as conforming to a convention. A warning to a skater (“The ice over there is very thin”), an entreaty (“Don’t go”) and an objection in debate need no convention beyond the linguistic.
- Grice’s analysis, strengthened. A watcher case satisfies Grice’s three intentions without being communication. Strawson adds a fourth intention: that the audience recognise the intention that it recognise the first.
- Uptake is understanding. The audience’s understanding is taking the speaker to have that complex intention. Strawson identifies it, tentatively, with Austin’s uptake. The aim of securing uptake is “a standard, if not an invariable, element” of the illocutionary act.
- What this explains.
- Explicit performatives make an overt intention explicit.
- Showing off is not an illocution, because recognition of the intention would defeat its effect.
- Insinuating is not an illocution, because its intention is “essentially nonavowable”.
- Where it strains.
- Request and entreaty are separated by recognition of how the wish is held.
- An order needs recognition of a social context with rules and sanctions, which the scheme holds “with some strain”.
- Institutional acts drop the intended response and the single audience altogether.
- What is common. “The illocutionary force of an utterance is essentially something that is intended to be understood.”
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-13 at the owner’s request, as one of the four works of the intention-based line that CLAIM-221 and QUESTION-073 name as missing from the record. See the curation entry of that day. Read the same day in NOTE-736. It reads Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (LIT-785), held here unread, and its quotations from Austin are the record’s only text from that book.