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LIT-1850: Commitments and Speech Acts

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Properties4
StatusActive — read in full 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1453) from the journal's own open-access PDF (philosophica.ugent.be/article/82209/galley/202023/download/, 31 pp.). Worth reading as Harnish's own account of the expressed-attitude theory of Bach and Harnish (1979, LIT-1040, unread), the record's nearest first-hand text of it. On that theory communicative illocutionary acts are individuated by the attitude the speaker expresses: the speaker reflexively intends the hearer to take the utterance as reason to think the speaker has that attitude. Communication succeeds when the hearer recognizes it. Conventional, institutional acts are a separate category. Harnish weighs it against the normative theories of Searle and Alston, on which an act is individuated by the commitment or responsibility the speaker takes on. He finds Searle's account of how commitment is created unexplained and Alston's rule-subjection analysis false. He argues that expressing a belief that P and taking responsibility for P may be equivalent, so the normative theory may describe the same facts. Teasing, reproach and the audience's standing are not discussed.
Tagspragmatics, philosophy-of-language
Cited as “grounds” byCLAIM-221 — The relational-constitution thesis's defeat condition describes a standard rival the record holds no counter for, intention-based accounts of illocution, which plausibly meet it for every act in the four-speakers case except the institutional one
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1453 — Harnish — Commitments and Speech Acts

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Robert M. Harnish (2005), “Commitments and Speech Acts”, Philosophica 75, 11–41. DOI 10.21825/philosophica.82209.

Key takeaways

From the reading, NOTE-1453.

  • Two paradigms. Austinian theories add rules or conventions to the utterance (Searle, Searle and Vanderveken, Alston). Gricean theories add expressed propositional attitudes (Strawson, Schiffer, Holdcroft, Bach and Harnish) (pp. 11–12). Bach and Harnish are “a mixed case”, with Austinian notes (p. 12, n. 2).
  • The expressed-attitude theory goes “internal”. Communicative illocutionary acts are defined by the attitude expressed, and understanding them is recognizing it. “For S to express an attitude is for S to R-intend the hearer to take S’s utterance as reason to think S has that attitude” (Bach and Harnish 1979, p. 15, quoted p. 19). Bach and Harnish “sharply distinguished” communicative from institutional acts (pp. 15, 22–23).
  • The normative theories leave commitment unexplained. Searle’s “imposing conditions of satisfaction on conditions of satisfaction” does not say how commitment is created (pp. 25–28). Alston’s analysis of taking responsibility as subjecting an utterance to a socially entrenched rule fails for implicature and for responsibilities no rule fixes (pp. 28–33).
  • The two may coincide. In uttering e, S expresses the belief that P if and only if S takes responsibility for P being the case (p. 35). If so, “normative theory might at this level be simply another way of describing the same illocutionary facts” (p. 38).

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-10-30 because CLAIM-221 and QUESTION-073 wait on a reading of the intention-based line of Bach and Harnish, whose book (LIT-1040) is unread. This article is Harnish’s own later statement of that theory against its normative rivals. It is not the book, and it does not discuss teasing.

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