Contribution
The paper asks why Austin calls every illocutionary act conventional, and answers that he is half right. One class of illocutions, the non-conventional ones, is explained by an amended version of Grice’s analysis of speaker meaning. Another class exists only within rule-governed procedures. After it, the intention-based account of illocutionary force has a definite form, with stated limits.
Key insight
The force of an utterance is what the speaker wholly overtly intends the audience to understand him to be doing. Conventions come in for two reasons: as a means of making that intention clear, and, for verdicts and umpires’ calls, as a procedure that gives the intention its effect. The first is optional. The second is constitutive, but only for one end of a scale.
Assumptions
- Serious use only. “Etiolated” and “parasitical” uses are set aside.
- Austin’s meaning and locutionary act are taken as given. Meaning “always embodies some limitation on its possible force”. Sometimes it exhausts the force, as with “I apologize”; often it does not.
- Standard cases. For institutional acts, “the participants in these procedures know the rules and their roles, and are trying to play the game and not wreck it”.
- Necessary, not sufficient. The amended analysis is offered as necessary conditions. Strawson grants that “the way seems open to a regressive series of intentions that intentions should be recognized”.
Key results
- The counterexamples to Austin (pp. 443–445).
- Introducing (“This is Mr. Smith”) and surrendering (“Kamerad!”) are conventional, as are the foreman’s “guilty” and the umpire’s “out”.
- A skater told “The ice over there is very thin” can be warned “without its being the case that there is any statable convention at all”.
- What makes “Don’t go” an entreaty is “something—complex enough, no doubt—relating to X’s situation, attitude to Y, manner, and current intention”.
- An objection in debate: “where is the convention that constitutes it an objection?”
- “Some illocutionary acts are conventional; others are not (except in so far as they are locutionary acts).”
- Grice amended (pp. 446–448). S means something by x if S intends (i1) to produce a response r in A, (i2) that A recognise (i1), and (i3) that this recognition be part of A’s reason for r. In the watcher case, S plants evidence knowing A watches him, and A does not know S knows. All three hold, but S is not trying to “let him know”. So add (i4): that A recognise (i2).
- Understanding and uptake (pp. 448–449). For A to understand an utterance correctly, A must take S to have the complex intention S has. So (i2) and (i4) must be fulfilled, not (i1) or (i3). This is identified, tentatively, with Austin’s uptake. After Hart’s objections (a will no one reads, a gift no one knows of), “the aim, if not the achievement, of securing uptake is essentially a standard, if not an invariable, element in the performance of the illocutionary act”.
- The performative formula explained (pp. 449–451). The speaker has an agent’s authority about his intention, and “a motive, inseparable from the nature of his act, for making that intention clear”. “That was a warning” is part of the act of warning. The explicit performative “make[s] explicit the type of communication intention with which the speaker speaks”.
- Exclusions (pp. 451–454).
- Showing off: “recognition of the intention might militate against securing the effect”.
- Further effects: informing you that p in order to change your conduct does not make the act a different illocution. Warning differs from informing because being put on guard is part of the primary response.
- Insinuating: “The intention one has in insinuating is essentially nonavowable.”
- Request, entreaty, order (pp. 454–455). The same words, “Don’t go”,
with the same primary intention.
- Entreaty is “trying to secure the primary response not merely through audience recognition of the intention to secure it, but through audience recognition of a complex attitude of which this primary intention forms an integral part”.
- An order adds an intended recognition that the utterance is “issued in a certain social context such that certain social rules or conventions apply”, with consequences if it is not obeyed. Here “the scheme has to be extended to make room for explicit reference to social convention. It can, with some strain, be so extended.”
- Institutional acts (pp. 455–458). An umpire, a jury, a judge pronouncing sentence, a bridge redouble, a marriage. The intended response drops out, and “it is not even possible, in other than a formal sense, to isolate … a particular audience”. “Such acts could have no existence outside the rule- or convention-governed practices and procedures of which they essentially form parts.” A player who lets slip “redouble” has redoubled: “Forms can take charge, in the absence of appropriate intention; but when they do, the case is essentially deviant or nonstandard.”
- The two ends compared (pp. 457–458). For a non-conventional act, “the act of communication is performed if uptake is secured”, but its overt intention can be frustrated without breach of any rule: “Whether it is effective or not is something that rests with his audience.” For a convention-governed act, once uptake is secured any frustration “must be attributable to a breach of rule or convention”.
- The common element (pp. 458–459). “The illocutionary force of an utterance is essentially something that is intended to be understood. And the understanding of the force of an utterance in all cases involves recognizing what may be called broadly an audience-directed intention and recognizing it as wholly overt, as intended to be recognized.”
- Intermediate cases (p. 460). An official who gives advice “in a ‘take it or leave it’ spirit”, or speaks as “the mouthpiece, merely, of another agency”. “We can scarcely expect a general account of linguistic communication to yield more than schematic outlines”.
Claims
| id | claim | strength | support |
|---|---|---|---|
| C1 | Some illocutions need no convention beyond the linguistic | strong | the skater, entreaty and objection cases, pp. 443–445 |
| C2 | Grice’s three intentions are not sufficient for communication; a fourth is necessary | moderate | the watcher counterexample, pp. 446–447 |
| C3 | Uptake is the audience’s recognition of the overt intention complex | weak | a tentative identification, pp. 448–449 |
| C4 | Explicit performatives follow from the speaker’s motive to make an overt intention clear | moderate | a “deduction”, pp. 449–451 |
| C5 | Showing off and insinuating are not illocutions because their intentions cannot be overt | moderate | the analysis applied, pp. 451–454 |
| C6 | Institutional acts are constituted by procedure and fall outside the intention scheme | strong | the umpire, verdict, sentence, redouble and marriage cases, pp. 455–457 |
| C7 | All illocutions share an overt, audience-directed intention meant to be understood | moderate | the comparison of the two ends, pp. 457–459 |
Concepts
- Illocutionary force. As Austin uses it: to know it is “to know what illocutionary act, if any, was actually performed in issuing” the utterance.
- Uptake. Austin’s “bringing about the understanding of the meaning and of the force of the locution”, read here as the audience taking the speaker to have his overt intention.
- Wholly overt (avowable) intention. An intention meant to be recognised, and meant to be recognised as meant to be recognised. Showing off and insinuating lack it.
- Essentially conventional act. One that “could have no existence outside the rule- or convention-governed practices” it belongs to.
- Primary response. The effect the overt intention aims at. Further effects pursued by means of it do not fix the act.
Connections
The paper reads Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (1962, LIT-785, held here unread) and amends Grice’s “Meaning” (1957, LIT-1042). It thanks Hart for the objections about wills and gifts and McGuinness for the case of inviting someone to be impressed. Bach and Harnish’s Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts (1979) builds its taxonomy on the distinction drawn here between communicative and conventional illocutions. Searle’s status functions (LIT-482) take up the conventional end of the scale.
Bearing on the record
- CLAIM-221 is confirmed in substance, with one correction.
- Confirmed. The paper individuates non-conventional illocutions by the speaker’s overt intention. It does so for request against entreaty with the same words, “Don’t go”. That is the form of CASE-018, where the words stay fixed and the act changes. It concedes the institutional acts to convention, as CLAIM-221 concedes the judge’s reprimand to Searle (LIT-482).
- Corrected. On Strawson the speaker’s states are not “alone”, as CLAIM-151’s defeat condition requires. The act of communication “is performed if uptake is secured”, so the audience’s recognition is a condition of performance, not only evidence. And the order’s force needs an intended recognition of a social context with rules. That is the reply CLAIM-221 calls missing from the record: the relation to the audience enters the act through the content of the intention. It is now held, in Strawson’s own text.
- For CLAIM-151. The paper supplies a three-way division:
- acts individuated by overt intention alone (warning, entreaty);
- acts whose overt intention must refer to social rules and standing (orders, “with some strain”);
- acts constituted by procedure (verdicts). Reproach by a parent sits in the middle class, where standing enters through the content of the intention. So whether CLAIM-151 holds for reproach turns on whether that content counts as a relation. Strawson does not decide that. For teasing he says nothing.
- For QUESTION-073. It asks for a case in which the intention is held fixed and the act changes with standing or uptake. Strawson’s scheme allows only one such case, the institutional slip (“redouble” said by mistake), and calls it “essentially deviant or nonstandard”. For non-conventional acts the scheme predicts no such case. CASE-069 (Labov’s sounding) would be a counterexample to that prediction if its attributed aim is accepted as the speaker’s. The prediction gives the question a definite rival to test.
- Austin’s uptake. QUESTION-073 names Austin’s uptake as a reply to intention-based accounts. Strawson absorbs it into the intention-based account, and weakens it after Hart’s objections to an aim, not an achievement. So uptake does not separate the two sides as cleanly as QUESTION-073 suggests.
- No instruction for machine-learning practice; nothing for the anthology.