Source
Strawson (1964), LIT-1043 (The Philosophical Review 73(4):439–460), read in full in NOTE-736. It amends Grice (1957), LIT-1042, read in NOTE-735. Its quotations from Austin are the record’s only text of How to Do Things with Words (LIT-785, unread).
What was actually shown
Not every illocution is conventional (pp. 443–445). Introducing, surrendering, the foreman’s “guilty” and the umpire’s “out” are conventional. 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 … relating to X’s situation, attitude to Y, manner, and current intention”. An objection in debate has no constituting convention.
Grice amended (pp. 446–448). S intends (i1) 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, and A does not know S knows: all three hold, and S is not trying to let A know. So add (i4), that A recognise (i2). Strawson grants this opens “a regressive series of intentions that intentions should be recognized”.
Uptake (pp. 448–449). To understand the utterance is to take S to have the complex intention, 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), “the aim, if not the achievement, of securing uptake is essentially a standard, if not an invariable, element”.
What the scheme explains (pp. 449–454). Explicit performatives make an overt intention explicit. Showing off is not an illocution, because recognition would defeat its effect. Insinuating is not, because its intention “is essentially nonavowable”.
Where it strains (pp. 454–458). Entreaty differs from request by a recognised “complex attitude”. An order needs an intended recognition of a social context with rules and sanctions, held “with some strain”. For the umpire, the jury, the judge, a bridge redouble and a marriage, the intended response drops out and no single audience can be isolated: “Such acts could have no existence outside the rule- or convention-governed practices and procedures of which they essentially form parts.” A “redouble” let slip is a redouble, but “the case is essentially deviant or nonstandard”.
The common element (pp. 458–459). “The illocutionary force of an utterance is essentially something that is intended to be understood.”
What could have come out otherwise. The skater’s warning or the entreaty could have needed an identifiable convention. On Strawson’s analysis they do not.
What this does not say
- That the conditions are sufficient. They are offered as necessary, with the regress acknowledged.
- That the audience is only evidence of the act. For a non-conventional act “the act of communication is performed if uptake is secured”, and an order’s intention must refer to social rules. The relation to the audience enters through the content of the intention. NOTE-736 corrects CLAIM-221 on this point: on Strawson the speaker’s states are not “alone”.
- Anything about teasing. Strawson does not discuss it. Where parental reproach falls (with orders, where standing enters the intention) is the reader’s placement, and whether that content counts as a relation is left open.
- That institutional acts are explained by intention. They are conceded to procedure. That end of the scale is Searle’s status functions (LIT-482).
- That a general account is available. Intermediate cases (advice given “in a ‘take it or leave it’ spirit”, an official as “mouthpiece”) are left schematic (p. 460).
Connections
- Extends THEORY-444. The same mechanism, an effect meant to work through recognition of the intention, refined by a fourth intention and widened from meaning to force. Its source list carries LIT-1042 second because the amended analysis is Grice’s analysis with one condition added.
- Answers QUESTION-073 in part. It is the intention-based rival the question names, read. It makes a prediction: for acts not essentially conventional there is no case with the overt intention fixed and the act changed by standing or uptake. CASE-069 (Labov’s sounding) would count against it if Labov’s attribution of the ritual aim is accepted as the speaker’s. And it takes uptake into the intention-based account, weakened to an aim, so uptake does not separate the two sides as cleanly as the question supposes. Goffman and Bach and Harnish remain unread, so the question stays open.
- CLAIM-151, CLAIM-221. The three-way division (overt intention alone; overt intention referring to social rules; procedure) is the shape CLAIM-151’s scope turns on.
- Bach and Harnish (1979; LIT-1040, unread) build their taxonomy on the distinction drawn here.