Transcript Austin on Performative Utterances ()

EINFÜHRUNG IN DIE
THEORETISCHE
PHILOSOPHIE:
SPRACHPHILOSOPHIE
Nathan Wildman
[email protected]
AUSTIN’S
PERFORMATIVE
UTTERANCES
Or, doing by saying
THE PLAN
1. Review Grice
 Searle’s Objection
2. Historical Background for Austin
 Logical Positivism
3. Austin’s Distinction
 Performatives vs Constatives
4. Saving the Distinction?
 Two attempts to define the difference
5. Conclusions
The Foundational Question:
What explains why ‘S ’ means what it does in L?
Grice’s answer:
a speaker’s intentions fix the meanings of an expression!
The project of reducing talk of meaning to speaker
intentions (or other kinds of mental intentionality) is
known as intention-based semantics.
GRICE‘S ANALYSIS
Grice’s proposal: S meantnn by x that P iff
(1)
(2)
(3)
S uttered x intending for his audience to form the belief that
P; &
S also intended that his audience recognize that’s what he
intended to do; &
S also intended that his audience form the belief that P at
least partly because they recognize that’s what he intended
to do.
Slightly shortened: A uttered x with the intention of
inducing a belief by means of the recognition of this
intention
GRICE‘S ANALYSIS
As Grice later puts it, we can distinguish between:
Relativized meaning, the explication of which
essentially involves reference to word users or
communicators
 Non-relativized meaning, where no such reference is
required

Non-relativized meaning is secondary, being reducible to
relativized meaning; and no corresponding analysis or
reduction in the other direction is possible
GRICE‘S ANALYSIS – SEARLE‘S OBJECTION
Suppose that I am an American soldier in WW II and that I
am captured by Italian troops. And suppose also that I wish
to get these troops to believe that I am a German officer in
order to get them to release me. What I would like to do is to
tell them in German or Italian that I am a German officer.
But let us suppose I don’t know enough German or Italian to
do that. So I … put on a show of telling them that I am a
German officer by reciting those few bits of German that I
know, trusting that they don’t know enough German to see
through my plan. Let us suppose I know only one line of
German, which I remember from a poem I had to memorize in
a high school German course. Therefore I, a captured
American, address my Italian captors with the following
sentence: “Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühen?”
GRICE‘S ANALYSIS – SEARLE‘S OBJECTION
Searle claims that the three clauses of Grice’s account of
meaning are satisfied: I intend to produce a certain
effect in them, namely, the effect of (i) believing that I
am a German officer; and I intend to produce this effect
(iii) by means of their (ii) recognition of my intention.
But when I say “Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen
blühen?” I don’t meannn ‘I’m a German Officer’ – rather,
… because what the words mean is, “Knowest thou the
land where the lemon trees bloom?” … Meaning is more
than a matter of intention, it is also a matter of
convention. [Searle, “What is a Speech Act?”]
GRICE‘S ANALYSIS – SEARLE‘S OBJECTION
Upshot: a purely intention based semantics isn’t going to
work – we need something about conventions.
Many interesting things to talk about here:




http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/convention/#ConLan
Searle’s ‘What is a Speech Act’
Lewis’s Conventions
Blackburn’s Spreading the Word
THE PLAN
1. Review Grice
 Searle’s Objection
2. Historical Background for Austin
 Logical Positivism
3. Austin’s Distinction
 Performatives vs Constatives
4. Saving the Distinction?
 Two attempts to define the difference
5. Conclusions
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
The Linguistic Turn
Began with Frege prior to the turn of the 20th century
This idea really hit it’s stride with the Logical
Positivists, who, influenced by Frege through Russell,
Carnap, and Wittgenstein, had propagated the view that
the study of linguistic meaning was the proper starting
point for philosophy.
Language and meaning were supposed to elicit initial
agreement better than other traditional starting points.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Logical Positivism
The Principle of Verification
The meaning of a sentence is its method of verification or
confirmation.
The Principle of Analyticity
Statements of logic and mathematics, together with
statements that spell out meaning relations, are true
purely in virtue of their meaning and provide no
information about the world.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Therefore, for a statement to be cognitively meaningful, it
must satisfy one of the following conditions:
a) it is an analytic truth or falsehood (self-contradictory
statements), or
b) it is capable of being verified as true or false by
experiential means (procedures which ultimately can
be reduced to what can be directly ascertained to be
true or false by means of the senses).
Wittgenstein:
‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Tyson: Do you
know who I am?
I’m the HeavyWeight Champion of
the World.
Ayer: And I am the
Wykeham Professor
of Logic. We are
both pre-eminent in
our field. I suggest
that we talk about
this like rational
men…
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Quine’s Attack:
The analytic-synthetic distinction is bunk, and the
fundamental idea of verifying a sentence by itself is
ridiculous. Rather,
Our statements about the external world face the
tribunal of sense experience not individually, but only as
a corporate body. [Quine, Two Dogmas]
Confirmation holism: sentences cannot be confirmed
singularly, they can be confirmed or falsified only in
relation to other sentences, in the context of theories
THE PLAN
1. Review Grice
 Searle’s Objection
2. Historical Background for Austin
 Logical Positivism
3. Austin’s Distinction
 Performatives vs Constatives
4. Saving the Distinction?
 Two attempts to define the difference
5. Conclusions
AUSTIN’S DISTINCTION
Austin's primary target: the verificationist presumption
that the only meaningful sentences are those which
express true or false statements, together with the
Descriptive fallacy: it is a fallacy to treat all utterances
as declarative statements and view those that don’t have
a truth value as nonsensical
Austin’s response: you can’t reduce meaning to truth;
many sentences both in the language of philosophy and
in everyday language aren’t intended to be true or false,
so approaching them from the perspective of truth is to
misunderstand what they’re doing
AUSTIN’S DISTINCTION
There are a load of declarative sentences that, just as
with questions and orders, don’t lend themselves to
being analysed via truth and falsity!
Performatives: a class of utterances whose members
i.
look like statements
ii.
would be so-classed grammatically (i.e,
grammatically, they are declarative)
iii. are neither true nor false
iv. are not nonsense
AUSTIN’S DISTINCTION
I bet you €5 that you can’t stand on one foot for a 10
minutes!
(2) I name this ship Titanic (uttered by the Queen while
breaking a bottle of champagne over the bow of a
ship)
(3) I will (uttered by a bride in response to the question
‘do you take this man…?’ during a wedding
ceremony)
Sentences like these make no statement about the way
the world is and thus aren’t open to being true/false
A:
I name this ship Titanic
B:
That’s not true!
(1)
AUSTIN’S DISTINCTION
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
When King Arthur makes Bedevere a knight, he says
‘I dub thee Sir Bedevere…’
This is a performative utterance – the act of uttering the
sentence IS the act of knighting!
AUSTIN’S DISTINCTION
Contrast the above with sentences like
(4) The M40 connects London and Birmingham
(5) The Queen named this ship Titanic
(6) I eat a lot of pastries



If any sentence is susceptible to having its meaning
pinned down to being true or false, then (4) is
(5) has obvious similarities with (2), but no ship gets
named by an utterance of (3b)
Uttering (6) is not the same as eating a lot of pastries.
AUSTIN’S DISTINCTION
This led Austin to divide utterances into two distinct
classes: on the one hand there are utterances like those
in (1) – (3) which are used to do things—Austin called
these performative utterances.
On the other hand, there are utterances like those in (4)
– (5) which are used to report things – what Austin
called constative utterances.
AUSTIN’S DISTINCTION
Note that while there isn’t much point in asking whether
(1) – (3) are true or false, that doesn’t mean that they
can’t in some sense go wrong.
Imagine that rather than being uttered by the Queen
wielding a bottle of champagne, the following is uttered
by me as I board a ferry on the Elbe:
I name this ship ‘Titanic 2: Electric Boogaloo’
Does my utterance have the same effect as the Queen’s
does? Clearly not – I don’t have the authority to go
around naming ships!
AUSTIN’S DISTINCTION
Similarly, imagine that the Queen is out walking her
corgis one day, and she says the following to one of them:
I dub thee Sir Thorgi
In this case, the speaker has the appropriate authority
to perform the action in question, so what’s gone wrong?
Answer: (British) knighting can only apply to humans
(Unlike Norwegian Knighthood)
AUSTIN’S DISTINCTION
Upshot : in order for a performative utterance to ‘work’,
certain conditions must be met.
Austin called these felicity conditions—they’re the
conditions that must be in place for the act in question to
come off successfully (or felicitously).
He offers several criteria for determining when a
performative utterance is felicitious or infelicitious.
AUSTIN’S DISTINCTION



Rules: performatives are governed by rules, usually
implicit in normative social behaviour
Constitutive Rules: If X violates a constitutive rule for
performing a speech act of type A, then X has failed to
perform an act of type A at all
Regulative Rules: If X violates a regulative rule for
performing a speech act of type A, the X performs an
act of type A, but X’s act is defective
AUSTIN’S DISTINCTION
(i)
The relevant constitutive rules do not exist: the
conventional procedure which by our utterance we
are purporting to use must exist – there must be a
convention to the effect that one can, e.g., marry by
saying “I do” in the appropriate circumstances
a.
b.
c.
Saying “I divorce you” does not count as an act of
divorcing because no such procedure exists
Offering someone a pencil does not count as an act of prooffering marriage because such a procedure doesn’t exist
Naming a ship by urinating upon it…
AUSTIN’S DISTINCTION
ii.
The constitutive rules are violated: the
circumstances in which we purport to invoke the
procedure must be appropriate for its invocation/ in
addition the procedure correctly and completely
carried through
a)
b)
c)
Saying “I pick George” does not count as picking George if
George is not playing
Saying “I appoint you counsel” when you have been
appointed already
Saying “I will” when the other says “I won’t’ counts as a
case in which the procedure is not completed
AUSTIN’S DISTINCTION
iii.
The regulative rules are violated: failure of sincerity
conditions – certain procedures are designed for
people who hold certain beliefs or have certain
feelings or intentions; insincerity occurs when you
use one of these formulae without the requisite
feelings or intentions
a)
b)
Saying “I congratulate you” when not glad the person
addressed has had a certain success
Saying “I promise to do X” when you don’t have the least
intention of doing X or of believing it is feasible
AUSTIN’S DISTINCTION
iv.
v.
Misunderstanding: You may not hear what I say or
you may understand me to refer to something
different from what I intended
Non-responsibility: there is a general overriding
consideration that, as we are performing an act when
we issue these performative utterances, we may of
course be doing so under duress or in some other
circumstances which make us not entirely
responsible for doing what we are doing
If the felicity conditions aren’t met, it might result in a misfire or
an abuse. In the case of a misfire, the whole act fails to come off; in
the case of an abuse, the act comes off but in some way insincerely
THE PLAN
1. Review Grice
 Searle’s Objection
2. Historical Background for Austin
 Logical Positivism
3. Austin’s Distinction
 Performatives vs Constatives
4. Saving the Distinction?
 Two attempts to define the difference
5. Conclusions
SAVING THE DISTINCTION?
Austin has discovered a class of utterances – the
performatives – which behave differently from another
class – the constatives.
Problem:
How do we distinguish the performatives from the
constatives?
Spoiler: there’s no systematic way to work out which
utterances are performative and which are constative, so
that distinction had better be dropped – all utterances,
not just performatives, are used to perform a range of
different acts.
SAVING THE DISTINCTION?
Grammatical Criteria?
Notice that, in all our performative examples, their main
verbs are all in the first person singular of the present
tense. Building on this, perhaps all performative
utterances must have their verb in the first person
singular present!
Problem: (4) – (6) have their verb in the right tense and
person and yet are clearly not performative…
So this grammatical point isn’t sufficient. But maybe it’s
necessary!
SAVING THE DISTINCTION?
Problem: some performative utterances don’t have a first
person singular present tense verb form
(7)
(8)
(9)
Passengers are warned to cross the track by the
bridge only
Notice is hereby given that trespassers will be
prosecuted
You were off-side
Both (7) and (8) are third person, in the passive voice.
And (9)’s isn’t even in the right tense, let alone the right
person! Yet they’re all performative…
SAVING THE DISTINCTION?
Argument I: Utterances of any grammatical shape at all
can be used as performatives



I declare you off-side
You’re off-side
Off-side
In the right circumstances, any of these can perform the
action of declaring someone off-side, yet the first is a
performative of the classic type we saw at the very
beginning, the second is a passive with no obvious
performative marker, and the third is a one-word
utterance!
SAVING THE DISTINCTION?
Argument II: in different circumstances, the same
sentence can be used both performatively and
constatively.
A: Will you come to my
party?
A: How do you get me to
throw all these parties?
B: I promise to come
B: I promise to come
The same sentence is used performatively in one
exchange, but constatively in the other.
SAVING THE DISTINCTION?
A Second attempt – Explicit vs. Primary
Explicit performatives—things like the sentences in
(1) which have explicitly performative verbs like ‘name’,
‘bet’, ‘dub’ and so on
Primary performatives: sentences like
I’ll come (uttered as a promise)
 There’s a bull in the field (uttered as a warning)
 Guilty (uttered by the foreman of a jury)

SAVING THE DISTINCTION?
It should be possible to distinguish by looking for a
particular kind of asymmetry between the first person
present tense singular and all other persons/tenses:
I name this ship Titanic
(11) She named this ship Titanic
(10)
The former can be used to perform the act of naming a
ship, the latter only to report a fact.
So, using this criterion, it’s possible to list all the verbs
with this particular characteristic!
SAVING THE DISTINCTION?
Once completed, all primary performative utterances can
then be paraphrased as explicit performatives, i.e. as
utterances containing explicit performative verbs.
For example, you get the utterances and paraphrases:
I’ll come ⇝ I promise I’ll come
Guilty ⇝ I pronounce you guilty
SAVING THE DISTINCTION?
One problem: there are some cases where we’ve a
performative utterance yet where is no explicit
paraphrase.
 Insulting: an utterance of ‘I insult you’ does not itself
count as an insult.
Another problem: the asymmetry test is not always
entirely conclusive, as there are some verbs which are
part performative, part constative:

‘I blame you for everything’. Am I performing an act of
blaming, or am I simply telling you how things are?
SAVING THE DISTINCTION?
Biggest problem: it allows verbs such as ‘I state …’ into
the class of performatives
I state that this ship is named ‘Titanic’
Question: why is this a bad outcome?
(Note: same problem as the ‘Hereby’ test)
SAVING THE DISTINCTION?
Given that any test Austin can come up with seems to
fail, the conclusion he’s inexorably drawn towards is that
the distinction between performatives and constatives is
impossible to maintain.
…But surely there is, at least, one big difference
between them; indeed, the very difference that started
us off in the first place – Constrastives are either true or
false, performatives are either felicitous or infelicitous!
Surely there’s a difference between truth and felicity?
SAVING THE DISTINCTION?
Not necessarily, since constatives are apt to misfire too!
(12)
I bequeath you my original Picasso

(13)
All of John’s children are monks

(14)
Problem: I don’t have any! Therefore, misfire.
Consider a situation in which John doesn’t have any
children. There is something wrong about an utterance of
(13) in this situation – a presupposition has not been met,
such that (13) appears to fail in the same way as (12).
'The cat is on the mat but I don't believe it is."

Like making a promise without intending to keep it
SAVING THE DISTINCTION?
On the flip-side, performatives also have a general
dimension of correspondence with fact: we evaluate
performatives (as well as statements) in terms of
correspondence to the facts.



A justified warning
A sound verdict
A empty threat
But surely truth is an all or nothing type thing—a
proposition is either true or false—whereas felicity is a
matter of degrees!
SAVING THE DISTINCTION?
But what about a claim like
(14)
France is hexagonal.
Is (14) true or false? Likely answer: it’s roughly true—
it’s not absolutely true, but it’s certainly not false.
And that suggests that truth may not really be quite
such an all or nothing property after all.
Further, there doesn’t seem to be as massive a gap
regarding truth (understood as corresponding to the
facts) & felicity as one might first think…
SAVING THE DISTINCTION?
Upshot: the distinction between performatives and
statements breaks down.
There are two questions we ought to ask about
statements:
(1) what was the meaning of an utterance; and
(2) what was the force of the utterance
In addition to the old doctrine about meanings we need a
new doctrine about the possible forces of utterances!
HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS
Locutionary Content: the propositional content of an
utterance
 Locutionary act: acts of expressing certain
propositional contents, performed by means of
performing referential and predicative acts
 Illocutionary Force: classification of an act as stating,
promising, betting, etc.
 Illocutionary act: communicative acts – successful in
virtue of listener understanding; this is not caused by
the utterance but is part of what the utterance is
 Perlocutionary act: non-communicative acts performed
by means of performing illocutionary acts (alarming,
annoying, insulting, etc.) to achieve something
