2020-04-20
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(Searle J. Speech Acts. An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge. CUP, London, 1977)
Chapter 1
1.4. WHY STUDY SPEECH ACTS?
<…> The form that this hypothesis will take is that speaking a language is performing speech acts, acts such as making statements, giving commands, asking questions, making promises, and so on; and, secondly, that these acts are in general made possible by and are performed in accordance with certain rules for the use of linguistic elements <…>
Chapter 3
THE STRUCTURE OF ILLOCUTIONARY ACTS
<…> In order to give an analysis of the illocutionary act of promising I shall ask what conditions are necessary and sufficient for the act of promising to have been successfully and non-defectively performed in the utterance of a given sentence. I shall attempt to answer this question by stating these conditions as a set of propositions such that the conjunction of the members of the set entails the proposition that a speaker made a successful and non-defective promise, and the proposition that the speaker made such a promise entails this conjunction. Thus each condition will be a necessary condition for the successful and non-defective performance of the act of promising, and taken collectively the set of conditions will be a sufficient condition for such a performance. There are various kinds of possible defects of illocutionary acts but not all of these defects are sufficient to vitiate the act in its entirety. In some cases, a condition may indeed be intrinsic to the notion of the act in question and not satisfied in a given case, and yet the act will have been performed nonetheless. In such cases I say the act was "defective". My notion of a defect in an illocutionary act is closely related to Austin's notion of an "infelicity". Not all of the conditions are logically independent of each other. Sometimes it is worthwhile to state a condition separately even though it is, strictly speaking entailed by another< …>
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Furthermore, in the analysis I confine my discussion to full blown explicit promises and ignore promises made by elliptical turns of phrase, hints, metaphors, etc. I also ignore promises made in the course of uttering sentences which contain elements irrelevant to the making of the promise. I am also dealing only with categorical promises and ignoring hypothetical promises, for if we get an account of categorical promises it can easily be extended to deal with hypothetical ones. In short, I am going to deal only with a simple and idealized case. This method, one of constructing idealized models, is analogous to the sort of theory construction that goes on in most sciences, e. g., the construction of economic models, or accounts of the solar system which treat planets as points. Without abstraction and idealization there is no systematization <…>
<…> although there will be no reference to illocutionary acts, certain institutional concepts, such as e. g. "obligation", will appear in the analysans as well as in the analysandum; I am not attempting to reduce institutional facts to brute facts; and thus there is no reductionist motivation in the analysis. Rather I want to analyze certain statements of institutional facts, statements of the form "X made a promise", into statements containing such notions as intentions, rules, and states of affairs specified by the rules. Sometimes those states of affairs will themselves involve institutional facts.
In the presentation of the conditions I shall first consider the case of a sincere promise and then show how to modify the conditions to allow for insincere promises. As our inquiry is semantical rather than syntactical, I shall simply assume the existence of grammatically well-formed sentences.
3.1. HOW TO PROMISE: A COMPLICATED WAY
Given that a speaker S utters a sentence T in the presence of a hearer H, then, in the literal utterance of T, S sincerely and non-defectively promises that P to H if and only if the following conditions 1- 9 obtain:
1. Normal input and output conditions obtain.
I use the terms "input" and "output" to cover the large and indefinite range of conditions under which any kind of serious and literal linguistic communication is possible. "Output" covers the conditions for intelligible speaking and "input" covers the conditions of understanding. Together they include such things as that the speaker and hearer both know how to speak the language; both are conscious of what they are doing; they have no physical impediments to communication, such as deafness, aphasia, or laryngitis; and they are not acting in a play or telling jokes, etc. It should be noted that this condition excludes both impediments to communication such as deafness and also parasitic forms of communication such as telling jokes or acting in a play.
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2. S expresses the proposition that p in the utterance of T.
This condition isolates the proposition from the rest of the speech act and enables us to concentrate on the peculiarities of promising as a kind of illocutionary act in the rest of the analysis.
3. In expressing that p, S predicates a future act A of S.
In the case of promising the scope of the illocutionary force indicating device includes certain features of the proposition. In a promise an act must be predicated of the speaker and it cannot be a past act. I cannot promise to have done something, and I cannot promise that someone else will do something (although I can promise to see that he will do it). The notion of an act, as I am construing it for the present purposes, includes refraining from acts, performing series of acts, and may also include states and conditions: I may promise not to do something, I may promise to do something repeatedly or sequentially, and I may promise to be or remain in a certain state or condition. I call conditions 2 and 3 the propositional content conditions <…>
4. H would prefer S's doing A to his not doing A, and S believes H would prefer his doing A to his not doing A.
One crucial distinction between promises on the one hand and threats on the other is that a promise is a pledge to do something for you, not to you; but a threat is a pledge to do something to you, not for you. A promise is defective if the thing promised is something the promisee does not want done; and it is further defective if the promisor does not believe the promisee wants it done, since a non-defective promise must be intended as a promise and not as a threat or warning. Furthermore, a promise, unlike an invitation, normally requires some sort of occasion or situation that calls for the promise. A crucial feature of such occasions or situations seems to bethat the promisee wishes (needs, desires, etc.) that something be done, and the promisor is aware of this wish (need, desire, etc.). I think both halves of this double condition are necessary in order to avoid fairly obvious counter-examples.
One can, however, think of apparent counter-examples to this condition as stated. Suppose I say to a lazy student, "If you don't hand in your paper on time I promise yon I will give you a failing grade in the course". Is this utterance a promise? I am inclined to think not; we would more naturally describe it as a warning or possibly even a threat. But why, then, is it possible to use the locution "I promise" in such a case? I think we use it here because "I promise" and "I hereby promise" are among the strongest illocutionary force indicating devices for commitment provided by the English language. For that reason we often use these expressions in the performance of speech acts which are not strictly speaking promises, but in which we wish to emphasize the degree of our commitment. To illustrate this, consider another apparent counter-example to the analysis along different lines. Sometimes one hears people say "I promise" when making an emphatic assertion. Suppose, for example, I accuse you of having stolen the money. I say, “You stole that money, didn't you?". You reply, "No, I didn't, I promise you I didn't". Did you make a promise in this case? I find it very unnatural to describe your utterance as a promise. This utterance would-be more aptly described as an emphatic denial, and we can explain the occurrence of the illocutionary force indicating device "I promise" as derivative from genuine promises and serving here as an expression adding emphasis to your denial <…>
5. It is not obvious to both S and H that S will do A in the normal course of events.
This condition is an instance of a general condition on many different kinds of illocutionary acts to the effect that the act must have, a point. For example, if I make a request to someone to do something which it is obvious that lie is already doing or is about to do quite independently of the request, then my request is pointless and to that extent defective, in an actual speech situation, listeners, knowing the rules for peforming illocutionary acts, I’ll assume that this condition is satisfied. Suppose, for example, that in the course of a public speech I say to a member of my audience "Look here, Smith, pay attention to what I am saying". In interpreting this utterance, theaudience will have to assume that Smith has not been paying attention, or at any rate that it is not obvious that he has been paying attention, that the question of his not paying attention has arisen in some way, because a condition for making non-defective request is that it is not obvious that the hearer is doing or about to do the thing requested.
Similarly with promises. It is out of order for me to promise to do something that it is obvious to all concerned that I am going to do anyhow. If I do make such a promise, the only way my audience can interpret my utterance is to assume that I believe that it is not obvious that I am going to do the thing promised. A happily married man who promises his wife he will not desert her in the next week is likely to provide more anxiety than comfort <…>
I call conditions such as 4 and 5 preparatory conditions. Though they do not state the essential feature, they are sine quibus non [1] of happy promising.
6. S intends to do A.
The distinction between sincere and insincere promises is that, in the case of sincere promises, the speaker intends to do the act promised; in the case of insincere promises, he does not intend to do the act. Also, in sincere promises, the speaker believes it is possible for him to do the act (or to refrain from doing, it), but I think the proposition that he intends to do it entails that he thinks it is possible to do (or refrain from doing) it, so I am not stating that as an extra condition. I call this condition the sincerity condition.
7. S intends that theutterance of T will place him under an obligation to do A.
The essential feature of a promise is that it is the undertaking of an obligation to perform a certain act. I think that this condition distinguishes promises (and other members of the same family such as vows) from other kinds of illocutionary acts. Notice that in the statement of the condition, we only specify the speaker's intention; further conditions will make clear how that intention is realized. It is clear, however, that having this intention is a necessary condition of making a promise, for if a speaker can demonstrate that he did not have this intention in a given utterance he can prove that the utterance was not a promise. We know, for example, that Mr Pickwick did not really promise to marry the woman because we know he did not have the appropriate intention. I call this the essential condition.
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8. S intends (i — I) to produce in H the knowledge (K) that the utterance of T is to count as placing S under an obligation to do A. S intends to produce К by means of the recognition of i — I, and he intends i — I to be recognized in virtue of (by means of) H's knowledge of the meaning of T.
This captures our amended Gricean analysis of what it is for the speaker to mean the utterance as a promise. The speaker intends to produce a certain illocutionary effect by means of getting the hearer to recognize his intention to produce that effect, and he also intends this recognition to be achieved in virtue of the fact that the meaning of the item he utters conventionally associates it with producing that effect. In this case the speaker assumes that the semantic rules (which determine the meaning) of the expressions uttered are such that the utterance counts as the undertaking of an obligation. The rules, in short, as we shall see in the next condition, enable the intention in the essential condition 7 to be achieved by making the utterance. And the articulation of that achievement, the way the speaker gets the job done, is described in condition 8.
9. The semantical rules of the dialect spoken by S and H are such that T is correctly and sincerely uttered if and only if conditions 1—8 obtain <…>
I am construing condition 1 broadly enough so that together with the other conditions it guarantees that H understands the utterance, that is, together with 2—9 it entails that the illocutionary effect К is produced in H by means of H's recognition of S's intention to produce it, which recognition is achieved in virtue of H's knowledge of the meaning of T. This condition could always be stated as a separate condition, and if the reader thinks that I am asking too much of my input and output conditions that they should guarantee that the hearer understands the utterance.
Литература
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5. Белл Р. Т. Социолингвистика. Цели, методы и проблемы. M., 1980.
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7. Austin J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge; Mass. Harvard University Press, 1962.
8. Searle J. R. Speech Acts. An Essay, in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
