A scholarly confusion of tongues, or, is promising an illocutionary act?

• Authors: Friedrich Doerge
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Technical terms, I argued elsewhere, should not be re-defined without a profound reason; for such a re-definition furthers misunderstanding and is therefore undesirable. If my argument is on the right track, then we have reason to acknowledge the original definition of ‘illocutionary acts’ established by John L. Austin; any subsequent re-definition, unless it is specially justified somehow, must count as a terminological mistake. I use this argument, in order to proceed against what appears to me a highly problematic terminological situation, namely, the present existence of a double-digit number of different definitions of the term "illocutionary act." Against my argument, I met the objection that the co-existence of several different intensional definitions of ‘illocutionary acts’ eventually is not very problematic, given the alleged fact that the extension of the term is indisputable. In this paper, I argue that the objection fails, because its central premise is false: William P. Alston (2000), Bach & Harnish (1979) and John R. Searle (1969) have very different opinions as to whether, for instance, promising is an illocutionary act, even though promises are commonly supposed to be extremely obvious cases. Additionally, I consider the objection that the term "illocutionary act" is indispensable as a means of referring to those various things it is used for; I discard this objection by demonstrating that, and how, at least the accounts under consideration in this paper could easily do without the term.

Keywords

EN

Speech act; illocutionary act; Austin; promising terminology

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Journal: Lodz Papers in Pragmatics
• Year: 2009
• Volume: 5
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 53-68

Dates

published

2009-01-01

online

2009-07-06

Contributors

author

Friedrich Doerge

• University of Tuebingen

References

• Alston, William P. Illocutionary Acts and Sentence Meaning. Ithaka/London: Cornell University Press, 2000.
• Andersson, Jan S. How to Define ‘Performative’? Stockholm: Libertryck, 1975.
• Austin, John L. How to do Things with Words, 2nd edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.
• Bach, Kent and Robert M. Harnish. Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1979.
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• Doerge, Friedrich Christoph. Illocutionary Acts. Tuebingen: University of Tuebingen, 2006a.; PhD thesis available online.
• Doerge, Friedrich Christoph. "Re-definition and Alston's ‘illocutionary acts.’" Grazer Philosophische Studien 73 (2006b): 97-111.
• Doerge, Friedrich Christoph. "Much ado about ‘performatives’" (manuscript in preparation).
• Doerge, Friedrich Christoph. and Mark Siebel. "Communication and transmission of thoughts." Erkenntnis 69.1 (2008): 55-67, doi: 10.1007/s10670-007-9099-1.[Crossref][WoS]
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• Schiffer, Stephen. Meaning. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972.
• Searle, John R. "How to derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’." Philosophical Review 73 (1964): 43-58, doi: 10.2307/2183201.[Crossref]
• Searle, John R. Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.
• Searle, John R. "How performatives work." Linguistics and Philosophy 12, 535-558.
• Siebel, Mark. "Illocutionary acts and attitude expression." Linguistics and Philosophy 26 (2003): 351-366.[Crossref]

Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/v10016-009-0007-9