Speech Acts

Philosophy of Language » Lecture 10

Performatives and Speech Acts

Saying and Doing

Performative Utterances

…it would be absurd to regard the thing that I say as a report of the performance of the action which is undoubtedly done… we should rather say that, in saying what I do, I actually perform that action. When I say ‘I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth’ I do not describe the christening ceremony, I actually perform the christening; and when I say ‘I do’… I am not reporting on a marriage, I am indulging in it.

Now these kinds of utterance are the ones we call performative utterances. (Austin 1956: 235)

Performatives and Performances

Speaker Meaning

Speech Acts and Speaker Meaning

[A] speech act is a type of act that can be performed by speaker meaning that one is doing so. (Green 2021: §2)

Speech Acts and Performatives

Appropriate Circumstances

Performative Infelicity

Illocution and Perlocution

Locutionary act
The utterance of a meaningful sentence \(S\).
Illocutionary act
The speech act done by that utterance of \(S\), in those circumstances; e.g., that utterance may be an assertion of \(S\), or a promise conveyed by \(S\), or a performance of the act of getting married.
Perlocutionary act

The characteristically intended consequence of performing a given illocutionary act; e.g., the hearers of an assertion might come to believe not only that the speaker believes \(S\), but they come to share that belief. The hearers of a promise might come to expect its fulfilment.

saying something will often, or even normally, produce certain consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audience…: and it may be done with the design, intention, or purpose of producing them… (Austin 1975: 101)

Force and Content

Classifying Speech Acts

Performative Truth?

Truth and Performativity

Abuse and Implicature

Assertion and other speech acts

Speech Which Acts on Hearers

Perlocution and Hate Speech

Pornographic Speech

The Harms of Pornography

Subordination and Silencing

Silencing and Power

powerful people can generally do more, say more, and have their speech count for more than can the powerless. If you are powerful, there are more things you can do with your words.

This bears on the question about silence. If you are powerful, you sometimes have the ability to silence the speech of the powerless. One way might be to stop the powerless from speaking at all. Gag them, threaten them, condemn them to solitary confinement. But there is another, less dramatic but equally effective, way. Let them speak. Let them say whatever they like to whomever they like, but stop that speech from counting as an action. More precisely, stop it from counting as the action it was intended to be. … Some speech acts are unspeakable for women in some contexts: although the appropriate words can be uttered, those utterances fail to count as the actions they were intended to be. (Langton 1993: 298–99)

Three Kinds of Silencing (Langton 1993: 314–15)

  1. We can intimidate or threaten a person or group into silence: they will literally not say anything, thus failing to even produce an utterance.
  2. We can undermine the speaker’s intended effects. She may say I urge you to reconsider, an attempt to perform the perlocutionary act of persuading someone. But we’ve already told the hearer that she’s untrustworthy; or the hearer believes she’s untrustworthy because she’s a women. So her attempt will not come off, she cannot perform the act she wants to.
  3. We can disable the speaker, ensuring that she will not even manage to perform a speech act by her utterance. Her utterance of Please stop doing that will not even be treated as a protest, which is the intended force of her speech act.

Disablement in other domains

Imagine this: the actor is acting a scene in which there is supposed to be a fire…. It is his role to imitate as persuasively as he can a man who is trying to warn others of a fire. ‘Fire!’ he screams. And perhaps he adds, at the behest of the author, ‘I mean it! Look at the smoke!’ etc. And now a real fire breaks out, and the actor tries vainly to warn the real audience. ‘Fire!’ he screams. ‘I mean it! Look at the smoke!’ etc. (Davidson 1984: 269)

Refusal

Pornography might … silence refusal, by doing something other than eroticizing refusal itself. It may simply leave no space for the refusal move in its depictions of sex. In pornography of this kind there would be all kinds of locutions the women depicted could use to make the consent move. ‘Yes’ is one such locution. ‘No’ is just another. Here the refusal move is not itself eroticized…: it is absent altogether. Consent is the only thing a woman can do with her words in this game. Someone learning the rules of the game from this kind of pornography might not even recognize an attempted refusal. ‘Coming from her, I took it as consent,’ he might say. Refusal would be made unspeakable for a woman in that context.

If young men can rape without knowing it, then women sometimes fail to secure uptake for their attempted refusals. This is the silence, not simply of frustration, but of disablement. (Langton 1993: 324–25)

Testimonial Injustice

identity power is an integral part of the mechanism of testimonial exchange, because of the need for hearers to use social stereotypes as heuristics in their spontaneous assessments of their interlocutor’s credibility. … Notably, if the stereotype embodies a prejudice that works against the speaker, then two things follow: there is an epistemic dysfunction in the exchange – the hearer makes an unduly deflated judgement of the speaker’s credibility, perhaps missing out on knowledge as a result; and the hearer does something ethically bad - the speaker is wrongfully undermined in her capacity as a knower. (Fricker 2007: 16–17)

The speaker sustains such a testimonial injustice iff she receives a credibility deficit owing to identity prejudice [‘prejudice … against people owing to some feature of their social identity’] in the hearer. (Fricker 2007: 28)

Cautions (Saul, Diaz-Leon, and Hesni 2022: §2.1)

References

Anderson, Luvell and Michael Barnes (2023) Hate Speech, in Edward N Zalta and Uri Nodelman, eds., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2023/entries/hate-speech/.
Austin, J L (1956/1979) ‘Performative Utterances’, in J O Urmson and G J Warnock, eds., Philosophical Papers, 3rd edition: 233–52. Clarendon Press.
Austin, J L (1975) How to Do Things with Words, 2nd edition. Harvard University Press.
Bach, Kent (1975) ‘Performatives Are Statements Too’, Philosophical Studies 28: 229–36. doi:10.1007/bf00353970.
Bird, Alexander (2002) ‘Illocutionary Silencing’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 83: 1–15. doi:10.1111/1468-0114.00137.
Davidson, Donald (1984) ‘Communication and Convention’, in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation: 265–80. Oxford University Press.
Fricker, Miranda (2007) ‘Testimonial Injustice’, in Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing: 9–29. Oxford University Press.
Green, Mitchell (2021) Speech Acts, in Edward N Zalta, ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries/speech-acts/.
Grice, H P (1957) ‘Meaning’, Philosophical Review 66: 377–88.
Langton, Rae (1993) ‘Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 22: 293–330. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199247066.003.0002.
Saul, Jennifer, Esa Diaz-Leon, and Samia Hesni (2022) Feminist Philosophy of Language, in Edward N Zalta and Uri Nodelman, eds., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2022/entries/feminism-language/.
Searle, John R (1975) ‘A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts’, in Keith Gunderson, ed., Language, Mind, and Knowledge, vol. 7: 344–69. University of Minnesota Press.
Wright, Crispin (1992) Truth and Objectivity. Harvard University Press.