Searle: Philosophy of Language, lecture 2

all right well last time I got started and I made various distinctions and later on will challenge those in various respects but the basic idea I want you to see is that there is a broad distinction in the study of the philosophy of language roughly speaking between what you might call a formalist strand that emphasizes the the formal mathematical logical structure of language and adherence of that view tend to see ordinary languages as essentially degenerate forms of ideal formal languages such as the predicate calculus and they I tend to use a lot of formal apparatus and nowadays it's very fashionable to use something called possible world's semantics and I'll tell you about that later on there is another strand which I think is the more powerful strand which emphasizes that language is above all a human social phenomenon that people get busy and talk to each other and that is ultimately what we're interested in studying is the use of language to perform speech acts that in a broad sense the study of language is part of the study of the mind now I am an adherent of the second strand I think you don't understand the formal logical apparatus unless you see it not as a branch of mathematics but as a look as a way of structuring human intentional behavior however I have to tell you that right now at this stage in history much the most influential strand in the philosophy of language is the what I've been calling the formal strand and by the way these are my labels I don't know that the people in question would label themselves that way but you'll get a feel for the difference when we get into the subject more now I'm not sure how to organize of course but the way I'm going to do it is to tell you first how I think the study of language ought to be done and how I've been doing it for the past 50 years or so and then I'll then I'll go back and we'll start with Fraga and Russell and pick up the various issues and conflicts between these two strands however it's not like the philosophy of mind where I think that the guys I'm opposed are basically just hopelessly wrong behaviorism and dualism and computationalism and all that whatever else we may say about them formalist guys they have something to say there's some very important insights to be got from that it's just I think that the insights you derive from the formal study are based on a much deeper conception of language which is language as above all a human intentional activity and that's what I'm going to try to get across okay now the reading well we couldn't get a hold of Austen but maybe that's a blessing in disguise because instead of working through his whole book just read that article in Al and al Martin H's book Al's real name is Aloysius and I think that's kind of cruelty to children I hate it you know I'd hate to go through second grade being named Aloysius anyway he's a great guy and he calls himself Al and he publishes the best book the best collection of readings on the philosophy language it's a humongous thing and I haven't read all that crap in it so I'm not gonna and I have a principle I won't ask you guys to read anything that I won't read myself okay so I will the stuff I'll assigned I'm either going to read or have read so read Austin's a piece in there on performative utterances all right now last time I blithely introduced some of the most contentious issues in the philosophy of language about the distinction between analytic and synthetic and necessary and contingent and and eight I always get them backwards a priori and a posteriori and you're going to hear them out about them later and then I also introduced distinctions between speaker meaning and sentence meaning and I'm going to argue that speaker meaning is primary a lot of people think no sentence meaning is primary there's a distinction between syntax and semantics and that's going to be crucial and with that distinction the distinction in syntax semantics and pragmatics between the form the meaning and the use of language I and then in connection with that I introduce two crucial notions the notion of compositionality and generativity and it is a remarkable feature of human languages and it's certainly not possessed by all animal communication systems that they have both of these features you can tell what the sentence means just by knowing the meanings of the parts and how they are arranged in the syntax and furthermore given that you understand the syntax you can generate an infinite number of new sentences sentences that nobody ever heard before and I gave you one or two ridiculous examples and I can't even remember them but you can effor fun just to annoy your friends generate a whole lot of sentences that they hope they would never have heard and never want to hear again but anyway those are remarkable features you can shuffle words around at will and as I said I have a greatest admiration for my dog's intelligence but he can't do that he can think there's somebody at the door but he can't think I wish there were a thousand people at the door or God knows how many people will be at the door next week because there were too many people at the door last week he can't think any of those thoughts he can't even think how much fun it would be to visit the zoo next Sunday because there a lot of funny-looking animals in the zoo that he could bark at so there are all these crazy things that humans can do with language that animals can't do i and later on I guess we have to talk about some of the animal languages because in or this amount of of play an enormous amount of philosophical mileage is made out of the B language and the various efforts to communicate by dolphins and whales and all the rest of it and I take that seriously I think we ought to reflect seriously on that and then there's that damned parrot we ought to think about the parrot because people whose opinions I respect think the parrot actually in some sense can sort of talk and understand well okay we'll get into that but right now we're with human beings and their remarkable capacities now there's one distinction I forgot to introduce I just forgot it but you have to you're going to hear more about it later and it's beginning it's in every logic textbook and it's the distinction between use and mention and clearly we need such a distinction it's just the way that it's described in the textbooks is just I think absurdly wrong but anyway here's how it goes I'll take an example from Quine if I say Boston is in Massachusetts I'll abbreviate it that's a statement about Boston if I say Boston with quotes around it has six letters that's a statement about the word Boston this is a case of using the word Boston and this is a case of mentioning the word Boston so far so good but now comes the absolutely amazing view invented by no less a person than Freya and as far as I know repeated in every logic textbook sense that says here the proper name of a city occurs here that name doesn't occur at all rather there's a completely new name I'll draw a circle around it and that name is the name of a word so in the first sentence the word Boston occurs but in the second sentence word Boston doesn't occur at all the proper name of the word occurs furthermore I if you think that Boston occurred the word Boston occurred in this sentence that would be like thing and the word cat occurs in the word catastrophe the word catastrophe isn't about cats it hasn't got the word cat in it it has a sequence of letters but the word cat does not occur in the word catastrophe symma no more than the word Boston occurs in number two well what does occur well we can name what occurs with three and that is we we can say well we can say this one occurs in two in proposition two over here that is you can keep going up with names of names of names of names now I this always seemed to me incredible it seems to me the word Boston obviously occurs here and we put quotes around it to indicate that it's being used and not mentioned however and I think that's an egregious mistake and it's one reason I never made it through a logic a textbook I always got stuck on a bad page one and if I thought I and I thought if they say outrageously false things on page one God knows what's going to happen later on anyhow the first book on logic I ever read was one I wrote and well that was where the help of a guy who actually knows something about it and on most of my friends tell me it's a dreadful book but anyway I thought leave you that you can decide for yourself but anyway I think that this that just to summarize is part there is an important distinction between using words and talking about words between using words and mentioning words the way that this is standardly described in the philosophical literature seems to me not just false but it's well I don't want to use technical terms okay but it it's off-the-wall Alfa Devon sounds better in German I and it to say you can't I that word Boston cannot occur in number two only the proper name of the word occurs now Elizabeth Anscombe said you know that has a funny consequence it is a consequence you can't be told anybody's name because if you're told that guy's name is Smith you didn't hear the name Smith you only heard the name of the name on the other hand if you're told that guy is Smith you're not told his name you're just told who he is now that's the kind of a fakey paradox that philosophers like but it ought to tell us that there's something wrong now oddly enough one of the chief adherents of this view without knowing it discovered a reductio ad absurdum but then what for what courageous philosophers do when they discover ridicule and as they declare it to be a discovery and the discovery is that if you put in a free variable X has six letters then you couldn't put quotes around X or if you say that take this take it out let me give you a better example if you take a sentence take Socrates is bald and knock out the word Socrates and put in a free variable X then if you wanted to consider this sentence that's the variable now is no longer a free variable now it just occurs as part of a proper name there's no structure - there's no syntactical structure to a proper name so there's no syntactical structure here so I if you don't understand I don't worry well get to it when I tell you about free variables and open sentences so Quine said well you have to invent a new kind of quotes and these are these corner quotes - to deal with that kind of case where you want the variable to be able to function as a variable and not like the word cat in catastrophe but what that tells you is you are making a mistake initially when you said that putting quotes around a word creates a new word the proper name you could invent a proper name of the word Boston call it bill and then we could say this would be proposition for bill has four letters okay now this an actual name of a word I deliberately introduced bill as the name of the word Boston so both two and four are true and four is true because the word name by the word bill actually does have oh I'm sorry I'm screwed up here six letters has six letters because now bill is the name of the word Boston and Boston does have six letters so you can see in number two that it's true that Boston has six letters you can just count one two three four five six whereas in for you you can't see on the blackboard that bill has six letters you have to know that bill is the name of the word Boston anyway we're going to talk about reference and when we do I want you to keep in mind that there's a distinction between using a word to refer that's the use of the word and talking about the word and I think the terminology of usin mentioned is probably a good way to do that but is the standard account is false the standard account says when you put quotes around a word you make a completely no word a completely new word the prop the proper name of the word you put quotes around that seems to me a mistake and it's led to a lot of other mistakes that we'll get to when we talk about how we use language to talk about language okay all of that is just clearing my throat to get to the main topic of this lecture which is the introduction of the notion of the speech act now maybe I should take questions about what I said so far any I mean I'm repeating stuff less time the only stuff I added this time was about use and mention any any questions about that I mean we're going to come back to forints you going to mo hear more about reference probably than you ever wanted to hear because it is the central subject in the philosophy of language how do words refer okay and my answer by the way is going to be they don't speakers refer using words words don't refer it speakers it's not the marks on the blackboard that refer but it's the speakers using the words that refer but anyway we're going to get to that all right now all of the stuff that I've said so far about necessity and contingency in a priori and a posteriori and all that seems to be about the use of language to state the truth and you succeed in this use of language if what you say is true and you fail if what you say is false now Austin who was a professor of philosophy in Oxford as well as Vik enstein who was a famous professor of philosophy then in Cambridge Austin and Wittgenstein in their different ways noticed that there's something fishy about the idea that languages only use to make statements it's only used to describe things and a lot of people had argued that unless a proposition was either analytic or synthetic and all synthetic propositions were empirical they would be meaningless and so traditional branches of philosophy like ethics and aesthetics were declared to be meaningless by a certain school of philosophers called logical positivists I'll tell you about more about them later as well but Austin looked at this and thought there are a whole lot of utterances that don't set out to make true or false claims a guy who says the meeting is adjourned or I now pronounce you husband and wife or I order you to leave the room or I promise to come and see you next week or war is hereby declared such a person doesn't set out to describe a state of affairs I think if the guy says the meeting is adjourned it won't make any sense to ask him or how do you know it's adjourned what's the evidence that is adjourned because he wasn't making that kind of a claim he wasn't claiming to describe a state of affairs when he says the meeting is adjourned he was creating a state of affairs he was performing an action rather than describing some phenomena and Austin introduced the notion of a performative and the idea of a performative is that there's a class of verbs usually verbs sometimes you get nouns but it's usually verbs which are such that if you utter a sentence containing the verb and you do it in appropriate circumstances then you will perform the act name by the verb so you can declare war by saying I declare war if you're the appropriate authority Congress has to do it for the United States but Congress makes its collective speech Act they declare war I and you can pronounce if you're the preacher you can pronounce somebody husband and wife in the course of a marriage ceremony and any speaker can make a promise by saying I promise in all of those cases you have a performative verb and the use of the verb in appropriate circumstances will be the performance of the very act named by the verb so Austin said we need to distinguish between performative utterances which don't set out to be true or false it's not they're not trying to be true or false we need to distinguish them from what he called con stative utterances and these are cases where you're actually saying something that's true or false and these would be such things as statements and descriptions and this would be over here this whole class of utterances where you so to speak create a speech phenomenon you create an order or command or an adjournment or a marriage or a declaration of war just by saying something by making the appropriate utterance so it looked like initially at least that you could make a distinction between the performative and the can state if what are that what's the basis of the distinction well Austin tried to get a precise distinction and it's very interesting why it didn't work because that led him to rethink the whole nature of utterances it looks like the way you make the distinction is this on the one hand you say Conn state is over here can be true or false and over here they're not true or false but somehow appropriate or authorized or correct and Austin introduced the technical notion he said these could be felicitous or in felicitous so if I got up in the middle of the Academic Senate and shouted the meeting is adjourned well that would be in felicitous because I'm not in a position to do that so that's the first way of making the distinction performative czar not true or false but felicitous or in felicitous con stative x' can be true or false but then it seems that for the performative there's a special verb a special sentence form and over here is just any declarative sentence it seems it can be used to make a con stative and indeed even sentences containing performative verbs can be used to make statements so if I say I promised to come and see you next Wednesday that's a performative utterance because I'm making a promise but if I say I promise too many things to too many people that not making a promise that's just making a statement about myself I'm describing myself as performing a certain sort of action so it looks we've got two kinds of ways of distinguishing the performative ZAR not true or false con stative czar performative x' require a special verb whereas the con stadiums don't and finally it seems the basic underlying idea is that a performative is an action it's a doing or acting as opposed to over here it is a saying you're just talking when you make the con stative but in the case the performative you are performing an action by doing the talking you're a journeying the meeting declaring war making somebody husband and wife giving and bequeathing your watch etc okay now it looks like a nice distinction but if you look closely Austin says you can't make it work because all of the features that are supposed to define the performative are also features of the con stative and I'm going to go through that it seems that in order to issue a performative utterance such as the meeting is adjourned or war is declared I or I name this battleship the battleship potemkin it seems that in order to do that I have to be in a special position there has to be some conditions under which it's okay but that's true for statements as well you can't just say anything you have if it's to be a serious correct utterance you have to be in some kind of a position where it is appropriate if I say right now there are 17 people in the next room and you say to me well how do you know what's your evidence I it won't do for me to say it's a free country and if I want to say that exactly 17 people okay of course I can make these noises but there's something wrong with my utterance if I say at this very instant Barack Obama is combing his hair with his left hand at this very instant and you say well how do you know what's your evidence free country I can say anything I want well of course but there's something in felicitous about that statement you're not in a position to say that and that's just as in foolishness as you're getting up in the meeting and saying the meeting is adjourned furthermore there are lots of verbs for con stative x' i if you're very pompous you don't have to say snow is white you can say I state that snow is white or even I hereby state that snow is white and indeed there are very varying degrees which one has for making statements and if you want it to be fully explicit you could introduce one of these con stative performative verbs like state or describe or characterize how would you describe Sally Oh God don't ask me to describe Sally well I would describe her as a marginal schizophrenic sufferer and then so on you give a description or and that sounds like a performative because you've used that describe there the verb to name the very action that you are performing when you uttered it so it looks like we this doesn't work because the verbs that are supposed to be over here can also work over here that is you have special verse for statements but now going back here some con stative x' can be true or false if i say i sorry some performative x' some i performative x' can be true or false if i say i warn you that the bull is about the charge and it turns out the bullets a stuffed bull been dead for 17 years then my warning is false I will have given a false war so it turns out just as on this side the Khan stadiums can be felicitous or in felicitous some performative z' can be true or false and just as there are special verbs for performative there can also be special verbs for con statex finally that leads to the obvious point namely it is you can't make the distinction by saying all performative Tzar actions doings and all conceit con stative tsar sayings statements because all statements are also actions it's you're doing something whenever you say anything so this is characteristic of intellectual history that what was introduced as a kind of marginal case as a kind of an oddball case tends to swallow the general case because the features that seem to be special of performative x' that they could be felicitous or influenced had a special verbs and we're all actions those three features are features of con stative x' as well and you come up with the with the result every utterance is an action every utterance that you perform is a case of performing an action and hence we need to recast the investigation we need to look at the study of language as the study of speech acts when people talk they are doing something and our task as theorists is to describe the structure of the actions that they are performing okay and now that's going to be our next heading for those of you who keep notes bless you all the new heading is speech acts and I'm now going to tell you some of Austin's investigations about that later on I'm going to make some corrections to that but let's take questions I saw a hand up yeah okay now she raises a deep question and that is all the same it doesn't it look like you have to have a special category of utterances that you speaks performative verbs because you're changing reality when you use the performative verb you're making it the case that the meeting is adjourned I and similarly when you say I hereby state that it's raining you're making it the case that you state but the answer I think Austin's answer to that would be yeah but you're changing reality when you say it's raining you've made it the case that you made a statement you just as in say that you made a statement but all the same you did make a statement now that's that this is one of the deep questions we're going to be examining in this course what is the relation between language and reality every utterance changes reality in this respect something now exists it didn't exist before namely that utterance but of course that's true of all actions if I raise my arm then I have changed reality because something that existed exists now that didn't exist before namely the raising of my arm the question though that Austin was confronted with is can we make a clear distinction between the con stative class of speech act and the performative class of speech acts and we can't on the way that he originally tried to with these distinctions now I think implicit in what you said is a variation which we can make and that is we can say all the same there is a special class of performative utterances indeed we need to identify three features there's the performative verb there's the performative sentence and there's the performative utterance and we use the verbs in the sentences to make the the audience's and the definition of the performative utterance is it's an utterance which contains a verb or sometimes a noun but basically they're verbs contains a verb which is such that in the utterance of the sentence you perform the act named by the verb so if you say I order you to leave the room war is hereby declared i given bequeath my watch to my nephew all of those are cases where you have a verb or verb phrase which is such that in the appropriate sentence under the appropriate circumstances the performative utterance is a performance of an act named by that verb okay so it looks like you're still going to need a distinction between those sentences verbs and utterances that have this feature and those that don't it's just that you can't make that distinction in terms of the true/false distinction on which it was originally based okay yes yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah the point is this I mean I in case you didn't hear the question at the back I'll repeat it there does seem to be a distinction because it's true that the warning might be false but all the same is true that you did warn the guy right I mean yeah there was a warning even though the warning was false and Austin would agree to that Austin would say yes you did make a warning but the whole idea was supposed to be that performative couldn't be true or false and this one can it's clearly a performative because it's got all these indices you you performed an act by naming it but you performed an act by saying I warn you and it meets the other test one of the tests you use was this here by test can you stick in the word hereby and you can you can say I hereby warn you that the bull is about to charge but in not in that case then you've got you definitely perform the act of warning and that was a performative but all the same the resulting utterance the resulting warning can be true or false and that's the point that he was making now at the same time that Austin was doing all this stuff Vidkun Stein was challenging the idea that language only serves one purpose to describe and Vidkun Stein thought we ought to recognize a whole lot of different functions of language and indeed Vivian Stein says I that they're strictly speaking an indefinite number a countless number of uses of language now I often read in intellectual histories how much Austin was influenced by Vidkun Stein that is absolutely false I knew Boston very well and he was totally colorblind where Vidkun Stein was concerned I used to try to get him to argue about Viggen Stein and he he was a very intelligent man but mostly what he said about Vivian shine wasn't all that smart I and they were well he was totally unsympathetic Vidkun Stein was a kind of a mystical middle Central European who was full of of a deep and profound and often mystical ideas Austin was exactly the opposite a very precise Middle English middle class professor who insisted on precision so when Viggen Stein says there are an infinite number of uses of language well Austin used to say there are philosophers who say that there are an infinite number of uses of language and then they give a list of 17 or 32 and Austin would say this was you know unspeakable contempt I mean oh my god how could anybody Austin once said to me about Oxford there's a lot of loose thinking going on in this town and I remember we shook our heads and we thought all the way out the if Lee Road and the Woodstock Road and the Banbury Road maybe all the way to banbury itself loose thinking and Austin was against all forms of loose thinking however that made it impossible for him to understand a lot of things in banking signs so at one time when I was an undergraduate I insisted on our little informal discussion group that we discuss Vidkun Stein's private language argument and Austin found it very uncomfortable but his technique was to take everything did literally so he said ok next week everybody has to bring a box with a beetle in it because vision stone has a famous example of the beetle in the box and then well he was being sarcastic we didn't bring a box with a beetle in it but at one point big and Stein says maybe there's nothing at all in the box and Austin shook his head and said a plain contradiction first he says there's a beetle in the box and now he says there's nothing in the box anyway so I I'm always amused when I read how much Austin was influenced by Vidkun Stein he was not now more that was somebody else I and in fact I think maybe the most insensitive remark it ever made about Viggen Stein was Austin once said it's all and more it's not all in Moore it's quite different but in any case I just want you to see this was Austin's most important idea was that all utterances are the performance of speech acts okay so let's probe that idea let's see how far we can get with that any more questions I want everybody up with us now those are both good questions yes yeah yeah well here's an interesting question and that is the question how about cases where you get it right by accident so to speak so for example a standard case of a lie is a case where you say something you don't believe but how about the lie which unknowns the unknown to you turns out to be true you see now in that case did you lie or not it's like your case did you make a true statement or not there's a famous short story by stuck it's called lumira the wall and I forget the name of the characters but one of them is captured by the fascists and his name we call him Pierre and they say to Pierre where is Holly and pure lies he says Ali is hiding out in the cemetery well unknown dup here Holly really is hiding out in the cemetery so the fascist police go to the cemetery and they find Ali and they let Pierre go now did Pierre lie odd this is supposed to have some deep existential meaning I'm not interested in that I don't understand that part but hi there is an interesting question here and that is did Pierre lied I would say he did lie consists in saying something you don't believe if it turns out that it's true in spite of your efforts to say a falsehood all the same you did life on the other hand the guy who made a statement where he was totally mistaken was having a fantasy but it turned out I that it's true he did say something true even though his statement was in felicitous if I say I there is a cat in this drawer I say that just to be saying something just stupidly and I open up and there is a cat in the drawer then I did say something true but it was just a coincidence just by accident those things happen yes yeah well there are cases of people who say things under the influence of mind-altering I have never had one of these unless unless a beer and wine count I and they do say strange things there's no question about the most famous cases William James William James was famous American philosopher and psychologist but maybe well I was going to say the best American Plus forever but I know the third best American philosopher ever the second was yeah maybe he's the fourth day I was going to make purse the second best and and John Dewey the third and William James the fourth I'm keepin first place open okay we'll keep first place opening but in any case here's William James had this practice of testing all of these mind-bending substances to see if he would get some mystical insight I and he would take these drugs he took a drug that knocked him into a trance and you have a secretary there to record what he said and he came out of the trance of having been in this drug-induced trance and he asked the secretary what did I say what did I say and his secretary read aloud you said hey gamez harmless woman is monogamous harmless higham us man is polygamous anyway okay so that's all right that's the effort now we're going to go back to work anyway this is these are interesting points all right now then let's suppose then that we take the speech act as our target of Investigation as I think we should well it seems clear that we need to distinguish different kinds of speech acts and I make some distinctions that are not quite the same as Austin's but I'll tell you mine and we'll see how they compare to Austin's it seems to me you have to distinguish I the sheer fact of uttering a sentence and I'll call that the utterance act where it's just a case of uttering a sentence or a word but now typically when you utter a sentence you're saying something if I say it's raining I will have made a statement that it's raining and Austin I introduced a technical term for this this type of complete speech act he call these illocutionary acts and I want to say that every successful utterance contains one or more illocutionary Act so if I say it's raining I the meeting is adjourned I wish it would rain more often in Berkeley all of those utterances are illocutionary acts and this is the act of uttering a sentence or etc sometimes you don't get a whole sentence but that's the standard case but now Austin pointed out you also need the act of achieving a certain effect on people so by saying something I might convince you or persuade you and Austin he was good at inventing these terms he called that a per location Airy act and the per location Airy act is the act of achieving a certain effect on the here if I convinced you persuade you annoy you exasperate you all of those are cases of Pirlo Cuccia nary act or as if I make a statement ask a question give an order make a promise all of those are cases of illocutionary acts notice the typical for illocutionary acts there will be a performative verb I hereby state that it's raining I hereby order you to leave the room there is no performative for the per location Airy act you can't say you can say bill I'm telling you that Sally didn't do it Sally's innocent but you can't use the per location or you can't say bill I convinced you that Sally is innocent or bill I persuade you you can say I'm telling you I say I'm trying to persuade you but there is no performative use of the Pirlo Cuccia nary verbs so you can you can in fact convince you by telling that you can convince people by telling them something but you cannot use the performance you cannot use the verb convinced in a performative form you can't say I hereby convince you that it's raining I hereby persuade you amuse you exasperate you annoy you all of those have to do with further effects on the hearer now it's interesting which verbs will take a performative and which won't so for example there's some verbs that don't take a performative occurrence because they imply concealment and the illocutionary the performative always makes explicit what you're saying so you can tell somebody that they got dirt on their face by saying aye aye you got dirt on your face or I'm telling you you got dirt on your face those are performative but you can't say look I hint that you've got dirt on your face or I insinuate that your pants are unbuttoned because that's not hinting and insinuating does everybody see this point you cannot use hint and insinuate performative Lee I hereby insinuate that your wife is unfaithful to you or I hereby hint that you got mud all over your face because that's not a case of hinting or insinuating now English is odd because there are these odd uses of verbs as far as I know there's no way that you can use the word lurk in the first person a present without modifying well what are you guys doing over there all we're just lurking or if I say to you let's go lurk behind the counter here and I think skulk is probably the same let's do some skulking this afternoon sounds funny to me alright so I don't know why you can't do it with lurk and skulk but I'm pretty clear that you can't do it with hint and insinuate because that implies absence that imply that the performative verb implies explicitness we're hinting and insinuating him imply concealment if it's you make it fully explicit it's no longer a case of hinting now Austin was struck by insult that you can't insult somebody by saying I hereby insult you and he looked at old dueling practices and found that there were conventional ways of insulting people throwing your gloves at their feet that's a speech act it's a type of illocutionary act but you can't insult somebody by saying I hereby insult you and Austin was puzzled by that but I think it's because insult is per location arey it's got partly Pirlo Cuccia nary meaning to it and you can see this if people will say things like an in a in an argument when somebody's being insulting you might say look you can't insult me meaning I don't take you seriously enough for allow to allow you to achieve this per location area effect so I think hint and insinuate do not have a performative use because they're in explicit but insult seems to me the lack of performative use for a different reason namely I think insulting is partly per location area okay so far so good now it seems to me we need to introduce a crucial distinction which is going to make our investigation a lot easier if you look at sets of utterances like for example if you consider cases like that the contrast between you will leave the room set as a prediction will you leave the room said as a question and leave the room set as an order it seems to me clearly there's something in common between those cases in every case the idea that you leave the room is expressed and I'm going to introduce a very tricky notion here the notion of a proposition and I'm going to say the proposition that you will leave the room is expressed in all three illocutionary acts the prediction you will leave the room the question will you leave the room and the order leave the room or the request please leave the room all of those contain the same proposition the proposition that you will leave the room but they contain it with different illocutionary forces so the basic structure of the illocutionary Act seems to me to be this you have a propositional content we can represent that with a P and then that propositional content is presented with different forces with the force of a statement the force of a question the force of an order and now if that's right then it seems to me we're going to need another notion and that is the notion of a propositional Act and a propositional Act is not a complete speech Act by itself but it's the act of expressing the proposition which will occur as part of a complete illocutionary Act so the proposition that you will leave the room is expressed in the three different illocutionary acts please leave the room will you leave the room you will leave the room even though in each case you have a different total illocutionary act notice that the propositional Act is an abscess direction it's not something that can occur by itself but why do we need it then we need it to mark what is in common to the three different illocutionary acts as well as what is different between cases where you have the same type of illocutionary act but different propositional contents so I order you to leave the room and don't come back contains two illocutionary actually the order to leave the room in the order to not come back both of those are orders but the propositional content is different in the two cases so you need a distinction between this F part the force and the P part the propositional content because the same proposition can occur in different FS that was our example of please leave the room will you leave the room leave the room but you also need the notion I of the same F occurring with different propositional contents as when you can order somebody to leave the room and order them to not come back so because the two features are discriminable you need a distinction between the illocutionary force which marks the type of speech acts that you are performing the type of act that's being performed and the content of that act the propositional content okay so I introduced the notion then of the propositional act in addition to the illocutionary act in the Pirlo Kershner act where the propositional act is always an abstraction from the total illocutionary act now all of that is going to be crucial for our investigation of language notice that the old-time behaviors who thought we could analyze language just by looking at the stimulus responses looking at the effects on people of our utterances in effect you can't do that because what you get then our per location arey acts you look at the effects that audiences have and the idea that the behavior had was that you could find out the meanings of words and sentences by looking at what sorts of behavior what sort of stimulus would prompt the utterance and what sorts of effects the utterance would have it was a hopeless enterprise from the beginning I if you get your freshman in the psychology course and try to find out what effect on them an utterance has you'll find pretty much not any effect they might look puzzled I mean what's common to all occurrences of the word shirt in I'm wearing a new shirt or shirts are cheap nowadays because they're all made in the same town in China or the Roman Empire contain no shirts now I look closely and I didn't see any common behavioral response to all those occurrences of the word shirt so it's it was a fairly hopeless enterprise to try to do a behaviorist account of language and one of the many things wrong with it is it can't distinguish between the illocutionary and the per location airy there's several other things I want you to notice the illocutionary is always intentional you don't make a statement or issue a promise unless you intend to make a statement or issue a promise but the per location area can be completely unintentional you might annoy people or exasperate them or convince them or persuade them without intending to I I might convince you that I'm drunk just by behaving in a drunken fashion but it might not be my intention to convince you that I'm drunk whereas if I make a statement it must be the case that I intend to make a statement now it's interesting how we will hold people responsible even in cases where they didn't intend to perform the act because the social situation is such that you you're not supposed to allow it you're not to give the impression that you're performing a speech act if you aren't so if you left your left turn signal on and somebody smashes the right side of your car he will be able to argue in court look he was signaling a left turn and you can argue well I didn't really signal a left turn because I didn't intend to well he won't get away with it because the law in the case like that requires that you not give the impression that you're signaling a left turn by turning your left turn signal on so will wholly responsible performing for performing the speech Act even in cases where you didn't intend to the trickier case is the auction if you've ever been to auctions it can be very tense in the auction and you don't want to give the impression you're making a bid if you're not making a bid I once attended an auction in London at Sotheby's and a wonderful Japanese a print I came up for auction and the bidding went very fast and it soon reached a thousand pounds and the woman that I was with saw a picture she admired on the other side of the room and she said look at that picture the auctioneer turned to us and said that lady has just been 1,100 pounds and I thought oh my god I don't have a thousand one hundred pounds anyway fortunately the bidding went on that we were not held responsible but if you give the impression that you're bidding at an auction then you will be held responsible for bidding and bidding of course is a type of speech Act I well I'll tell you the kind that it is later oh by the way now I wish I bought the damn picture it was Hokusai's the wave and it went of course I didn't have the money then I was a graduate student but in any case it's worth lots more money then then it went for in that remote era okay now there's some tricky parts to this one is I say there's a whole proposition but in the case of questions only in yes/no questions do you get a whole proposition so will you leave the room said as a question just gives the proposition will you leave the room and then you're asked to say yes or no but if I say to you how many people were at the party then the way that that works is the question let this be our force indicator for questions then it's not questions P where you get a whole proposition it's more like this question X number of people were there and what you're requested to do in the case of the question is to fill in the value of X what you're supposed to do is complete the proposition so in the case of all questions except yes/no questions you don't get an entire proposition you get a proposition with a hole in it and you're supposed to fill the hole why were you so rude to Sally means fill in the blank in the proposition I was rude to Sally because and then you're supposed to give the reason why so in those cases you don't get an entire proposition now there's odd features of all these and I want you to think about one is in general the form of the question determines the form of the answer so if if the question is how many people were in we're at the party it won't do to say because she was rude to me that's an answer to another question but you have to use the form of the question how many people were at the party determines the form of the answer I there were X number of people at the party where you have to fill in and again English is amazing because there are odd features of English where that's not not true and shall and will the damn modal auxiliary verbs always run against the rules here if I say to you shall I marry Sally the answer is not yes you shall or no you shall not not or even yes you will or no you will not the question asks for an imperative it asks for advice I shall I marry Sally invites yes do marry her or no don't marry her but it doesn't ask that the shell form there does not require that shell or some some variant like will occurs in the answer now why that should be I don't know the modal auxiliary verbs that I can and could ought and should may and must we'll all of those are very mysterious and and Chomsky once told me he didn't work on those because they were too hard and the pay there's an odd fact that the people I know who do work on modal auxiliary verbs the people really devote their lives to him tend to go crazy and I'm not recommending any of you should do it but if you get the modal auxiliaries figured out it might be helpful I there was a guy a wonderful man in our English department who was very good on these and he used to come to my office and after one session the woman came from the next-door office and said what was all that screaming going on in your office and I said that was Julian talking about may and might wait till he gets on the can and could those are really tough verbs anyway okay so what we've got then is a kind of nice picture that what we're interested in where human linguistic communication is concerned is the illocutionary act but the illocutionary act is typically performed in the course of uttering a sentence and that's an utterance act and for most illocutionary acts when you perform the illocutionary act you express a proposition sometimes you don't sometimes you just get a unknown phrase hurrah for the forty-niners just gives you something of this form where you have the illocutionary force F and then you just have a name the 49ers and indeed sometimes people just perform an illocutionary act with no propositional content at all hurrah or dam or I won't go through the various obscenities but there I you sometimes know what they're talking about when they say all and then they utter some unfortunate expression I'm not drunk enough to go through the list this morning but in any case I you can fill in your own values there but in any case that the kind of stuff that we'll be studying the stuff that's really interesting to us are where you get a proposition or a big chunk of a proposition as in interrogatives f as in questions now of course that's the symbol picture and now we're going to find these wonderful complexities you can perform a very large number of speech acts with just one utterance by performing indirect speech acts so you say one thing and you mean what you say but you also mean something else it frequently happens at faculty parties that it gets quite late in the evening and the wife says to the husband it's quite late and he said no it's not late at all it's only two o'clock and she says no dear it's quite late and it's clear she means one it's quite late to time to go that is a directive three and that so she is she's imposing an obligation on him but also she's performing an undertaking because she's saying not only is it late and time to go but there's an element a threat wait till I get you home so you have all of these speech acts contained in one speech act you can perform you can utter a single sentence that contains a very large number of implications that implies other speech acts and if you look in if you listen an ordinary conversation I think you'll find that a high percentage of utterances that you hear in ordinary conversations are indirect speech acts where people say one thing but they mean something much more let's go to the movies tonight as answered often by saying no I have to work on my homework whereas you understand I have to work on my homework as an answer to the suggestion let's go to the movies because it's a reason for not complying with a suggestion okay so we're going to investigate the structure of the illocutionary act but before we do that there are two crucial notions I have to introduce and those are the notions of the network and the background if you understand any sentence you have to understand a whole lot of stuff that is not contained in the literal meaning of the sentence I say how did you get to the campus today and you say we drove that might seem a simplest conversation imaginable but to understand that conversation you need a prodigious amount of information it doesn't mean we drove a team of six white horses I normally you would take it to mean we drove in a car I and what thing of what you have to understand in order what it means to say we drove in a car even if you said it explicitly you have to understand that a car is a means of transportation that it proceeds along the surface of the earth that you people get inside a car rather than strapping themselves to the tire or riding on top of the roof and all of that is contained not rather all of that is presupposed by your understanding of the sentence we drove growth but none of it is contained in the literal meaning of the sentence there's nothing in the literal meaning of the sentence to block the under Stephen if you made it explicit we drove in Sally's car which is on 1997 Subaru well even if you put all of that there's nothing to block the various kinds of misunderstandings and the way you we drove is first of all we broke the car into bits and each of us ate there bit and then we rent to the campus and coughed up the various bits no that's not the standard meaning of driving in a Subaru and you don't have to have that made explicit it's all part of the network of information that you have you understand any sentence so I'm arguing only given a certain amount of other information that's what I call a network but furthermore there are a whole series of abilities you have abilities to move about abilities to cope with cars and other people abilities to understand movement through space and time and I call that the background so you understand the sentence we drove or we drove in Sally Subaru you understand those sentences only in virtue of having a network of other mental states as well as a background of capacities and dispositions and ways of coping all meaning and understanding presuppose a network and a background pick up any newspaper take a sentence at random and ask yourself what sort of information do you have to have to understand that sense what sort of abilities do you have to have and by the way this is not innocent because often they will give you a in the newspapers and speeches and so on you will hear sentences where it's assumed you understand the sentence where it's pretty clear they haven't the faintest idea what they're talking about in the great economic crisis that we're still going through certain kinds of metaphors are constantly coming up and they're very poorly explained that a period when people talked blithely about something called toxic assets do you remember toxic assets well I never know anybody who got a sore stomach from mortgages I mean in what sense exactly were these toxic and we're told that the financial system is freezing up well it's been pretty hot in this summer what's the form of the freezing and I think expressions like toxic assets and freezing up are really designed to prevent people from having to go through the struggle of actually explaining these are not innocent expressions because of course conventional economic theory I mean the standard market free-market mantras make it impossible that there should be such a thing as a toxic asset over any period of time because the market has perfect information the information would eliminate toxicity to keep going with a metaphor all right so you understand the sentence only against the background and within a network but that doesn't mean that everything works fine because there's a lot of confusion even within the network and the background now if you're not convinced by that you see a lot of people they know since just has the meaning it has the simplest way to convince you is to see that the same word with the same meaning can have different applications can determine different conditions of satisfaction relative to different networks and backgrounds by the way I spent a long time trying to make a precise distinction between the network and the background but I can't do it I mean there isn't a precise distinction for reasons I'll explain later on but the but the basic idea is the network is a set of things you might actually be thinking about it's a set of beliefs and desires and other meanings that you understand and the background is a set of abilities that you have ways that you have of coping with the environment and with other people the background is the biological and social skills that you bring to bear the network is the set of thoughts that you have whether consciously or unconsciously now the simplest way that I know to get people to see this is to see that the same word will be understood differently given different network and background assumptions so if I take the word cut in Sally cut the cake and bill cut the grass and the barber barber cut my hair and let's say the tailor cut the cloth all of those I want to say contain the same word cut and in some sense it has the same literal meaning and you can see that if you contrast this with other sorts of occurrences if I say the Raiders cut the roster or the president cut the salaries of the professors that is a different those are different meanings of the word cut I'll get this up higher so you can see it and can everybody see that in the blast to the word cut is used metaphorically and not literally and there's a simple test that the linguist use it's called conjunction reduction if I say General Electric has invented a new devices it can cut cake it can cut grass it can cut hair and it can cut cloth you can get rid of all of those different occurrence and just say it can cut hair grass a cake and cloth but you can't add on by the way it can cut rosters and cut salaries that would be a bad joke so conjunction reduction you get rid of conjunctions you don't have to keep recurring repeating the word cut all the same you understand it differently in those first four cases and you see this if in case of the imperatives I I ask you to cut the cake and you slice it with a knife and then I ask you to cut the grass and you run out and stab it with a knife you won't have done what I asked you to do and if I say bill now that you've cut the grass cut the cake and bill promptly drags in the lawnmower and runs over the cake with it he will not have done what I literally asked him now why not I mean what's the matter didn't he cut in both cases yes he did but and this is the key point you understand any word against a background of ways of doing things social practices that people have and within a network of assumptions within a network of other intentional states and other meanings that you're aware of and I think the simplest way to see that point is to see that just about I think literally any sentence will admit of different interpretations given different background assumptions different background practices and within different networks of beliefs it's because we have a set of practices this is of cutting cake and grass and hair and cloth that we understand the words the way we do the semantic content of the word itself is not sufficient to fix its application what I will later call the truth conditions or the conditions of satisfaction you have to be part of a culture you have to have an apparatus that goes beyond just literal meanings okay well again another way to see this is I think in the understanding of metaphors if you take those first four sentences they translate pretty much exactly into other languages that I know in French I if you're going to say for example I cut my skin you have to use a reflexive jump sweet Cupido look poke and the English doesn't use the reflexive you just say I cut my skin you wouldn't say I cut myself my skin I you could say I cut myself but if you had a direct object there you wouldn't have to use the reflexive but these metaphors um if I say in English Sally cut to classes last week that doesn't translate in the French salia Cupido class and the French have as typical of them as they have a nutty metaphor for this they say well maybe it's not so bad they say she dried out two classes LS LS a che now I may be out of date but that's what I remember and and French francophone among you can correct me on this so metaphors it's interesting which metaphors translate and which don't metaphors are readily understood these dreadful examples of toxic assets and frozen financial systems are readily understood but they don't all translate into other languages okay the point I'm making now oh my gosh look at the time oh I'm just getting started well anyhow okay the point I'm making now is you understand any sentence within an enormous amount of intellectual apparatus within a network of other AI meanings and other intentional states and against the background of capacities now our first question is going to be how our illocutionary acts possible and here is the and in philosophy you've got to allow yourself to be absolutely flabbergasted by what any sane person takes for granted now any sane person takes it for granted that we talk to each other but I want you to be amazed by the fact that I can open this hole in my face and make this racket make this acoustic blast that comes out for an hour and a half and all these remarkable things occur I make statements give descriptions give explanations all of those are illocutionary but I convinced people annoy people amuse people bore people exasperated people and sometimes even put people to sleep all of those are per location airy verbs and how is that there just by making these noises through my mouth I can do that the first crucial way of answering that question how is it that you get from the physics to the semantics how do you get from the acoustic blasts to the speech act the first way of asking that question is what is meaning I just you know there are certain words that are so awful that most of English language philosophy is about them and to such words our mind and meaning notice they do not translate well into other languages they the the French and the German for mind comes out roughly as spirit SP or Geist and whenever I write a book called mind or with mind in a title the translators scratch their heads or they scratch their Geist and wonder how the hell do we translate this because it looks like you're writing about the philosophy of spirit it looks like it's all spiritual stuff anyway meaning and mind and on Thursday we're going to talk about meaning you

Channel: SocioPhilosophy

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Keywords: John, Searle, Philosophy, of, Language, University, California, Berkeley

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Length: 78min 54sec (4734 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 25 2011