Searle: Philosophy of Language, lecture 20

all right now our main objective in the course is to explain the nature of human language and in particular how language relates to reality and there are certain background assumptions behind that enterprise one is that there exists a reality that's totally independent of language and that view is sometimes challenged its but I think you can't make sense out of discourse except on the presupposition that we are addressing a common representation independent reality a reality that exists entirely independent of anybody's attitudes towards it however there are lots of aspects of language that don't quite fit that model and at some point we have to talk about those now one of those is often we use language to create a reality that only exists because we think it exists and I'm thinking of money property marriage government universities cocktail parties and World Series games you could imagine those guys going through exactly the same motions as part of a religious ceremony but it would not be a baseball game what fact makes it a baseball game well at bottom it's a set of attitudes that we take toward it and if you think of these if you think of the reality in question it's not just a matter of brute physical facts though there are a lot of brute physical facts but the physical facts only are the institutional facts because they exist within systems of constitutive rules and they thus are counted as as we take a set of attitudes toward them we treat them as a set of institutional facts with corresponding rights duties and obligations now that's a stunning intellectual achievement and it is it done entirely by the use of language that is there are brute physical movements but the brute physical movements only count as a baseball game or an election today's election day only count as a baseball game or an election because there are a set of procedures rules processes conventions that enable us to behave in such a way that we are counted as treated as playing a baseball game or going through an election now there's another class of utterances which are not intended to correspond to an independently existing reality and that's fiction and I'm gonna spend most of today talking about fiction however just to remind you of the overall structure of the course first I told you how I thought the philosophy of language ought to be studied as a branch of human behavior then I took you through some of mainstream philosophy of language beginning with Fraga and going right up to external ism with Kripke and Putnam and the others and now I didn't do as much of that as I should that is I think if this were a conventional course in the philosophy of language most of the course would be devoted to that maybe all of it but we only have time for so much so I'm now going to go back to my primary objective which is to tell you how I think the subject to ought to be studied and that means we have a series of questions that are so to speak leftover about fictional speech about metaphorical speech about the use of language to create an institutional reality and most of today's lecture will be about fictional speech now there's another element of language that I should mention in passing and that is I that language is essential in constructing what we think of as fashions and change in fashions I teach another course in the philosophy of what's the nature of human society and today partly because of the Giants victory I put on clothing of a kind that I could have worn when the Giants last won the World Series this jacket was actually token identical I had it made in Oxford well before any of you were born I mean like I guess it was in the 1960s and yet it looks pretty much like a jacket I mean it looks like the kind of jackets that guys wear it isn't as if I came in a meaty evil armor and though the shirt was not actually was not actually built was not actually made in the 1960s all the same white shirts were very common then and the tie is a college tie well god those never change I mean I for all I know it may have been the same 200 years ago they say historians say in tones of amazement that the Japanese had a period of 250 years during which there was no change in clothing fashions well we're not all that far behind I'm showing you 50 years in which there's no substantial change in men's clothing fashions it looks pretty much today and as it did when I was an undergraduate okay so now we're going to go on and talk about fiction is there any any bureaucratic or questions that I should know about oh yeah there are some lectures going on you should probably know about there is a guy Dave Chalmers is giving a lecture on coins I think it's about coins criticism of the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions and so that's certainly relevant to the material of this course and you might want to look in on that that's on Thursday in the house and library I said that the the baseball game only counts as a baseball game because of the attitudes we take toward it and not because the physical movements and I like to illustrate that with an example the anthropologists have a problem and that is there always have to interpret whatever data they get from the cultures they're studying they have to interpret that in light of their own backgrounds and particularly storica LAN through polishes investigating the Aztecs or Mayan civilization may persistently misunderstand the civilization because they have very little direct evidence about the intentionality of the participants and insofar as they do i the the intentionality of participants is itself only understood against the background that the participants had and that may be so remote from our background that it's hard for us to conceive it see here's an interesting historical puzzle how did Cortez beat all those sent central Mexican tribes I mean we're talking about Aztecs mystics Toltecs RN walks and whole lots of others and he had a hundred and fifty homesick Spaniards and he beat the whole damn a lot of them well partly it was because they had a different conception of what they were doing the Spaniards were fighting a European warfare the local natives had a totally different conception of the nature of the enterprise the purpose of the enterprise was to get close enough to your enemy so you can hold him without injuring him the purpose of that being that you capture him so that you can sacrifice him to the great god Quetzalcoatl and how do you do that well you take him up on top of a pyramid on a hot summer's on a hot day and you cut out his living heart with an obsidian knife they didn't have any metal eye so the idea that the natives had was to get close enough to the Spaniards so they wouldn't actually injure him they didn't want to hurt any of these guys well four armed men on horseback with European weapons with metal weapons that's a very inefficient way to conduct warfare and Cortez beat a lot of them anyway that's a problem about the conception of what they were doing the Aztecs had a totally different conception of the enterprise they were engaged in and I often like to think what future historical anthropologists might make of us if they found records of our bizarre civilization and I once attended a Super Bowl in Stanford Stadium where this came home to me I was sitting that was a bizarre experience I have to tell you it was a long time ago and I am none of you will remember it because it happened I'm almost 20 years ago and it was the 49ers against the Miami Dolphins I and I the whole thing was so I don't want to say preposterous but so extraordinary with all the ceremonials attached that I tried to imagine what an anthropologist say 200 years from now if they found a movie of this event how they would interpret it and it seems to me they would interpret at least as the following first of all it has to be a religious ceremony nobody would go through this amount of effort and ceremonial expense an organizational cost just for a game I mean I mean that the president the United States came on on a huge television screen at halftime and this is while people were flying around the field with jets with jets attached to their heels they could actually take off and fly around and it seemed a great technological achievement so clearly it's a religious ceremony however it's a religious ceremony enacting a symbolic conflict between the red priests and the green priests now you do not have to have a deep philosophical insight together the nature of the conflict the head priest of the Reds was called Montana Montana think about that after your puzzle if you're not puzzled by that remember the head priest of the green priests was called Marino so it was Joe Montana against Dan Marino well we know what those words mean Montana means mountain the male symbol and Marino means see the female symbol so the nature of the religious ceremony was that of a conflict between these two primal life forces there's no question which one has to win the mountain against the see the the symbolism is painfully obvious the symbolism is busted ly excruciating and you don't have to accept naive Freudianism to see that the mountain has to triumph over the sea in order that the race can survive and that's really the meaning of this incredible religious ceremony that we're all seeing on this ancient movie well I won't go through all the details but anyway that's the idea and occurred to me this is how anthropologists have to work they have to interpret things that are well I bet that come to us uninterpreted and their interpretation is typically hopelessly confused by their own set of presuppositions and predilections there's actually a funny book about that called a Wiens and it's spelled this way I was looking for a white piece of chalk doesn't seem to be one the book is called the Wiens and it's about a great conflict that took place in the 20th century between two tribes one is called we are US and the other is called more US or more we uh sir meaning more US and the winds have a great capital in a town named pound laundry that's the name of their capital washing which has to do with laundry and ton which is a unit of measurement so Washington is translated into our language as pound laundry and they go on in this way giving a typical anthropological interpretation of the conflict between the u.s. the US and the USSR which is even more us in their story they have more us beat the US but that is not how it turned out in real life anyway I'm now gonna turn to fiction I so before we launch into that are there any questions anybody wants to ask about what I've said or about anything else there may be some bureaucratic stuff that I've neglecting how when is your next paper do we have to get out some fun questions well I'll think of some questions but now right now right now we're gonna talk about fiction okay I hold a view that a theory of language ought to be able to accommodate texts chosen at random so to contrast fiction and nonfiction I picked up two books off my bookshelves I'm gonna try to get this in such a way it'll hold on its own does that work now can you hurt now all right well let's try it anyway the first is a novel by Marguerite your cenar and it's called the Abbess I haven't read it I did but I just picked it up and I read you the first sentence now you're Cenarion it was an interesting woman she is the first woman ever admitted to the Academy Paul says but she actually lived in New England I lived with her girlfriend in New England I think I forget in Maine or somewhere but in any case she wrote beautiful French and her best novel is called the memoirs of Hadrian unfortunately the first part is much better than the later parts because she I like a lot of novelist she got exhausted and couldn't maintain the level of prety okay here's the first sentence young Henry Maximillian League law was making his way toward Paris taking the long journey in short stretches the bones of contention between King and Emperor were nothing to him what counted was the peace signed only a few months back that was already fraying away like a garment the worse for wear everyone knew that Francis of Valois Vasa de Valois still cast amorous eyes upon Milan much as a rejected lover continued to ogle his fair his lady fair report had it on good authority that the French King was quietly working to assemble and equip a whole new army on the Duke of Savoy frontiers to send it to pavia of course to regain his lost Spurs okay now what's going on in that passage well it purports to be an account of a young man travelling obviously a long time ago I forget when Francois Valois lived but it's not safe at 16th century he's travelling across France and he's discussing the political situation with about Milan and they failed effort to capture Milan okay now notice interesting things there it's as if he were making statements if you ask what kind of a speech act is that well it looks like a statement actually makes references to actual historical locations however the rules are off the normal rules of statements because if we ask well how do you know that this guy's name was Maximilian legal spell lig re was Maximilian legal how do you know there actually was such a person well Marguerite Hewson R doesn't know it's an invented character there never was such a person and it's not an objection to what she says that there never was such an a person such a person no contrast that and I literally about fifteen half an hour ago I opened up Alexis the talk vil democracy in America to read at random in the United States where public officers have no class interest to promote the general and constant influence of the government is beneficial although the individuals who conduct it are frequently unskillful and sometimes contemptible there is indeed a secret tendency in democratic institutions that makes community in spite of their vices and mistakes while in aristocratic institutions there's a secret by it bias which notwithstanding the talents and virtues of those who conduct a government leads them to contribute to the evils that oppress their fellow creatures a typical piece of talk villian syntax where the sentence runs on but there are a lot of interesting ideas now if you look at the Tocqueville the normal rules of assertion are in play if you asking about Hadean know that did you actually investigate a number of public servants in the United States did you actually have a close look at how they behave because it is a remarkable claim a Marxist would say it's impossible that what de Tocqueville said could be true because he's saying that American officials have no class interest to support and thus though their behaviors often contemptible still they tend to work for the common good whereas in France the public officials all have to defend the aristocratic class interest now the interesting thing is that once you read the sentence from the Tocqueville the language game of assertion I'm using victims nationals in the language game here the language game of assertion comes into play you can ask questions such as well how do you know that is that really true what evidence do you have are there is there really such a place as the United States and France you can ask all of those questions in a way that those questions aren't askable or at any rate have a different interpretation if you ask them about the work of fiction now a lot in philosophy typically we can put our problems in the of a paradox and the paradox about fiction is this how can it be the case that the words in fictional sentences mean exactly the same as the same words in non fictional sentences and that the speech act performed is a function of the meanings of the words uttered and yet the speech act performed in a work of fiction is not at all the same as a speech act performed in a work of nonfiction how can it be the case that the words mean the same but the commitments are totally different the commitment in the non fictional case in that in the de Tocqueville case is to the truth of the expressed proposition but the commitment in the fictional case is well what I haven't said what it is but it's clearly not to the truth of the expressed proposition because it's not a criticism you can always see what the speaker is committed to by asking yourself well what counts as a valid criticism and it's not a valid criticism of I am Margareta Nielsen now to say well there never was such a person as Max Immanuel legal I whole thing is a lie and that raises another interesting question what's the difference between fiction and lies I know a woman who when she was a little girl was astounded to discover that grownups had been telling her a pack of lies about Cinderella and Snow White and the Goldilocks and the three bears and all of that there never were such people the whole thing was a pack of lies and what's worse not only did grown-up slide a little kids but they lied to each other they had whole bookshelves whole library full of books which were packs of lies now why is it what is it exactly that she had wrong what's wrong what's the difference between fiction and lying notoriously Plato thought that there'd be no place for poets in the and the Republic of the kind that we as I give to poets because they're not out to tell us the truth so what is it what's the difference between fiction and lying we don't think of the author of fiction normally as a liar okay now my first task then is to answer those questions and I'm just going to repeat stuff that I've said and you're assigned reading in in the logical status of fictional discourse and the word logical figures crucially in the title and a way that a lot of literary theorists haven't understood by I mean it the status of fictional discourse in logic is it true or false what's the relationship between meaning and truth why is it that you can have the same words in the same meaning without a commitment to truth okay so I'm just gonna give you a set of propositions first of all we have to say that in uttering the fictional sentence in producing this fictional sentence the author whom I was quoting does not make an assertion but acts as if she were making an assertion she goes through the motions of making an assertion and just to have one word for describing this as if going through the motions I say she pretends to make an assertion she doesn't actually make an assertion she makes a pretended assertion it's not an actual assertion and that is why the normal rules of speech acts are not enforced now in order to make that clear we mate we need to make a distinction between fiction and literature nowadays we think of most works of literature as works of fiction but that has not always been the case I and indeed I there's no necessary connection between fiction and literature some time ago I authors of philosophy where routine were routinely taught in English departments as examples of English literature so Hume was an example of a great stylist in English as was Gibbon so there it's nowadays it's the case that most works of literature are treated as works of fiction but there is a difference to say that something is part of the Canon of English literature or American literature is to accorded a certain kind of value status there's a certain sort of axiology a certain kind of award being issued when you say that it is a work of literature fiction not so fiction I just identifies what well that's what we're trying to specify but it's a clear I think just on the face of it that whether or not a work is a work of fiction depends on the author's intentions did the author intend to make be making a factual claim or was it a fictional claim so roughly speaking fiction is in the author but literature is in the readers it's up to the readers to decide whether or not something is a work of literature this is why it would seem odd if somebody says what are you writing and I say well I'm writing a novel a fictional story about a philosopher who lived in Berkeley and had hard times a totally fictional character but it would seem pretentious if I said oh I'm writing a work of American literature or I'm writing I'm writing a work which will become part of the which is part of the Canon of American literature and that's because it's not up to the author it's not up to me to decide whether or not I'm writing something which is a work of literature but a work of fiction that's up to me it's important to emphasize this because several theorist literature's have tried to analyze fiction and literature as if they were the same as if an analysis of fiction was an analysis of literature that's not true most works of fiction are not intended as nor would ever be construed as works of literature go into any of the men's rooms in a busy part of the campus and you will find fictional utterances written on the walls often of an obscene character none of those are intended as contributions to literature you know the kind of thing there was an old man from Eau Claire all that kind of stuff a limerick and so on are written on the walls and they're certainly fictional or any comic strip is fictional but it's clearly not literature so what is fiction is up to the author what's what's literature is up to the readers and nowadays it's become up to sort of opinion makers professors of in literature departments who get to decide what sorts of works they're going to assign now there was a period in the 90s I hope mercifully gone where people said would say well all this idea of you can distinguish different degrees of quality that's a kind of elitist somebody we can't have that and people who even said things like well Bugs Bunny just as good as Shakespeare well no bucks money's not as good as Shakespeare and I'll be prepared to defend that if anybody I to defend the distinction if anybody I took it seriously I don't really think they intended these remarks seriously but the idea is that if we take it seriously as literature is in virtue of certain features that it has but the decision is up to us it's not a matter of the author's intention whether or not something is fictional is up to the authors intentions now similarly we need to distinguish between fictional discourse and figurative discourse so for example whether or not something is a metaphor is independent of the question whether or not it occurs in a work of fiction or work of nonfiction if I say Hegel is a dead horse on the European philosophical market well that's metaphorical because Hegel isn't even a horse alive or dead but if I say he's a dead horse well that I that gives a certain fictional a figurative attribution but the remark if assuming I made it seriously is not a remark in fiction but it's a figurative remark similarly in a work of fiction there are a lot of things that are not figurative that are perfectly if literally literal once upon a time there lived a little girl named Little Red Riding Hood that is perfectly literal it just happens to be fictional okay so you need these two distinctions and the point of them comes out when you see that the work of fiction is identified by the fact that the author does not perform illocutionary acts but pretends to perform the elocution area actually goes through the motions acts as if he were performing elocution eggs now some people have said no no there really ought to be a fifth kind of speech act along with assertive directives Cammisa --vs expressives and declarations there ought to be a fictional type of speech acts everybody got that idea that we ought to think there's a separate kind of a speech act which is called a fictional speech act but then one wonders well why don't we have a performative verb i hereby fickt that i hereby fake that once upon a time there lived a little girl named Red Riding Hood we don't have and couldn't have such a verb because any sentence that can occur in a work of fiction can also occur in a work of nonfiction and conversely there's no syntactical marker no semantic content that identifies it as fictional now I'll come back to that point in a second but it's clear from what we've said that the pretense is entirely a matter of the author's intention if the author's intention decides that it's a work of fiction and not a work of non-fiction now I said that there are no sentences that can only occur in fiction or in non-fiction but there are certain syntactical devices that are more typical of fiction than they are of non-fiction there is a tense or a form that this the French call steel and Eric Lieber where you talk as if you were giving direct quotations but it's not really direct quotation you say things like Sally would never put up with this from Billy no siree she'd had enough of Billy's bad behavior now what's going on I invented that on that spot so you know you can probably improve on it but the idea is some things in it are intended as if they were direct quotations no siree we are quoting Sally's thoughts in that in that passage that I just invented and that's typically only occurs in works of fiction you don't see that in nonfiction why not well there's no way that an author of nonfiction could get inside the mind of somebody that he or she is reporting to report the actual thought in this steel and you liked libo where you have the free indirect style as if you were actually stating what the person is really thinking but you do it without a direct quotation so there are stylistic forms that are more appropriate to fiction but I don't think it's the semantic content that makes them typically occur in nonfiction but rather it's the epistemic difficulty of actually getting inside the mind of a real-life character so a historian named Lytton Strachey wrote a book called eminent Victorians and in the course of that he out raised a lot of people by trying to describe Queen Victoria's thoughts as she was dying I and a lot of people were offended by that because they thought epistemic Lee he had no right to try to try to get inside her mind and describe her thought processes in a way that in Ulysses at the end of the book you remember Joyce tells us what's going on in Molly blooms mind you know we get her actual thought processes but you can do that in a work of fiction you can get away with that because the epistemic problems that go with actually describing people are suspended in a work of fiction there isn't going to be any question well how do you know that Molly bloom was actually thinking that we're letting the stray see faced the problem that he didn't have any way of knowing that Queen Victoria was actually thinking that he just invented this okay so we got two results so far one is that in a work of fiction the author pretends to perform illocutionary acts but doesn't actually perform the illocutionary acts and that's why that normal rules are suspended now the question arises how do we get away with that I mean how is it possible that people will let us do that and I'm not sure that all cultures have fiction in our sense I doubt it I think it is a fairly recent development in Western civilization and I doubt very much that fiction in our sense where you have all of these different types of fiction you have short stories and novels and poems you have all of these cases where you have a pretended illocutionary acts that are determined of whose status is determined entirely by the author's intention but what we have evolved in Western culture and in some Eastern cultures I mean the Japanese and the Chinese have novels is a set of conventions for identifying something as fictional discourse so on your sonars novel Marguerite yours NARR the Abbess it says at the bottom a novel and that I take it is not fictional that's not a fictional utterance the thing at the bottom that's a non fictional characterization of the work as a work of fiction the normal rules are suspended so we have these conventions but I want to say they're different from the conventions of serious or non fictional discourse because you remember what those give us characteristically are these two directions of fit what happens in fiction is you come through and break them from the side and that's why they say they are horizontal conventions so the woman that I told you about who had not got the idea I that these weren't lies she was a very little girl at the time and she thought grown-ups were lying to each other and lying the little kids because there never was a Cinderella there never was Goldilocks and all the rest of it and the answer is she hadn't got the idea that there were conventional forms whereby you could suspend the normal rules of speech acts just for the purpose of telling a story or making up a joke you could do these things you could suspend the normal rules and thus you would not be held responsible and I think there are differences in in cultures today - how much you are held responsible for when you tell anecdotes about your own life people often embellish these anecdotes and I thought I wouldn't want to say they were actually lying but just the story seems much more interesting if they dress it up in a certain way so certain sorts of standard accounts of things become they become taken as if they were fact even though they are fictional an example came out the other day after the 94 elections Jimi Bill Clinton was quoted as having a having said defensively and plaintively the president is still relevant I'm still relevant well that's actually a Mis description of the fact what actually happened it happened the Republicans had a big victory in 1994 I and some reporter asked Clinton are you still relevant as the president silver and he said of course you know look at the Constitution well there was nothing defensive about that but then it got embellished in such a way that MIT is if he's plaintively pleading with the with the reporters to continue to pay attention to him so you get these distortions and if you're ever engaged in any kind of public behavior you'll find you get distortions like this about yourself and I'm not sure that it's worthwhile fighting them because they acquire kind of life of their own and people are actually important in public life like Clinton I guess just have to live with these absurd distortions okay so far then we got three claims one is the fictional speech actors pretended it's status as fiction as determined by the author's intention and we understand it because of these conventions now this you have to take with some hesitation because of course there has to be a first time that you have to be able to start off a fictional style a mode of fictional discourse and what we think of as revolutions in literature are often alterations in the conventions so modernism in the early part of the 20th century and modernism I'm thinking live authors like James Joyce and Proust and Kafka especially just operated by a bunch of different conventions and they were good enough so they got away with it so the conventions are always being messed around with the conventions are not a fixed body of procedures unless you have a very established conservative a ceremonial literary establishment all right but now how do you do it that is how is it that you invoke these conventions with your intention to perform a pretend to speech act and that leads to the fourth point I want to make and that is that the utterances the utterance Act is not pretended it's real the utterance Act is real so the author of a work of fiction really does produce English sentences that's not pretended but this is typically the way pretenses are performed is that in order to carry out the pretense at the higher level you really perform the acts at the lower level i watch children pretending to drive a car they sit in the driver's seat and wiggle the steering wheel and push on the gearshift and do various other things now those movements are real they really are sitting in the driver's seat and really are turning the steering wheel but they're only pretending to drive the car the drive the driving of the car exists at a higher which they're not actually carrying out and of course famously on stage the utterances and the movements of the characters on in the play are real but they're not really Hamlet and they're not really contemplating suicide and all the rest of it I once when I was in high school there was an opera being performed and they needed some super extras I don't know why they trusted me but I went a lot with a lot of my friends to act in an opera I think it was Trovatore Wow it was a first opera first grand opera and I ever been to and we had to be perform in one of the sword fights and I wanted to actually you know get busy with my sword and I've knocked the swords out of these other guys hands and and the professional actors there kept saying I keep the damn thing up kid keep it up in the air and quits hit me so hard with it because they didn't want to take the risk of these were actual metal swords that we were banging around the whole thing was just supposed to be pretending to have a fight of course and in order to pretend to have a fight we had to actually wave our swords around and bang other people's swords but they didn't want any they didn't want the pretense to reach the level of vigor and enthusiasm that I wanted to carry out okay now then we still have a lot of other questions left and I we two special cases come up that I want to discuss and one is a first-person narratives where the author tells the story in the first person I went to such in such a place and did such and such a thing and then I think the texts of place is a fascinating test case for us when you read the text of a play what's going on what is the author doing when they write down the text of a play so before I go to those let's take questions about what I said so far I have with some hesitation offered you a theory a fiction fiction consists of pretended speech acts that are determined as such by the intentions of the author in accordance with conventions and the means by which they're carried out is by actually performing utterance acts the utterance acts are not pretended they're real now I'm going to go on to first-person narratives and the texts of plays questions so far or objections for that matter okay everybody's with us well that yeah yes yes yeah okay that that the question is because it's pretending how can you analyze the condition of satisfaction the condition of satisfaction are exactly the same as if it were a serious speech act but of course the speaker is not committed to those conditions satisfying so a famous novel by Marcel Proust begins long poem sweet coucher de Benner and there are many debates about how to translate that the standard translation is for a long time I used to go to bed early no it's clear what the condition satisfaction are for a long time whoever said that used to go to bed early but the point however is in this case and he's not committed there's no commitment if we can prove that Marcel Proust never went to bed early you haven't shown him to be a liar because this is a work of fiction it's he's not supposed to be telling the truth he got in a lot of trouble by the way with his friends there is a great love affair that occurs in remembrance of things past as the English translators have it remain a search for a lost time as a better translation than remembrance of things past but he gotten a lot of trouble because there is a beautiful description of a love affair with albertine in some of the later volumes and honor of a Jean who was a friend of Bruce recognized the emotions there as the homosexual emotions that he knew that Proust had and he thought this was an outrage that Proust described his homosexual emotions as if they were straight heterosexual emotions and was outraged at him but this was a personal dispute between two people as we would now describe them as gay persons they didn't have that concept in that time they were thought of as homosexuals but that's not part of the criticism of the novel that's a rhetorical device that Proust used to describe the love affair with Al Bateen okay so the essential thing is to see the words keep the same meaning and hence the same literal condition of satisfaction but the author's not committed the author is not committed to their actually having been such a state of affairs similarly with a with a sentence that I read to you from Margo Lee you'll soon know where we hear about young Henry Maximilian legal was making his way toward Paris taking the long journey and short stretches I the condition satisfaction is there actually was this guy Maximilian Oliva he went on a trip to Paris it was a long journey and he took it in short stretches conditions of satisfaction remain the same because they're exactly the same for the fictional as they are for the non fictional but the difference is the author's not committed he's not committed to their actually existing yes at the back yeah yeah okay well let me I'm gonna answer that but I want to introduce something before I do that when I first wrote this article and the article that you is assigned to you I said what we need to distinguish the serious intentions behind nonfiction and the non serious or pretended intentions behind fiction well my gut professors of literature all over the world were furious because they thought I was saying literature's not serious as if somehow Dostoyevsky was convulsed with frivolity when he wrote crime and punishment I or Tolstoy wrote war and peace giggling throughout that's not it they're too defensive I just wanted a way of marking the distinction between the serious commitment that goes and the the use of language where you do not have a serious commitment but an as if commitment anyway I'm kind of stuck with it I what they use the word non serious but it's not meant to imply frivolity or goofing off or just giggling your way through the text I think they're too defensive I think a lot of people in humanities have become defensive about their operations but in any case I did say that the intentions are not serious intentions and by that I mean the normal commitments are suspended now there is a question there used to be a debate in literary studies about the role of intention in literary criticism and this was a famous debate and the problem was supposed to be how one problem is supposed to be how can we tell what the author's intentions were how can we ever know but that's an epistemic question and there are times where you may not know exactly what the intentions were but don't confuse the epistemology with the ontology from the fact that you can't know it doesn't follow that there's no factor than to be known and at the level where I am describing it there isn't any question about the intentions I this woman is writing a novel she says so on cover and not the intention to write a novel is the if I'm correct in describing this way is the intention to perform a series that pretended speech act so at very subtle levels you may not be able to tell exactly what were the intentions of the author but at the very crude crass level where you're just identifying what type of speech act is it I at that level it's not hard to tell this is a novel and not a history yes yeah well the author may not have made up their minds or have may have forgotten I once went to Japan and I met with three translators of three different books in my nan week we went to a teahouse and it was quite an impressive scene with his enormous elaborate original weather tee and they asked me questions about these books well what does this passage mean and what did that passage me and they got to a passage and I said I forgot I don't know what it means and they looked at me you know as if I just told her drop dead or something they and then they started to laugh and they became hysterical with laughter the idea if you don't know what the hell you meant I mean you came all the way to Tokyo to tell us you don't know what you minute well how am I supposed to remember something I wrote a long time ago so you get a kind of indeterminacy yeah the author may not know which of these things he I intended I know nowadays we have a great fetish about the unconscious maybe unconsciously he intended something that bit did not come to his consciousness I once gave a lecture on the logical positivism where I said well the logical positives had a tough-minded air about them and that people thought that was a pun on a famous positivist whose name was Alfred Jair Freddie hares he was known it wasn't intended as a pun but I'm you know maybe unconsciously I intended as if I'm bad I don't think so so you do have these epistemic problems them but at the level I'm describing where you're simply trying to identify the the type of utterance being made and there's no problem that this is a work of fiction and that the the speech acts are pretended now there are some authors who are notoriously ambiguous and you're not really sure if they know what the hell they intended and some of them are actually pretty good my favorite is mal Mae because I often don't know what the hell he had in mind and it still it's quite interesting and it's fun to see how the different translators will translate the same French in really quite different ways because they don't know what to make of it either so madamme is very hard to translate into colloquial American English and maybe impossible in the end because we're not really quite sure what the intentions and also there are systemic ambiguities in malhomme I and I am now but they're not all poets are worth it they're not worth the effort of sorting out the ambiguities there's an American poet who's notoriously obscure and I've repressed his name but it'll come back to me but in any case that short answer I mean you ask a deep question the short answer is for the theoretical purposes we don't have to worry about the epistemic problem how do you solve that how do you figure out the intentions of your friends or people you know or public figures those are the same as figuring out the intentions of the author and I mean in some cases we know fact of the matter there may be a systematic indeterminacy any intention itself but then that's an interesting fact about the work of fiction that we're talking about if the author himself was unclear in the intentions how much of Proust is intended as autobiography a graphical I think a lot of it is but that's where we may never be able to settle that definitely and maybe Proust himself wasn't entirely clear about that if you want to say some arts an important issue yeah yeah well I mean not that you don't have to go to a literature or fiction to find cases like that often in a conversation you're amazed at what you say now particularly you've had a lot to drink I'm describing my own experiences here and I think there are people I've sometimes met with other people who I ask them a casual question and they think very hard about the answer they're going to give because they think this is heavy-duty cross-examination they're getting but there are people who always think carefully about what they're gonna say but there's a name for them they're called bores it's just boring to have a conversation with somebody's always thing you know he asked me how I feel well what's he getting at you see what's he driving at maybe he's getting at how how do you feel but there are so but this is a and this will kill any conversation if you always try to get exactly your intention expressed precisely and there are cases of course where the intentions have to be disguised now watch go into any singles bar and watch a guy trying to pick up a girl now I it takes a particularly aggressive kind of guy to say literally and exactly what he has on his mind and by and large it's not a recipe for success now Bertrand Russell was famous for the directness of his approach to women he simply told him exactly what he had in mind and they either accepted the proposal or rejected it he had a lot of failures and rejections but he was a very self-confident aristocrat these rejections did not bother him I guess not too much it reminded me of Babe Ruth Babe Ruth a revolutionised baseball why well people stand early see say because he hit more home runs than anybody else that's true how did he do it Babe Ruth struck out more than anybody now before Babe Ruth the baseball player at the end of the day could well I didn't get any hits but at least I didn't strike out it was a sort of a failure of your manhood if you couldn't at least make contact with the ball but Babe Ruth saw doesn't make any difference I mean there's no difference between hitting a pop-up fly that's caught by the centerfielder eye and striking out so he was perfectly willing to strike out he just struck out more than anybody and after that there was no disgrace in striking out a baseball player today does not have anymore disgrace in striking out than if he hits a weak grounder and that strictly due to Babe Ruth I'm not quite sure how that connects with Russell and his practices but I hope you get the idea that is willingness to accept a certain kind of failure can itself be a possibility success now there is a puzzle as to why I think the speech acts are typically I are the responsibility of the male in these situations and I there several reasons for that is one is I think the level of the desire in the male is probably stronger but also I think traditionally at least rejection was harder for females to accept and as women get greater equality it will be interesting to see how much that changes how much the willingness to accept rejection in sexual encounters is common among females as it is among males so anyway these are kind of footnotes to the theory of speech acts but you know I want you to keep your ears open when people are engaged in conversation to see how much of it is fully explicit and there are forms of speech acts where it doesn't work if you try to make it fully explicit and that is what the German philosophers Emmel called using the French word Kokiri where you are engaged in a preliminary versions of a sexual encounter his name was Georg Simmel zimmo taught in germany in the later stages of the Empire of the German Empire and there was a real conflict between the intellectuals I and the official German militaristic ruling class so Zemel always scheduled his lectures in Berlin at exactly the time of the changing of the Prussian guard so we'd start a lecture on sociology and then you'd hear the trumpet blast so he'd stop his lecture and god here we go again with his stupid trumpet blasting so there there be trumpet blasts and drummers and Prussians marching around and then when they finish then zimmel as serious intellectual would resume his discussion with this interruption now completed incidentally people say you cannot change cultures forcibly well we did we simply wiped out the Prussian ruling class there is no ruling a military no ruling class in Germany of millet of Prussian officers the Prussian officer class as a ruling class in Germany and it's hard for us today to imagine the amount of power that they had that came to an end in 1945 now oddly enough ironically we were helped by Hitler because of course many of that ruling class was engaged in the plot against Hitler where they tried to assassinate him on July 20th 1944 and the result is that Hitler himself killed about three I don't what the figure is be worth looking at I think it's about three thousand officers of the traditional Prussian ruling class because he thought they were not loyal to him in any case this is a case where a ruling class was simply eliminated now I don't understand what happened in Japan I don't speak Japanese and I'm not familiar with it but I think we may have done the same thing to the samurai class to the Japanese ruling class the idea that the essence of Japan is the fighting spirit of the military class I think that's over but I as I say I'm completely confident about what happened in Germany because I've lived there and I speak a little bit of the language but and we and this is a case where military force simply changed background practices of the society okay I'm sorry - we got a little bit I digressed slightly but it doesn't matter because I want you to see that all these different uses of language and that the serious literal utterance so much prized by philosophers is not necessarily the norm in conversations there are all kinds of cases where it isn't a form of deception if you don't make your intentions fully explicit but rather it's part of the social situation you find yourself in similarly I think with certain kinds of lies it's true that if the dinner was absolutely dreadful I you should tell if you were speaking the truth if you're a manual can't when you go home you should say to the hostess that dinner was absolutely dreadful I found it disgusting in every respect but I you won't get invited to many dinner parties if that's your conversational style so you say I very much enjoyed the dinner it was really great everything was terrific now are you to be condemned for lying I don't think so I think that's perfectly harmless okay back then to other Esper there's some other people had their hands up I saw some others around here yeah at the very back then he did what I threw the rain of fire yeah yeah yes well we're talking about the author here now the author is pretending to tell a story pretending to give an account of a mythical creature Frodo who himself tells a lie about throwing the ring in the fire but that's that seems to fit very comfortably with what I've been saying that is that there never was a Frodo and there never was an event of either throwing or not throwing the ring in the fire but this is a case where the story where story here means fictional contains I counts of utterances that were themselves wise and in the same way in the same kind of double level you can get stories within stories that is to say you can have a novel and be fun to write such a novel where the hero of the novel constructs a novel and you in the course of the novel you are writing you construct the novel's I will given by the hero now that's hard to do because you've got to get that would be hard to do because you have to get a stylistic difference between your own novel that you're writing and the novel that the character in your novel is writing a Tolkien didn't have that problem with Frodo it was all invented and Frodo wasn't writing a novel he was just telling a lie on this particular occasion okay other questions up with us okay now I want to go to these special cases what are we going to say about first-person narrative and what are we going to say about a work of a dramatic text where you have a text of a play and I didn't have a chance to track down some examples I've never used before but I have some pretty good examples here I quote Sherlock Holmes and dr. Watson you remember the Sherlock Holmes stories with one exception are all told by dr. Watson and Watson says it was in the air 91 that a combination of events into which I need not enter he's being a bit coy there cause mr. Sherlock Holmes and myself to spend some weeks in one of our great university towns and it was during this time that the small but instructive adventure that I'm about to relate befell us okay what's going on there in that case Conan Doyle is not just pretending to make an assertion but he's pretending to be someone he's not he's pretending to be John H Watson MD veteran of the Afghan campaign and confidant and roommate of Sherlock Holmes and he's pretending to be that person recounting a small but instructive adventure that occurred in 1991 so the pretense goes one further step you pretend not only to be performing these speech acts but you pretend to be somebody else performing the speech act and I think that's characteristic incidentally it outrages a lot of people that in this I cite Sherlock Holmes a mark of Philistine ISM on my part they think well let them think it but the reason I like Sherlock Holmes is it's very clear there's no you know you don't have to think oh my god what did he mean it's so deep whereas you do with their passages in in Kafka or or even well I won't say proofs no but in and in cough guard James Joyce there are passes where you're not quite sure what the hell he meant here I don't really think there's some deep subtext that we need to grow all right but how about a dramatic play when you read the text of a play well I went to my bookshelf and I pulled off a book of plays now you might think this is carrying random that's too far I can't stand gulfs worthy but I did pull gulls where I don't think anybody reads gulls worthy or performs it any more but anyway he was immensely influential in his lifetime and here's act 1 scene 1 act 1 scene 1 as is called a silver box the curtain rises on the barth wix dining room large modern and well furnished the window curtains on electric light is burning I was at a time when it was a big deal to have an electric light so it has to say it's electric light on the large round dining table is set out a tray with whiskey a siphon and a silver cigarette-box it is past midnight a fumbling is heard outside the door it is open suddenly jack barczyk seems to fall into the room jack hello i got home alright said defiantly now what's going on in that passage I immediately think that's a boring play let's get up and go home but in any case what's going on and that happen capacity I think it's very instructive it's this what the author of a play gives you is not a a set of pretended speech acts but rather a set of instructions as to how the characters and the director are to put on the play the illocutionary force of the text of a play is a set of directives so they say such things as a silver box is on the table now notice in the text of a play you typically use the dramatic present you say things like Hamlet's it's Afilias stands up now an ordinary speech you never say you never use this dramatic present you have to say thing like Hamlet is sitting or Hamlet sits on it on a chair very often but this if the Hamlet's it's marks an immediacy I to the relationship between the speech act and the event that it's describing so what that tells you is that the characters are supposed to carry out the performance of their actions exactly as described in the text of the play thus the text of the play functions as a directive the burden of pretense in a play is shifted from the author to the actors the actors carry out the pretense the author gives them a set of instruction as to how they are to carry out the pretense okay so now we have with these five propositions I think what is reasonable to say is a theory of fiction the five propositions are to describe the special case of the first-person narrative where the author pretends to be somebody else and dramatic texts where the author writes a play where the burden of pretense is shifted from author to actors and the text of the play functions as a set of directives as to how the actors are to carry on the pretense all right but now then they're a whole lot of other complexities I mean I think that's a right account I wrote this a long time ago but I think it's correct I think this is the right way to see fiction however there are lots of interesting further developments for the things we need to say one the author often does have commitments of a non fictional kind so I think in a case of Margaery you're cenar she actually is committed to the existence of the city of Milan and the Duke of Savoy and the conflict between the French King I and the Italians I think she is committed to them what's the mark the mark is what counts as a mistake if it turns out there never was such an event as the war that she hurts to hear is the war she mentions here then she's made a mistake what counts as a mistake will determine what she's committed to so the commitments very enormous Lee from one type of literary genre to another in science fiction you can get away with all kinds of things that you cannot get away with in a work of naturalistic literature so in slaughterhouse-five Vonnegut switches back and forth between a completely naturalistic naturalistic account of the bombing of Dredd and a science-fiction account where what's-his-name Billy Pilgrim goes to the invisible planet Tralfamadore in a microsecond now they're the rules are off I mean they're the that's that science fiction so he's not committed to this being a possible thing to do but the account of the bombing of Dresden that occurs in slaughterhouse-five is a naturalistic account he's not committed to the details but that actually was such an event that I think he is committed to so we need a further distinction we need a distinction between a work of fiction and fictional discourse because not all of the utterances in a work of fiction are fictional there is in fact a set of not in a typical novel there are a set of non fictional commitments and this will vary with the type of work of literature that it is now to take this one step further often it occurs in a work of fiction that you will get straightforward claims where the author has a message that he wants to tell you and a Tolstoy pretty later Tolstoy is a famous case of this because Tolstoy is always afraid well maybe we'll miss the point you know maybe we won't get what he's trying to tell us so he grabs us by the lapels and tells us now I'm going to tell you the point of all this the point is this Anna Karenina she got in trouble by messing around and you mustn't do that because all happies are happy in the same and then he goes on and on in this tedious fashion where he's afraid we might not get the moral of the story that's not fictional typically a work of fiction is intended to convey a message that's not itself part of the work of fiction that is not itself a fictional message and that's a straightforward commitment at the beginning of Anna Karenina Tolstoy tell us that happy families are all happy in the same way and unhappy families are all unhappy in their various different ways that I take it is not part of the story that is not fictional he intends that as a serious non fictional and Nabokov makes fun of him at the beginning of odda he turns that remark on its head and he says all unhappy family is unhappy in the same way and all happy families are happy in their various different ways he turns the whole thing around as a way of poking fun at Tolstoy that's ironical I'm not sure how seriously we should take that but Tolstoy is quite solemn about this and there are lots of parts of Tolstoy that are intended to be non fictional so the story about Natasha and Pierre that's purely fictional but the Battle of Borodino post always anxious to get across there are great Russian general katukov much better general than this smartypants Napoleon from Paris he come to Russia we beat the hell out of him because we have musica to job knows how to beat the hell out of Frenchmen I always thought that was just a flat lie that I Polian was a much better general but there's a recent book out about the French campaign that suggested all those dumb Russians were pretty good that they did out general Napoleon anyway this I take it is a straight historical debate it's not about the fictional aspect okay I'm gonna stop but I want to say one last sense because I want you to think about kind of go on on Thursday here is the question why do works of fiction make such a difference to us and why is it we have so much trouble telling why so I think Dostoevsky if you read Dostoyevsky the world never quite seems the same afterwards but it's very hard to say exactly why that is so I'll tell you why on Thursday you

Channel: SocioPhilosophy

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

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Length: 76min 10sec (4570 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 30 2011