Searle: Philosophy of Language, lecture 3

okay well today let's remind ourselves where we are and what we're trying to analyze I have said that the main question in this course is how does language relate to reality and the short answer is it relates because people so relate it in the intentional performance of speech acts but that only forces back the question yes and how does that work how does the speech act work and we're going to spend a fair amount of time answering that question but you are always to be struck by the apparently miraculous character of language and as I told you last time a philosophy really I its characteristic of philosophers that they are astounded by what any sane person takes for granted and we ought to be astounded by the fact that we do all these remarkable things just by making noises through our mouths or marks on on blackboards or on paper and the basic idea is that we those represent reality because of people's intentions because people intentionally perform speech acts but if that's right then this is the target of our analysis the target of our analysis is the speech act then as a structure of an illocutionary force together with a propositional content most of traditional philosophy of language is about this inside here and we'll get inside it it's a real swamp I'll tell you but right now we're still having a good time out here with these illocutionary force indicators and the question I'm gonna ask today is well how many different kinds of these things are there I mean if you start listing verbs in English like a search state question command order promise valve threat pledge apologize think congratulate and so on you can get quite a long list austin claimed he got a thousand I don't really believe it I think he put in a lot of stuff like intend and wish which are not really illocutionary verbs they intentional states it's true you can use them to perform a speech act you say I wish you wouldn't do that and that's just a not not um just an autobiographical remark but it's normally taken as a request that's an indirect speech act but that doesn't make wishing itself into a speech act so we're gonna have to get to the and this is going to occupy some time the relation between this thing which is a mental state where you have a state type of psychological state belief hope fear desire love hate disgust shame all of those over here and how they relate to assert state question command all of these things over here our question today to repeat is how many of these guys are there how many different kinds of things are there and that really is the same question as how many different uses of language are there and I want to begin with a skeptical answer to the possibility a skeptical doubt to the possibility of answering the question and this isn't Vicki in Stein's philosophical investigations paragraph 23 but how many kinds of sentence are there that's a German Zots is the translation there how many kinds of shots are there say assertion question and command there are countless kinds says Wittgenstein own szeliga numberless kinds countless different kinds of use of what we call symbols words sentences and this multiplicity is not something fixed given once for all but new types of language new language games as we say come into existence and others become obsolete and get forgotten we can get a rough picture of this from changes in mathematics here the term language game is meant to bring into prominence the fact that speaking a language is part of an activity or of a form of life review the multiplicity of language games in the following examples and in others giving orders and obeying them describing the appearance of an object or giving its measurements constructing an object from a description or a reporting an event speculating about an event forming and testing a hypothesis presenting the results of an experiment and tables and diagrams making up a store in reading it play acting singing catches guessing riddles making a joke and telling it solving a problem in practical arithmetic translating from one language into another asking thanking cursing greeting praying it's interesting to compare the multiplicity of the tools in language the ways they're used the multiplicity of kinds of words and sentence with what logicians have said about the structure of language including the author of the Tractatus logico-philosophicus that was Vic in Stein's first book now I appreciate this passage and he does call attention to the enormous variety that we find in language and we have to respect that variety but there is a sceptical implication in the passage that I want to reject and that is a sceptical implication that somehow or other we can't do a rational classification of the different uses of language I think we can and it's vision Stein seems to me as if you say it's as if he said look you can't really classify animals because there are countless kinds of animals think not just of cocker spaniels and zebras but think of teddy bears and Glass Menagerie Xand stuffed animals and so on well ok you got a problem about stuffed animals and hunted bears but all the same we can do a rational classification of animals and I'm going to say we can do a rational classification of those things provided we make our question more precise our question is not just how many things can you do with language you can do all kinds of things sing operas and gargle and do all the stuff that he talks about there but how many kinds of these are there how many kinds of illocutionary force are there and that means we're going to leave out a whole lot of things we'll have to talk about later like fiction for example and metaphor and other cases where we're operating on a different dimension from the illocutionary force dimension all right now if we're going to do that when I ask that question how many types of illocutionary force are there we have to ask first well what are the components of illocutionary force what are the things that go to make up any location air force and that's the same as the question how many things you have to understand can you hear me you can't hear me oh I have to hold a damn thing up it's rather primitive technology I'll find a way to attach it to my nose or my twitch or something but anyway for the moment here's how it goes what what do I know when I know that somebody was apologizing rather than boasting that he was making a prediction rather than making a promise I said last time that its characteristic of these things that you have to intend to perform them in order to really be performing them but often it's hard to figure out people's intentions there's a famous passage in Dickens I think it's in the Pickwick Papers where Mr Pickwick who was not very clear at expressing himself is telling his cleaning lady that he wants to hire a handyman he/she thinks he's proposing marriage so he says in a sort of pompous way boy I think you need a man around the house Oh mister she says thinking that this is a marriage proposal no no you need a man to help you out around the house just know mr. pickle and so on and it goes on and eventually they wind up in court and she pleads breach of promise which is a condom on our cake a court case but anyway as she pleads that he promised the merrier and then didn't marry her we know that he never made any such a promise because we're speech Act theorists and we know how the story goes all the same he loses the case he is held responsible for performing a speech act that he didn't actually perform okay so I'm gonna first begin by listing the components of the F what sorts of different things I can distinguish one speech act from another I what do we care about when we care that one speech actors have one kind rather than another and of course that's relative to our interests if you're madly in love with Sally then you are interested in dividing or language into those speech acts that are about Sally and those that aren't that's not interesting to us we just want to know what are the components of a location area force and I'm just gonna list them the most important component I called the illocutionary point or the purpose of the type of speech act now let me make that clear if somebody makes a promise he might make a promise for all kinds of reasons because it seemed like it was the way to keep the conversation going or the person he was talking to clearly expected him to make a promise but what purpose does it serve in virtue of the fact that it's a promise that's what that's the question we're asking what is its point in virtue of being a speech act of that type and there it seems to me we can answer that quite clearly the point of a promise is to undertake an obligation on the part of the speaker the speaker undertakes an obligation normally a to the hearer and normally for the benefit of the hear I can't promise to punch you in the nose or pour cold water on you and lists for some reason you want to be punched in the nose or have cold water poured on you so the point or purpose is the point or purpose in virtue of being a speech act of that type it's essential to some things being an apology that it's an expression of sorrow or regret I even if it's insincere it's essential to something's being an assertion that it's a commitment to how things are in the world and so on through the other types of speech act so illocutionary point or purpose I'll put in the modifier here the illocutionary point or purpose but now we saw briefly that speech acts have different ways of relating to reality the whole idea of assertions and descriptions and explanations is they supposed to match how things are in the world they have the word to world direction of fit where the point of orders and promises is not to match an independently existing reality but to express how but to make it clear how we want reality to come to be or how we intend to make it be as in the case of intentions so that we get these different directions of fit we get the word to world characteristic of statements and descriptions and you get the world to word characteristic of orders commands promises and vows and then you get these odd cases where you presuppose a fit where I apologize for doing something I apologize for stepping on your foot and there I simply presuppose a fit now this is very interesting and we're going to get more of these later on but I want you to see that we fit language to reality in different ways now there's a third essential feature of the speech act and that is that whenever you perform one of these you express a psychological state that has this structure so whenever you make a statement you express a belief whenever you give an order you express a desire whenever you make a promise you express an intention and that's a true I think of all cases where you perform these you express one of those and that is the sincerity condition on the speech act I and I just call that as the expressed psychological state and when you read speech acts you'll see this is what I call a sincerity condition and this is the essential condition now when I wrote the book I didn't really understand direction of fit I I should have put it in but I I didn't understand it well enough at that time but so we've got these conditions on the speech act and they're going to give us an important set of tools for classifying different kinds of speech acts for getting a sort of Reason taxonomy now why are we doing that well there are two parts to our analysis of this thing one is what you might call a horizontal analysis where I give you a sort of geography of language I give you different ways in which you can get a map of discourse a map of speech that people perform but later on we're going to have to dig deeper we're gonna have to do not a horizontal analysis but a vertical analysis how is this thing embedded in the mind and in utterances how do you get from the sound to the illocutionary act that's a tougher question and we're get to that but right now we're doing a geography and geology later on we'll get deeper alright and our answer is how can we give a map how can we give a classification of different kinds of speech acts and these I'm going to suggest are the most important features for classifying speech acts and I'm directly answering Pitkin Stein there who says well you can't really do it because there there are an infinite number or as he says he's usually quoted as saying it's an infinite number but he's strictly speaking doesn't say infinite he says numberless and I think by that he means you can't count its own szeliga and rather than infinite okay but now there are a bunch of other factors one is there's the force or strength with we the utterance is performed the with which the illocutionary point is presented in the ordinary non-technical sense of force or strength or for example we all hear the difference between I say to you did you eat the cookies and you say well I don't think I did that's different from I solemnly swear on the memory of my dead ancestors that I did not eat the cookies it's the same propositional content in the same illocutionary point but it's presented with much and deeper strength much greater strength and you can do this with all kinds of ways you can say I want you to leave the room as a request and you can say you're going to leave the room or else I mean and there you see it's the same you're presenting a directive and indirectly in the first case where you say I want you to but the illocutionary point is presented with different force or strength now that's not the same as the fifth feature and that is the position of the speaker and the hearer as it relates to the illocutionary force so the same utterance will be interpreted differently if I say I I want you to read such in such a chapter in a book that is a direction that's a requirement of the course whereas if somebody else tells you gob sure would be nice if you read that chapter that's not an authorized order he's not in he or she is not in the position to tell you what you ought to read and that has to do with the position of the speaker and the hearer I if the if I say I excommunicates you you don't have to worry because I'm not authorized to excommunicate anybody if the Pope says it I what the Pope has to do to excommunicate somebody but suppose he does all the rules he's got the committees going and all that type of stuff and and he says I hereby excommunicate you then you get much then you're in worse shape because he has the authority that I don't have he's in a position which I'm not in and the position of the speaker and they're here typically will bear on the performance of the speech act now sometimes indeed the position requires that you do it in a very special way I have a an artillery handbook of the French army from 1834 and when you first read it you think it's ridiculous because it's the military mentality these guys make explicit things you don't need to make explicit so it says to make the firing begin the captain says begin the firing and to make the firing stop the captain says cease firing and you think well that's kind of dumb you know como se la filler cap attendee come on sailor fool a poor sailor fool a cabbie 10dc a sailor foo but it occurred to me it's not really so dumb to make it fully explicit what you don't want is some hyper sophisticated captain who is who can bear to say things literally and crassly so instead of saying cease firing he says things like fellows don't you know when enough is enough I mean sus you fee I you don't want that I'm people are dying all around there's a lot of racket blood and noise you want everything to be totally explicit so this is why it often it's important for the person in authority not just to say anything but to have an explicit formula and indeed when the United States Congress declares war if you look it up you'll find they always use the same form of words now the Constitution doesn't require that they use the same form of words but it after a while it requires it becomes unambiguous everybody knows what it is I assume what they do is they tell some secretary to go get up and then they copied out from the last time they declared war but the point is there are certain standard things that are used so the reason the Pope connects communicates you and I can't is not because he speaks better English or Italian or Latin than I do no doubt he does but rather it's because he has this position of authority that I don't have okay well let's list some other features there is another dimension and that is how the speech act relates to the interests of the speaker and the hearer so we all understand that everything boasting and complaining between me saying congratulations on your marriage to Bill and me saying my condolences on your marriage to Bill same propositional content you're getting married to Bill but I give different expression because I assume one is in your interest and the other is not in your interest now that also leads to another consideration and that is how the speech act relates to the other speech acts in the discourse and we have a lot of verbs for marking that things like I deduce I conclude I infer I object all of those relate the utterance that follows to the rest of the surrounding discourse you conclude from the evidentiary basis and not just the discourse but from the rest of the context are you infer from what somebody said that such and such is the case so reply to Do's conclude and for all of those are ways of relating the utterance to the rest of the discourse and the surrounding propositional content now there is another feature the it's worth remarking on and that is sometimes the F component this guy out here reaches inside and affects the propositional content as determined by or as affected by the illocutionary force so if I make a prediction it has to be a prediction about the future it can't be a prediction about what happened in 500 BC I if I make a promise it has to be some future course of action of myself I say I promise you that Barack Obama will keep your taxes low because it's not he can promise you that but I can't promise you that or maybe he could promise to try to keep your taxes low if you I promise something has to be something you can do now if the mother says to the piano teacher Johnnie will be on I promise you Johnnie will be on time for his piano lesson next week what she means is I promise to see to it that he will be on time all of these are cases where the illocutionary force reaches inside and affects the propositional content now there's another distinction I made and I'm not sure it's quite right but anyway let me put a question like next to it and that is is the utterance necessarily a speech act or can you do the same thing without a speech act so for example I suggest I'm not sure this is right that often you can conclude or deduce or infer without actually saying anything or without even internally performing a speech Act now I'm not sure that's right I'm sitting in an airplane and I conclude that the guy sitting next to me is drunk now I don't have to say sir I conclude that you are drunk no I'd better not do that I might get in trouble but do I have to say something to myself at least in order to conclude that he's drunk I say in the assigned reading that you don't have to say anything but I'm not sure that's right if I conclude or infer it looks like some mental be checked some internal speech act of some kind or another has to be in perform anyway so put a question mark next to that now a tenth a feature that I have is does it require an extra linguistic institution some speech acts do require an institution that goes outside of language and this is a yes/no do you need an extra linguistic institution in order to give and bequeath my property I have to be a property owner I in order to adjourn the meeting there has to be an institution of meetings and of Robert's Rules of Order or some such now you might think well these are really are related to each other the position of the speaker and the hearer the force or strength and the extra linguistic institution remember I said well the Pope has a position that enables him to excommunicate you or the president United States as a position that enables him to do things that you and I can't do and isn't that the same really as the institution I don't think so because there are lots of cases where you have a position of a non institutional kind so if the guy goes in the bank and points a gun at everybody and says ok everybody hands up this is a robbery I then he look he's ordering you to raise your hands he's not suggesting it or putting it forward as a possibility for discussion it's really an order but that's not because we got this old American tradition of bank robberies and he's operating within the institution no it's because he's got a gun that is the brute physical force will give him the possibility of of having a stronger position even though the stronger position isn't defined institutionally ok well let me mention just a a couple of other these one other one that interests me is what are we up to is there a performative verb or not for that type of speech act and remember I'm I said there are certain types of speech acts that really you can perform even though there is no performative use of the verb you can't hint or insinuate by hey by saying I hereby hint or I hereby insinuate and there are others like that I don't think you can threaten by saying I threaten and you can't boast by saying I boast I boast that I got a new harley-davidson that sounds funny to me it sounds alright if you embed it if you say look bill let me boast a little bit about my new Harley and then it's okay if you embed it but just to come out flatly and say I hereby boast that I have a new Harley that sounds I don't sound like good English to me and maybe it's cuz boasting threatening like hinting and insinuating have to have some degree of concealment of implicitness that they can't be fully explicit finally and I'm not saying this list is complete but it's what I could think of on an afternoon when I worked on this I had to give a lecture to the linguistic Society of America and I thought well what the hell let's give a classification of speech acts so I thought up all of these different features but maybe you can think of others and the final one I got up to 12 and then ran out of gas I there are verbs that have to do with a style of the performance of the speech Act I and one of my favorites here is an ounce you see any illocutionary point can be announced but announcing means performing the speech act to the general public so universities will typically have bulletin boards where it says at the top announcements now I think just about any kind of speech act can on the announcements the Chancellor apologizes that the fees are going up the police department apologized for beating up so many demonstrators I the I the philosophy department orders that all philosophy majors complete the requirements by such and such a time so it looks like announcements don't restrict illocutionary point they have to do with the style of performance and their that's opposed to confiding because if I confide in you that suggests it's not a general announcement that is something confidential between you and me this is why those advertisements on television are slightly well not just slightly they're totally absurd Gillette razor wishes to tell you confidentially that they now have a brand new thing that will chop all your beard off or whatever and that's not a that's not a confidential that's that they're not confiding that to you okay so this is what I came up with as the twelve features that are that come out most obviously now what I'm going to do is use these three-point fit and sincerity condition to give you a basic classification of speech acts and basically I'm gonna make a very strong claim in this line of business in the illocutionary line of business there's not an infinite number of things you can do now there's not an ounce Elega number there's a very limited number of things that you can do and furthermore it follows from the nature of language itself that there are only a restricted number of things that you can do that is every philosopher who's that brought up on in our tradition fields i if you've got categories at some point you owe us a justification of the categories you owe us a transcendental deduction of the categories I shudder when I hear that Kant when I utter that content expression but that's what I'm gonna do later on now I'm gonna give you the categories later on I got to show you why it has to be like that why the nature of meaning itself determines that these are the categories okay now I'm gonna stop for questions because now comes the meat of this lecture or can I erase some of this stuff yeah I'll erase this last two because I'm gonna put on my my categories right now any questions so far about these features anybody everybody's up with us yes did you have your hand up yeah the point is there certain speech acts you all can only perform if there is an extra linguistic institution and you are occupying a position in that institution so if the the guy says to you I you are under arrest in the name of the of the the legal authority of Alameda County I arrest you that is a speech act that can only be performed if you have if there's a certain institution and you occupy a certain position in that institution if I walk up to some guy on the street and say I hereby arrest you that's not gonna work right now there is such a thing as a citizen's arrest I never understood it but maybe somebody though those who are pre-law students can figure it out but the point is there are lots of institutions that you perform and we we accept these quite unconsciously we don't have a problem you would be surprised how people accept instructions from the police there was a person who was harassing me not long ago and I didn't want to call the cops you know okay she had problems all right but when the police if somebody else call the police and she was sitting in my car and wouldn't leave and I mean I wanted a horrible story but in any case she suffered from various fantasies I and when the police came I noticed everybody did what the police said it's my car the policeman told me get out of the car and go stand over there I did you know this I've accepted the guys but I didn't say which I if some instinct wanted me to say look it's my goddamn car if I want to sit in my in the driver's seat of my car I can't oh the cop says I do this so I did it so people will accept Authority even people who pride themselves on their independence and this is a case where the force of the speech act depends on the position of authority that the person occupies yes okay now let me make this clear I did I said it but I didn't say it very clearly the extra linguistic institution that is number 10 is often a source of the position of the speaker and the hearer but it's not the only source there can be the position of the speaker and the hearer where it's just based on brute force that was the point of my bank robber example the bank robber who tells you hands up is not making a suggestion he's issuing an order and what makes it in order is not that he occupied he doesn't say I am the official bank robber in this particular scene and I am as the officially appointed an authorized bank robber I hereby instruct you to raise your hands that's the policeman who has a position of authority in an institution and I was suggesting we don't have an established institution of bank robbery we have an unfortunate practice but it's not you can't say well this is the old American tradition of the bank robbery and we all have to do what we're supposed to do now people have these expectations and that has to do with a background and I'm going to tell you about that later because that is a very important set of issues about language let me give you one example it is standardly said and I think probably correctly that you can learn more about human beings as we dust I have skins would say about the human soul I mean I don't quote me as saying that but as Dostoyevsky would say about the human soul from reading Dostoyevsky then you can from taking a course in psychology right you must have heard that before that if you read Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky you'll understand human beings better than if you take a course in psychology now I think that's probably right but there two things to say is it's not a criticism of psychology as an academic discipline that's not what they're trying to do they're not competing with Gustov ski they have a different set of questions but now there's something else important and that is people who tell you I know so much more from reading Dostoevsky well what is it exactly that you know that's a harder question to answer what are you gonna say things like well people are kind of complicated well yeah but I think that before I read Dostoyevsky and yet I do want to say my life is different for having read Shakespeare Dostoevsky Tolstoy Chekhov and a whole lot of other list of required reading that I'll provide you at the end of the course but now here's the point I couldn't list the information that I got from them as a set of propositions and in a sense it isn't information III don't say well here are seven propositions you'll learn from the story of Sookie you missed the point if you think that's what it's like rather in the case of literature by imaginatively occupying a different background you affect your own background now I have to explain that in more detail a one symptom is this when when I became obsessed as an undergraduate dust ofc and I read roughly speaking everything including even the bad novels and there plenty of bad novels there what I discovered was the first 50 pages all these characters seem to me crazy but after about 50 pages everybody else I knew seemed to me crazy and these people seem to be quite sane of course you got all that money what else would you do you throw it in the fire Ezra Gerson does in the idiot and well anyway this is not a lecture about Dostoyevsky the point I'm making now is that we have to understand the role of the background in human cognition in including human linguistic cognition and I'll come back to that later okay but anyway that's those are good questions and the question is what's the difference between the position of the speaker here and the extra linguistic institution and the short answer is often the position I will derive from the institution but not always there are other factors at work as well yes yes yes the opposite right okay it doesn't fit into this and now there are a whole lot of things that are not listed on this particular on that on the taxonomy that I'm going to give you because they're in a different dimension that they're liked well how do you fit a stuffed animals into your classification of animals and the answer is you don't it's a different set of questions involved or how do you fit imaginary animals in fiction like leprechauns and unicorns how do they fit in and again you don't do it you discuss them later so I'm gonna give you a taxonomy now and then we'll talk about irony sarcasm fiction and all sorts of other things that lie outside this taxonomy which have to do with variations on elements in the taxonomy okay somebody else had a hand up yeah yes let me go over a direction of fit again it is an absolutely fundamental fact about human cognition and I'm pretty sure that it derives in the fact that we've got a sensory nervous system and a motor nervous system that our mental capacities have two fundamentally different ways of relating to reality now there are others besides the two but the two that are the biggest deal is your cognitive apparatus is supposed to tell you how things are that's the mind to world or word to world direction of fit and that's true of assertions statements perceptions memories beliefs the that rough-and-ready test anything that can be true or false has the downhill or word to world or mind to word world direction of fit but also there's another direction of fit where the cognitive apparatus is not supposed to tell you how things are but how you want them to be or how you intend to make them be and that's the case of desires and intentions but also within language it's the case with orders commands promises vows threats pledges do you follow me okay now it gets more complicated and for reasons I'm going to explain to you when you get into the emotions and the emotions are kind of a [ __ ] actually they speak metaphorically and it's a scandal that nobody's got a decent theory of the emotions and maybe I'll get into them though this isn't really a course about the mind they do relate very importantly to language okay but I want you to understand these two direction of fit there's a whole class of speech acts indeed in in heavily theoretical societies like our own they're the ones that are regarded as the most important and those are the ones that are supposed to be true or false that represent how things are that's most of what you acquire when you go to the university is a set of propositions with the down hill or word to world direction of fit propositions that are supposed to be true but there are other classes of propositions presented in orders vows promises threats commands requests I and praying and pleading which are not supposed to be true or false but supposed to represent how you intend to make things be in the case of a promise or how you want somebody else to make them be in the case of an order or a request we got it now yeah okay all right well let's do it I mean let's answer the question how many types of speech act are there and here goes the first class I call assertive now when I first wrote this I call him represented but I think I and later publications I call them assertive and now we're going to go through these three features point fit and psychological state the illocutionary point of the assertive class is to represent how things are in the world or alternatively to commit the speaker to the proposition or to the view that the propositional content represents accurately the state of affairs in the world so if I say Barack Obama's president are two plus two equals four those are assertive z' and they commit me to truth the assertive commits you to the truth of the proposition and that's because the assertive is supposed to represent how things are now let's introduce a symbolism this little gate symbol called the assertion sign was invented by Freya and I'm going to use it to mark assertion so all assertive --zz have this assertion sign in front of them the direction of fit is always downhill it is a word to world and remember the mark is these can be true or false and the expressed sincerity condition of the assertive is always belief and any proposition can be assertive so we just put in a propositional content generally can be of the form P now notice when I say it is a commitment the commitment can very enormous Lea there's a difference between making a solemn assertion and putting something forward as a hypothesis between saying I'm absolutely certain it's gonna rain and saying well I think it's gonna rain and then there you will be in these two cases have different degrees of commitment so I believe here marks a range rather than specifically a belief it includes supposing thinking something is probably true or might be true but it seems to me clear putting something forward as a pothinus is quite is like asserting in a way that it's not like promising or ordering verbs that name assertive z' are well the philosophers favorite statement state as well as a certain describe characterize classify and no doubt others okay so I won't write all those verbs down because I think it's pretty clear what's going on here all right now the second class I call directives and the defining illocutionary point of the directive is that it always counts as an attempt by the speaker to get the hearer to do something it is the only type of speech act defined in terms of an intended per location area effect you notice the assertive typically are designed to convince people or persuade people but it's not part of the definition I can make a statement and not give a damn whether or not you believe me but if I give you an order even if I don't care if you obey it the giving of the order counts as an attempt to get you to do it so the directive is an attempt by the speaker to get the hearer to do something that which is specified in the propositional content we use the shriek mark to mark the illocutionary point the direction of fit is world two words that is the world is supposed to change to match the words the sincerity condition is always desire when you issue the speech act you express the desire that the person should do the thing you're ordering him or her to do and the propositional content is always that the hearer does some future voluntary act a the hearer does future voluntary a now let's go through that if I issue you an order it has to be something that you can do I can't order you that somebody else should do something I might order you to see to it that they do it but then that's you who's supposed to be carrying out the order and it has to be some voluntary act I can't it's okay for me to say look I try to be more like a President Eisenhower but it won't do for me to say things like well resemble Eisenhower or look like Eisenhower because it's not a future it's not something you can voluntarily do an order has to be something you can voluntarily carry out now direct the verbs that name direct as well the Philosopher's favorites are order and command but there's also request and suggest and plead and beg and pray and notice incidentally that suggests and insist can take different illocutionary points I can both suggest that something is the case and I can insist that you do something I can suggest and insist both as assertive and has directives okay so we've got the illocutionary point the direction of fit they the sincerity condition the expressed psychological state and the propositional content of the directive is restricted it is restricted to some future course of action of the hearer notice it can be a negative action stop smoking or it can be a mental action I do the 12 times 12 tables in your head but it has to be some future form of behavior on the part of the hearer now you might say well why do we care about these damned psychological states aren't they just sort of an accompaniment and the answer is they are internal to the speech act and you can see that by an interesting logical property it doesn't make sense it's not self contradictory but it's not it doesn't make sense to perform the speech act and deny the presence of the psychological state you can't say Barack Obama's president but I don't believe he's president I order you to leave the room but I don't want you to leave the room I promise to come and see you but I don't intend to come and see you I apologize for stepping on your face but I'm not one band damn bit sorry that I stepped on your face I I thank you for giving me the money but I'm not grateful I congratulate you on winning the race but I'm not glad you won the race now notice it's perfectly consistent to suppose that I apologize for something that I'm not sorry about that I congratulate you on something I'm not glad about that I assert something I don't believe and that's the mark of sincerity and in sincerity the insincere apology is one where you apologize for something you're not really sorry for but what you cannot do is conjoin the performance of the speech act with the denial of the sincerity condition because the performance of the speech act is automatically an expression of that sincerity condition you are expressing sorrow gratitude and so on when you perform the speech act and that's shown by the fact that you can't consistently perform the speech act and deny the sincerity condition even though there's no logical absurdity in supposing that you perform the speech act and that you didn't satisfy the sincerity condition does everybody see that the sincerity condition is internal to the performance of the speech act even though of course the speech act can be performed even without the presence of the sincerity condition and that's what makes it sincere or insincere it's insincere if you express an intentional state that you don't in fact have now this has a history in one version a one form of it is called Moore's paradox Moore was struck by the fact that the hypothesis that it's raining is quite independent of the hypothesis that I believe that it's raining so why can't I say it's raining but I don't believe that it's raining why is that weird to say that and I and he never got a satisfactory answer but I'm giving you the answer the answer is when you make an assertion you are expressing the sincerity condition now notice an interesting counter example of that and that is if you change your tone of voice you can adopt so to speak a different persona the Sartre that lieutenant who says men it's my duty i order you to charge up that hill but frankly I don't want you to do it because you'll all get killed now that's the case of the guy who is as the lieutenant is giving you the order but I as your buddy as your friend he is dissociating himself from the order if the stewardess says we will be landing on time and then adds but frankly I don't believe it well she won't keep her job very long as stewardess but the point is there what she's doing is dissociating herself from the performance of the speech act I think there are cases like that where you wear two different hats where you perform a speech act but at the same time you can deny the correlated intentional state by as it were dissociating yourself from the performance of the speech act okay any questions other questions yeah right okay there are all sorts of ambiguous characteristics and English is very good about allowing you to distinguish these cases where you say well I'm not in a position to make a flat assertion but I can at least suggest something as a likely possibility philosophers do this kind of crap a lot because they don't want to be caught off base and some authors are so refined Henry James was once a reviewer of Henry James once says mr. James stated that's such and such and James was appalled how could you possibly think I would do anything so crude as to state I mean James never stayed at anything he beat around the bush for several for several chapters his characters generally have about eighteen motives for my one and then it turns out they don't actually do anything on any of these motives so there are different degrees of refinement and ambiguity but all the same what is being what we're being ambiguous about or what we're being refined about are the different degrees of commitment involved I in the presentation of this illocutionary point I wants to review a book by Francis Crick and which I said a quick put forward the following view and it's false I mean the view was that consciousness caused by variable rates of neuron firing in the thermo cortical system of 40 of 40 to 60 Hertz and he agreed with me that was false but what appalled him as I said that he I asserted this he said I just put it forward as a tentative hypothesis oh okay tentative hypothesis sounds to me like an assertive though admittedly it's a weaker one so there are all kinds of variations and refinements and ambiguities in these cases okay the next class I and here I just use Austin's word I call Cammisa --vs and the defining illocutionary point of the Cammisa v' is that it commits the speaker again in varying degrees to some future course of action the philosophers favorite is a promise and the promise commits you to doing something normally for the benefit of the hearer but not all Cammisa --vs are for the benefit of the year if I give you a threat that's not for your benefit it's for your dis benefit for your is for your harm okay as with directives the Cammisa has the uphill or world a word direction of fit the characteristic or the internal sincerity condition on the Cammisa v' is intention the speaker expresses an intention to do something and the intention it always is that the speaker does some future voluntary act a so I can promise you that I will do something next week but I can't promise you that I will do something last year it has to be some future act some future voluntary act again the philosophy I'll take questions a second the philosophers favorite Cammisa the all-time favorite is promising and there's a huge literature about promising even I have written about promising it's an oddity here and that is promising is a favorite of English language and German language philosophers but as far as I know the French and the Italians don't give a damn about promising what's des cartes theory of promising I doubt if he had one but Kanye I can tell you about contour now GE Moore or me or a whole lots of other people now what is it about the English language that I and German German language philosophers that leads them to have an obsession with promising which is not characteristic of other European languages particularly the Romance languages such as Spanish French and Italian it must have something to do with Protestantism I mean Protestants are more obsessed with promising than Catholics are but I'd say only I mean if you can figure it out let me know but in any case I I have a theory of promising and mmin to write about promising in English or German promise is the favorite Cammisa but there are lots of others as well Val threat pledge contract con and warranty and guarantee when I was working on this I'm wondering what's that I've seen a warranty and a guarantee as far as I can tell there isn't any difference a warranty just is the same as a guarantee I'll take a question a second I want to do this I want to go through these cases first okay so it's clear what's going on in the case of Cammisa --vs and how they differ from directives now I got in trouble once I gave a lecture on this kind of stuff at Notre Dame and it's a Catholic University and the somebody in the audience asked me well what's a prayer and I said well it's a directive you know give us this day our daily bread well there was a near-riot I the point is yeah don't give orders to God you see and give us this day our daily bread is not an order it does not you couldn't say give us this day our daily bread or else or give us this day our daily bread are all getcha I mean it's just that's not gonna wash so later on I'll tell you what a prayer is it's an expressive but anyway I okay we all make mistakes and I had it this one was pointed out very forcibly okay there were a bunch of hands up let me take them yeah yeah yeah no it's nothing you're gonna do promise in English is the favorite verb for committing yourself and people often use promise with assertive they things like look it's going to rain I promise you it's going to rain now in the Bay Area it's more like this Europeans come here and they look at the clouds in July and I think is certainly going to rain and you tell them no this is the Bay Area that's a high fog it's not gonna rain on July 17th and then they come I look at these clouds I say I promise you it's not gonna rain now that is that's an assertive it's not a committee but we use promise metaphorically because it is the it means Pro meas I place myself or I place myself forward and I use it to mark the the the force of the commitment okay first her then you then him you're next yeah Cammisa the symbol is see I couldn't think of a better of a sexier symbol its II Fraga I stole from the assertion sign and the shriek mark is kind of obvious you know in Spanish they use it to mark the illocutionary point of the directive but c is for Cammisa v' and then the up wheel direction of fit intention is the express psychological state yeah okay next question was you yeah okay I'm getting to that but let me go over it questions are a species of directive and there are always as I said last time directives to answer the question where the form of the question determines the form of the answer I should have said that again but let me make it fully explicit the question directives are have questions as an important subclass where the question is always to perform a speech act where with his odd exception of the English modal auxiliary verbs the form of the answer is determined by the form of the question i if I say do you have any bananas and you say yes that means yes we have bananas not yes it's a fine day or yes Obama's president because the form of the question determines the form of the answer and the only exceptions I can think of are the English modal's where if I say I should I marry Sally I you know the answer is not yes you should but yes do you can use an imperative as or no don't they the the question invites the imperative in that case but questions are all directives there are directives to fill in the value of a propositional variable propositional function the yes/no question asks you to assert or deny proposition was Sally at the party answer yes answer no question the answer is given by making an assertion how many people were at the party there the form is X number of people were at the party question mark and the direction is filling the value of X state the value of X now in speech acts there's an idiotic mistake where I say all questions are requests for assertive and I think I may have just said that a few minutes ago but it's wrong when the book was in the press a small boy said to me do you promise to take us skiing this weekend heart sank it was too late to correct that the text but he had just requested a promise right because the answer to his question is either make the promise or refuse to make the promise but it's not giving some information what he wants is a commitment or a denial of a what I call a illocutionary negation of the commitment we'll get to those in a second okay so questions our requests for an answer typically request for an assertive but other kinds of speech acts can also be the answer to a question all right now it gets Messier there is a big class of expressives the defining illocutionary point of the expressive and I'll just use efore that is a to express the psychological state in the sincerity condition so when you congratulate somebody you're expressing your pleasure when you I thank them you're expressing your gratitude when you congratulate them and so on through these other cases congratulating thanking welcoming all of those are cases where you express the whole illocutionary point is to express the psychological state now in the thing that you read I say well there really isn't a direction of fit you just take the fit for granted if you thank somebody for something but I think that's misleading because that suggests there is no fit what I'm trying to is the fittest presupposed I'll put PRP there and I can't think of a better symbol for it I'll put a circle around it to mark the fact that it's a single a symbol and then the psychological state expressed is a variable you can express just about anything and indeed you can even express these things like desire and belief even though the point of the speech act is not given order or express a belief if you say things like Bill I want you to do this for me I want you to do it for me and Cynthia and the children that seems to me likely to be unexpressive of course the mayor the point might will be to get the guy to go on and do it but the whole idea is you're expressing this strong desire and you can show you can see that by getting similar sorts of things where it has no question with somebody's a future course of action you say I really want the Democrats to win in November or whatever you have some deep expressive there where the aim is to express the psychological state and indeed I want to say it often happens in prayer that the point of the prayer is expressive and the Nicene Creed it begins we believe in God the Father Almighty and that's an expressive it isn't that they're reporting a piece of autobiography you know they're telling you about their psychological state but they are expressing their faith they're expressing their common faith okay so expressive I don't have all those meant all that many verbs that name them but there is congratulate thank condole welcome apologize all of those are cases of expressives but anytime you perform the speech act whose primary illocutionary point is to express a psychological state then it seems to me that's an expressive now what's the propositional content well in the examples I gave you it needn't be something that the speaker actually does if I congrat you I that the hearer does it can be be something that's associated with you so I congratulate you if you win the race but I can also congratulate you of your child when's the race something you're not responsible for all the same it's your good fortune on the other hand I can't thank or congratulate you upon just about anything it has to be something that's got something to do with you and so I put that rather lamely by saying it has to be some property the speaker over here plus some property of the speaker here I can't congratulate you on anything and you can't apologize for anything I cannot congratulate you on the elliptical orbit of the planets congratulations that damn things are elliptical I I could do that with the Ohana's Kepler because he discovered the elliptical orbit of the planets but for the rest of you it's not it's not closely enough connected with you as iliyan years ago when I was first working on this stuff there were as an interesting international crisis and crises are always great for the study of speech acts because people have to find various mealy-mouthed things to say to reporters Watergate was a speech Act theorists delight where when the Nixon administration said something false and they were pointed out its falsity at one point they said well that statement is no longer operational what does that mean you know as if somehow other it was a machine and got shut off or something broke down but in any case in an earlier crisis there was a great crisis where they Soviet military shot down an American spy plane and then there were all kinds of pillow Kosh night forces in the air now Eisenhower who then president made a very interesting uh pterence he said I will express my regret for the spy plane but I will not apologize well hell I had a theory that that's what apologizing was it was expressing regret but as usual Eisenhower was right and I was wrong there's a huge difference between expressing regret and apologizing you can see this with example suppose a tidal wave strikes Yucatan and wipes out the population and the State Department sends their deepest expression of regret and condolences to the Mexican people that's one thing if the Defense Department issues an apology that's something else that means they are accepting responsibility oh yeah well we tested a few hydrogen bombs and they got out of hand and the waves got too big and so if you apologize it's something you accept responsibility for it's something that's bad that you accept responsibility for now how much time I got I want to get through all of these oh my gosh well the one that's most fun I won't have much time for but that's this one there are speech acts whose aim is to change reality to match the content of the speech acts and I call him just have a different sounding name I call him declarations now most people like to call them declaratives to match the pronunciation of the others but they are special why because the illocutionary point of the declaration is to change reality to match the propositional content of the speech act solely by declaring reality to be changed there's a kind of word magic almost involved in the declaration because you make something the case by saying that it is the case declarations have the double direction of fit if you adjourn the meeting by saying the meeting is adjourned you declare war by saying war is declared you make it the case that war is declared and thus you achieve the world to word direction of it you change the world to match the words you do that by representing the world as having been so changed does everybody see that that in the case of the Declaration when you adjourn the meeting pronounce somebody husband and wife given bequeath your watch make somebody the chairman of the meeting or make somebody prison in the United States all of those are cases where you change reality unless you achieve this uphill direction of fit but you do it by representing reality as having been so changed now notice you don't perform to speech acts one speech act does both directions that fit at once it isn't as if I said when I make you chair more the meeting as if I it isn't no if I said you're gonna be chairman as a statement and then go and be chairman as an order that's not it's a single speech egg that changes reality by represented as having been changed now how do we get away with that well for human beings almost all of these I'll show you some odd exceptions later I have to do with there being an extra linguistic institution you make a declaration within an extra linguistic institution in the text that you read I say declarations don't have a sincerity condition there's no way you can declare war in sincerely you just do it or you don't but I now think that's wrong I think they got a whole lot of sincerity conditions in the Declaration you have to intend to do it you have to believe you're doing it and I think you have to want to do it if you declare war adjourn the meeting pronounce somebody husband and wife so I think you've got a lot of sincerity going here but let me put a question mark next to that that you have to have all of these and anything can be declared as far as the logical structure is concerned though of course in real life you can't get away with much see God says let there be light and there is light that's a declaration and it's not a directive or a committee when God said let there be light he didn't mean Sam over there turn on the damn lights nor did he mean that's a directive nor did he mean I promise you guys I'll make like when I get around to it he makes it the case that there is light by declaring that there is light now we can't do that we do not have the power to create light but we do have a similar magical power we can create various institutional facts facts about human relations just by declaring them and I will give you an example this lecture is now over

Channel: SocioPhilosophy

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

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Length: 73min 32sec (4412 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 25 2011