Searle: Philosophy of Language, lecture 8

okay I handed out a little sheet called notes on performative because it turns out that I have some questions that people ask me suggest that I wasn't completely clear in lecture I and it the issue about you didn't get one about office hours yeah no I just show up it's coming bang on the door I mean I I'm not saying that you know sometimes I go to the bathroom I go and get a cup of coffee or something like that but so it's a prediction I'm not a promise I predict that I'll be around from 4 to 6 and you can usually find me okay any other bureaucratic type questions all right now we're gonna go to work on this handout sheet that I gave today you didn't get one everybody got one of these I made plenty of them I mean we're not short and thanks and I want to go through this so everybody understands that it's not the subject didn't all isn't all that hard but you have to get it just right you have to be fairly careful about stating the various features of it and let's just go through this sheet of paper first of all we got a distinguish when people talk about performative do they mean the verb the sentence or the utterance so I make a distinction in general when I talk about performative I mean a performative utterance unless otherwise marked so I I just think we should I say we distinguish a performative verb promise state a vow threat pledge apologizing and congratulate a performative sentence for example I promise to come and see you and a performative utterances ample the utterance of the sentence I just uttered but the utterance to make a promise I promise to go and see you used to make a promise don't confuse performative --zz with performances I cannot tell you how common that confusion is all performative utterances are elocution Airy Act hence performances but very few illocutionary acts are performative why because most of them don't actually contain a performative verb you don't need to you can just say it's raining you don't have to say I state that it's raining even though both of those are statements it comes out the difference comes out obviously if you say somebody please leave the room I that sounds different from I request that you please leave the room the second is a performative because it's got the word request in it it is a performative a good test is Austin's test Kenny can you put in the word hereby if you can put in here by I hereby request I hereby order that you leave I hereby promise then that will be a performative utterance now why we use hereby well I'll get to that in a minute because that's an important clue these syntactical clues are very important as to what's going on semantically now normally we talk about verbs but sometimes you can do it with a known so if I say leave the room and that's an order well the word order their functions performative Lee it makes it the case that it's an order by saying that it's an order so that's a performative sentence that's an order and it's a performative utterance even though it's not a verb but most of the cases are verbs and not nouns okay all performative utterances are declarations why well they satisfy the definition because when successful they bring into existence the fact that they represent such as the fact that I'm making a promise I make a promise by declaring myself to making a promise when I say I hereby promise to come and see you now not all declarations are performative so when God says let there be light that's a declaration he makes it the case that there is light but it's not a performative eye and human beings also have this it's yours I say I'm giving the beer to Sally that's a declaration it makes it the case that it's now Sally's beer but it does so by declaring it to be the case I don't need a performative verb for that I can just give it to her and announce that I'm giving it to her okay now we need to distinguish linguistic formative declarations such as I promised to come and see you from I'm tempted to call non-linguistic but since they all this is linguistic I don't know quite I don't have a good word for this so it's calling extra linguistic the fact created by linguistic declaration is a linguistic fact I promised to come and see you the fact made by an extra linguistic declaration such as the meeting is adjourned or we declare war those are linguistic acts but they the facts that they create aren't just linguistic facts now there's a state of war the meeting is over and or your husband and wife if I pronounce you husband and wife in a marriage ceremony now how does that work how can you have how can you create non linguistic facts with language and the answer is in all of the human cases you require an institution there has to be an institution a marriage or an institution of meetings in parliamentary order or an institution of relations between states and warfare between states you you get the power to do the extra linguistic phenomenon by something that's beyond language and that's why as I said in class the Pope connects communicates you if you're a Catholic but I can't and it's not because the Pope speaks better English I'm sure he does speak better English but he can excommunicate you because he has power within an extra linguistic institution I don't have such power Congress can declare war I cannot declare war and that's because they have an extra linguistic power so there there are declarations that are purely linguistic I promised to come and see you all you got to do to perform that one is be able to speak English but to be able to declare war pronounce somebody husband and wife or excommunicate somebody you have to have powers that go beyond language and those are typically institutional now I say typically the exception are supernatural if you're God you can do all kinds of stuff I I mean I'm on musical where God is concerned sorry about that so I'm not on the last guy to be able to report accurately on or her attitudes but basically when she says let there be light he or she or it does not any extra linguistic institution because God has supernatural power so there are two ways of getting the power to make extra linguistics trolling wist ik institutional effects extra linguistic facts by declaration one is you can have a human institution like a state or a university the second is you can have supernatural power and that's was i why I said fairy stories are a good source of declarations because people in fairy stories like that Good Fairy and so on often do things ultimate create facts just by declaring them to exist okay now I that means though all this means that a typical performance with a performative can be more complicated than appears on the surface and in fact I say linguistic performative like I promised to come and see you typically contain three speech acts so the person who says I promise to come and see you makes a promise that's what it's all about that's the purpose of the utterance was to make a promise that's a commission but the way it's done is by making a declaration you declare the utterance to be a promise and that makes it a promise but furthermore you did say something you did you not only promise but you said that you promised and saying that you promised is an assertive it's a statement the important thing to see though is the statement derives from the declaration you don't get the declaration out of the statement some people have tried to explain promises by just saying well they're really statements and what makes them true is well hell or is anything else for to make them true accept the fact that you said they were true yes but how does it work and that's why I say we need this extra feature we need the feature of the declaration so but explicit declarations such as the meeting is adjourned typically contain two speech acts the declaration and the corresponding assertive so the statement for example we declare war or the meeting is adjourned constitutes both a declaration of war and adjournment of the meeting and a statement it constitutes saying that the meeting is adjourned saying that war is declared so it's fairly complicated but it's not impossible anyway I've laid it out here now my account differs from Austin and certain crucial respects Austin thinks in the end that there are class of implicit performative and I think that's a model when we talk about indirect speech acts I'll explain how those works how those work the guy who says I promise to come and see you he makes a promise to come and see you and that he is a performative now the guy who says okay I'll do it Sally I'll come and see you that guy makes a promise also but not as a performative he just does that by way of making a statement now the guy who says I intend to come and see you and intense that as a promise that guy does not use a performative that's not a performative sense because the intent is not a performative verb but then how does it work well as you know intending is it is the sincerity condition on promising whenever you make a promise you express an intention and it's generally the case it's not always the case but it's generally the case that you can perform a speech act indirectly by stating that you satisfy the sincerity condition so somebody asks you did Descartes invent the coach Ito and you say well I believe he did now you're not changing the subject a guy can't say to you well I asked you about Descartes you talk about your autobiography I don't care about your autobiography no you're answering a question you're making an indirect speech act you're stating the Descartes invented the code you told but you do it more cautiously by stating the sincerity condition similarly you can apologize by saying I'm sorry you can congratulate somebody by saying I'm glad it is a general feature of language that you can indirectly perform a speech act by stating that you have the sincerity condition on that speech act you can thank somebody by saying I'm so grateful you can congratulate somebody by saying I'm glad I and you can as I said apologize by saying I'm sorry and you can ask somebody to do something in fact it's a polite way to ask them to do it by saying you want them to do it I would like you to do this or I want you to do this where the point of saying that is to issue a directive to try to get them to do it now how does that work well I haven't got there yet I will explain indirect speech acts and how they work that comes after we get the theory of speech acts out completely and after I take you through mainstream philosophy of language okay so once you understand about performative the collapse of the distinction between constitutes and performative x' doesn't show that all utterances are performative all utterances are indeed performances because whenever you perform a speech act you're doing something but the performative ZAR rather special class now what there's still a puzzle left over and I haven't resolved that on this sheet and that is well how the hell does it work I mean how come I can apologize by saying I apologize but I can't fix the rough by saying I hereby fix thereof I stand on top of the roof it's leaking and I say I hereby fix the roof or God like I say let the roof be fixed or I think maybe it's a French speaking book coup d'etat so ah I like suave right ballet doesn't work you can try all those does it doesn't even modest things you can't fry an egg by saying I hereby fry an a Wow why is it that eggs are so recalcitrant well okay the answer it I mean I'm here God can okay God says let the egg be fried it's right no arguments all right what is special about performative is there's a class of words where the class of verbs that plot imply that you did it in tension we unless you it was done intentionally you didn't do it so that's true a murder for example or at least first-degree murder you have to do it intentionally I and it's true of the illocutionary verbs if you didn't intend to do it you didn't do it now you can do it with these verbs by saying that you're doing it because that's manifesting the intention to do it and for those verbs manifesting the intention to perform the act is sufficient to perform the Act now if you didn't understand that last sentence don't worry about it because I'll get to that way I have to teach you one thing at a time now today I'm teaching you the bare bones about performative how they work I'll tell you that later on why why you can fix the roof by saying why you can't fix the roof by saying I hereby folks that fix the roof we can apologize by saying I apologize that's that's the kind of question that obsesses philosophers and I'll give you the answer that later on I gave a lecture on this I gave a faculty research lecture and I said I can't start my car by saying I hereby start the car and one of the world's greatest physicists said to me well I'm gonna rig up my car so that when I say I hereby start the car it starts and of course you can do that what you do is here comes a magic word you have a transducer and that transducer converts the acoustic signal into an electronic spark high that activates the spark plug why was I not dismayed by this and the answer is because the semantics doesn't function in that case you see when I say I promised to come and see you it works because you hear the meaning of the words I promise to come and see you but the engine doesn't hear the meaning of the words I hereby start the car it's just an electronic device you could be saying glug-glug-glug or anything that you set your transducers to do whereas with with promising you've got to convey a semantic content okay now that's the main topic of today's lecture is how the hell do you get from the physics to the semantics see my physicist friend he is that one of the world's greatest physicists he said he's a member of our five a terrific guy he invented the laser I mean among other among his other achievements and when he was a graduate student I started working on this idea of a laser and all the professors he was at Columbia that's crazy don't worry about that anyway he did invent the laser and it made a tremendous difference to all of us ok but now then we have this next question how do you get from the physics to the semantics he wasn't interested in the semantics but before we do that I want to take questions about performative Ya Ya Ya Ya okay I think Austin's account isn't right now what I want to say is this you can apologize by saying I apologize but you can also apologize by saying I'm sorry what happens when you say I'm sorry is not that you did a sort of quasi performative it's not a performative at all it's just a statement about yourself however it is one a statement of the sincerity condition on apologizing and two it can be used expressively so it's an expressive speech act so you don't just say I'm sorry you say Sally I'm so sorry how can you ever forgive we've all been there and you do this whole whole damn thing with Sally and you hope you know finally she she quits throwing crockery at you or whatever it is it she's doing and that's that is both an assertive you assert that you're sorry and an expressive you express your sorrow and those are good ways to perform indirect speech acts now the favorite way to perform indirect speech acts in English is with directives because it is a bit rude to just come out with the imperative mood leave the room that sounds a bit rude worse yet I order you to leave the room whereas what we have our whole lot of ways of doing it more politely bill I'd really appreciate it if you could leave me and Sally alone while she's throwing the crockery at me or something yeah and that is the case of an indirect speech here you're asking bill to leave the room I want you to leave the room I'd like you to leave the room do you want to leave the room could you leave the room would you leave the room all of those are indirect ways of asking somebody to leave the room why do we do that well it's the first reason is it's more polite why well it appears to give people a choice would you like to leave the room or would it be possible for you to leave the room you don't really give them a choice but it appears to give them a choice because of the interrogative form could you leave the room can you leave the room could you leave us alone they appear to give a choice and it's in English rude to just come out with the straight imperative mood exceptions of that are interesting and those are cases where it's not really an imperative we are not really ordering people around so if I say to you you come into my office and I say have a seat sit down you don't say don't boss me around or somebody comes to my house and I say I have some cake they don't say I don't take orders from you you know I mean because they understand it's not really an order it is an offer so you can issue imperative moods if they're not really imperatives if their offers or suggestions or something like that but in general it's employed in English to just come out with a flat imperative so we have these ways of disguising it can you could you would you would you like I would appreciate it if all of those are indirect directives now do cultures differ I think they do in the imperative mood it always seems to me in Germany that I hear more imperatives but Islands easy meta and all this kind of stuff I thought you get on German railway platforms but still that's a that's a speculation on my part be interesting for those of you know other languages to tell me how you do indirect speech acts in those languages yes yeah what's the verb you see the verb left is it seems like a wrong word for a performative definition of these cases is the verb has to name the act being performed as in I promised to come and see you but in let there be light the let is not I the well it doesn't name what you're doing and indeed it's interesting how its translated into other languages and French now you those of you who speak French have to remind me but I think in French eats he swallow Lumiere and in German is Vidar leashed I check this out because you know I have it's been a long time since I read the Bible in German but in any case you can I check this out so I think there isn't that's not a performative because the sentence isn't the performative sentence see the performative sentence would be something like I promise you or I order you those are genuine performative okay other people I question you had a question over here yeah yeah exactly the utter and so every speech act is a performance that's what it means to say it's an act very few speech acts are performative only those that contain a performative verb or an other performative expression like as in that's an order where order is there used performative Lea I and I cannot tell you in I in literary studies they're whole lot of people talk about the performative aspect of language and they gas on and sort of the higher BS but the truth sorry I don't mean to use technical terms here but but they gas are in this way and it's that makes it clear they don't know what they're talking about they don't mean performer they mean performance there is a performance aspect of language because every speech act is by definition an act but that has so far not to do with performative some languages have very few performative verbs I told you about a lang in Cameroon well they only have one performative verb and I asked Dan Everett about Peter ha but I'll ask him again how many performing they don't have very many performers they I it's now you can't say this in anthropology anymore but their language is much more limited than ours you can't say that because it sounds like you're saying ours is better of course you're not saying that but in any case they don't have the rich variety of performative that we had and I told you can my amazement French has a surprising number of elocution area verbs more than I would have expected partly I think because they're so damn argumentative and they love I mean I'm legalistic yes you had a question yeah like an order it looks like an imperative you guys over there let there be light no but that's not what it means it is an opt ativ and where you are expressing a desire and that's why it translates into the French optative Keith swallow Lumiere and I don't know German well enough to know why they say ville de Ville Dali would it be the case that there is light and we do the opportunity of is dying out in the official optative mood is dying out in English along with a subjunctive would that it rain more and Berkeley you see when did you last hear somebody say that but that's an operating mood that would that is the mood for expressing desire what you say it's God I wish it would rain some Moree we're gonna have more forest fires or something like that and that is I that is explicitly an expression of a wish but the optative there is what's being is what's being manifest yes yes no an illocutionary verb is any verb that names an illocutionary act most illocutionary verbs like state warm command apologize thank congratulate welcome those have a performative use we've seen a very small number of illocutionary verbs like hint and insinuate and most that do not have a performative use you can't hint by saying I hereby hint and you can't even most it sounds funny to me to say I hereby most I hereby most that I got a new harley-davidson you can do it if you dress it up so it's no longer performative look I hope you don't mind if I boast for a minute about my new Harley but then it's okay because you've you've embedded it in something else but you cannot just flatly come out say I hereby boast though boasting is a new location I act yeah a new location a verb is any verb that names Anna location or act what is an illocutionary act well that's what I've been telling you about and what I'm going to tell you about in today's lecture how you get from the physics to the semantics and how the illocutionary form how the illocutionary level differs from the per location area level but that's the question of meanings we're gonna we're that's the that's the question we're answering today in a way that's what the course is about yeah okay should we go on and yeah guy at the back to create linguistic facts by non linguistic means sure if you can communicate as I once as I told you I was once in in scope eeeh with a broken-down engine and I was trying to create the linguistic fact that I was telling the mechanic something but I did it by making gestures and so on if language means conventional language you often communicate in foreign countries by using gestures or pointing or other sorts of devices if you go to most places in the world and point to your stomach and open your mouth make sure they'll get the you're hungry you want something to eat and even though those are not part of any known language so yes you do often perform speech acts without an explicit performative or without an explicit at linguistic device such as a sentence now it's interesting to see the degrees of indirection that are employed and how people convey things indirectly how they can talk about something without actually mentioning it and they will often do this in situations where it's embarrassing everybody wants to talk about Sally's pregnancy let's say but nobody wants to come out and say Sally's pregnant so what they say is well you know Sally doesn't seem to be in a very good shape and so on and then then they go on in this indirect way and I if you go into a bar I'm not suggesting you should and listen to conversations between males and females present you often find there's a high level of indirection so there's an awful lot of talk about well what's your sign and how long have you lived in the Bay Area and all this kind of stuff but it's clear that they have other things in mind and and I don't want to go into that this morning but anyway I want you to see I want you to become sensitive to the nuances of human communication now of course what's interesting what is one of the things that's most interesting about performative x' is that the performative device hi or rather the type of speech acts that the performative x' exemplify the declaration is the device by which we create human civilization we create money and property in government in marriage and universities and lawyers and doctors and presidents of the United States and cocktail parties we and I a sabbatical leaves all of those are created by making facts by representing those facts as existing I someday you will all be graduates of this university and that fact the fact that you're a graduate of the University you're a holder of a graduate from graduate degree from the University of California Berkeley that fact will be created by declaration it may not be an explicit performative but there be a declaration involved okay so let's move on now and I want to move to the main topic of today's lecture and that is I I said last time that we're trying to explain how you get from the physics to the semantics that is how because all speech acts are actions we need to explain both how it can be the case that speech acts are like other actions and how they are different and they are different in that they are in a special sense of this word meaningful speech acts have meaning in a way that other forms of human behavior do not have meaning now the word meaning as I said is is is a heavily loaded word in English so you can say things like you mean a lot to me Sally or that sunset was very meaningful where those I take it are not semantic and not the semantic sense but the semantic sense in which utterances means something that's what we're getting at all right now I say on the syllabus that there are really five conditions of adequacy and that the five there is partly arbitrary but anyway let's list them we've got to show how we get from the sounds - meaning physics - semantics how we get from the sounds that come out of my mouth sound - meaning and that's really our major project Nantz identity when we get to mainstream philosophy of language one of my complaints about mainstream philosophy of language as they take language for granted they assume we all got a language and they ask how do words refer what is truth and those are good questions but you can't really answer those intelligently unless you're prepared to answer the question what is language in the first place and that's one of the things we're trying to answer okay now secondly there is a peculiar feature of that answer because we know there's a double level of intentionality you have a double level of intentionality there's the intention with which the speech act is performed you intended to make a statement and there's the intentional state expressed in the sincerity condition so when you say it's raining you have the intention to make this statement that it's raining that's one level of intentionality but you also have the expression of the belief that it's raining when you make the statement and even if you're lying even if you're lying you still represented yourself as believing something you still express that belief even if it's a belief you don't hang up you express the belief that it's raining even when you're lying so you have the meaning intention and the sincerity condition in these two levels of intentionality now third and this is really a kind of continuation of the second you have a complex set of relations and I just want to tell you what those are the conditions of satisfaction of the intention to perform the speech act are not the same as the conditions of satisfaction of the speech act performed so the condition of satisfaction of the intention to make the statement that it's raining are just that you succeeded in making the statement but the statement itself has conditions of satisfaction namely that it's raining but you can succeed in making a statement even if it's a false statement now that's a very important point that a lot of people think well if you really succeeded the statement have to be true no you succeed in making the statement even if it's false all the same the conditions of satisfaction for making the statement have to determine both what counts as truth and what counts as sincerity so you've got three different types of conditions involved you got the conditions on making the statement the condition of satisfaction of the statement made which are that it be true and the intention of the intentional state expressed namely the belief and you your theory of meaning has to explain those three that has to follow out from your your theory of how you get for the physics to the semantics and then fourth let me just go through these no stop for questions about them then the fourth feature that we want is the taxonomy has to follow it has to follow from our account of meaning that I'll just put the word taxonomy there because that's really all I need the taxonomy of speech acts has to be a natural consequence of meaning it can't just happen that there are five and only five types of illocutionary act it must somehow be a consequence of the nature of meaning that that's all you can do that there are not an indefinite or infinite or as vision science said unsay lega a countless types of speech act when i first started teaching this course before any of you were born I used to send my students home and say invent a new kind of speech act and you'll find you can't do it what you do is you will do variations on the old kind so for example there are odd illocutionary verbs that have died out in English because well we no longer have a use form one of my favorites is this one to Mack arise and it means to call someone happy so if I say Bill you're happy I have Mack Erised bill and I guess that probably had a performative use bill I'm a karai's you are I hereby Makka sounds obscene but it's pretty harmless you just say you're feeling pretty good bill I now that seems to me a case where you had an elocution Airy verb but it didn't really a name a new type of speech act it's just a form of assertive it's just this just mentioned something about the propositional content as a report has to be something about the past it's a restriction on propositional content so the taxonomy has to be justified by your account of meaning it's got to show how I there these are the possibilities of language you can't just do say anything and do anything as I said you can't fix your car or or a fix the roof or fry an egg by language you need something more and then finally I cease to me in our theory of meaning we need to keep our distinction between representation and communication and I want to say this is characteristic of a lot of even good philosophy in this field that they confuse those two they think that the account of meaning must contain an account of communication that's my criticism of grace that grace gives us an account of communication and I think he's right I think communication does have this self reflexive feature that in linguistic communication you succeed in communicating something by getting your hearer to recognize your intention to communicate that very thing however that way of putting it implies that there is something there that you are communicating and that's the representation part I think if we're going to talk about the ordinary use the word meaning that is closer to what the ordinary use the word meaning means namely the illocutionary package so to speak that you create when you perform the speech act you create the statement that it's raining and that statement as you know has this structure but you communicate that from you the speaker to the hearer by getting the hair to recognize your intention to communicate that but it getting them to recognize means getting him to recognize that there is this entity you've created I the illocutionary act so there are two parts to the successful performance of the speech act there's the creation of the of the representative content with the illocutionary force and there's the communication of that package the communication of the propositional content and Hill location Air Force to the hearer okay so that's what we're going to try to do let's see if we can do it now questions about those everybody up with this by the way is this thing working can you hear me okay good it sounds I mean I can hear me today so it sounds like it's working all right yes how you doing yes let me go through those again okay this is important you can say something and succeed in saying something even though what you say is false you can say that it's raining and mean that it's raining and successfully communicate that it's raining even when it's not raining but all the same your intention to state that it's raining has to determine what counts as truth or falsity what counts as success or not success and that means you have to distinguish between successfully performing the speech act and performing a speech act which is successful you see I make a promise to you I succeed in making the promise but that's so far isn't keeping the promise the promise will be successful only if it's kept so there's a distinction between the conditions on making the speech act and the condition of satisfaction of the speech act you got that okay orders may be disobeyed promises may be broken statements may be false even though in every case the speech act was beautiful I mean it had all of the right features of the speech of the speech act rules I mean it satisfied all the conditions but furthermore in addition to those two types of intentionality the intention to perform the speech act and the condition of satisfaction on the speech act there is the condition of satisfaction of the sincerity condition expressed every statement expresses a belief every order expresses a desire every promise expresses an intention and throat and so on through the other cases now this is what's interesting the conditions of satisfaction on the sincerity condition are identical with a condition of satisfaction on the speech act so the belief will be true only if the statement is true the desire will be fulfilled only if the order is obeyed the intention will be carried out only if the promise is kept I promise to come and see you that expressed the intention to come and see you but I will have kept my promise only if I carry out my intention so the conditions of satisfaction of the speech act the condition satisfaction the intentional state are identical even though neither of them is identical with a condition of satisfaction on the performance of the speech act that you succeed in making the statement or the promise or the order and now to make it more complicated even though the conditions of satisfaction on the performance of the speech act have to determine the condition of satisfaction of the speech act itself and the sincerity condition so they got a complex relation between the speech act the success of its propositional content that is the success of the speech act in matching reality and the sincerity condition I mean it sounds complicated but in fact it's kind of simple yeah yeah I mean it's not a big deal you live it every day you say it's raining or it's not raining and you succeed in saying something and what you say will be true or false and you will believe it or not believe it and the intention to make the statement must determine what counts as the statements being true or false and what says I being sincere and what counts as that the sincerity condition being satisfied or not satisfied I'm glad you asked me to repeat that because it sounded even more obscure the second time I said it but but anyway I think everybody got it I mean it's not it's not higher mathematics okay I mean you live this every day so we ought to be able to figure it out okay other questions everybody's up with us all right well let's take some kind of mickey mouse cases as we always do with simplified cases and in a book that I wrote about this in intentionality I say well let's imagine somebody who's signalling to somebody else now why do we do that well if you get away from sentences with their noun phrases and verb phrases you can see the condition of satisfaction more clearly we'll get the sentences in a minute but the idea is imagine that you're signaling and it's in a military situation where it matters so you climb up the hill and you look at the enemy and then you have arranged with your guys who are waiting down at the bottom of the hill that you're going to signal to them by raising your hand in various ways if you want a signal I I don't remember what I actually said in the book but let's invent something I if you want to signal the enemy is here you raise both hands okay now that's an assertion what are the condition of satisfaction well the condition of satisfaction of your initial utterance act is just that your hands go up right I mean you you got to have that much intended so the condition satisfaction of the intention and action are that it caused your hand to go your hands to go up but now this isn't just a case of raising your hand just to be raising your hand you're actually signaling you it's an elocution act it's a speech act so what you now intend now this is the key point you intend that the raising of the hands has as condition of satisfaction with the downward with the word to world or mind to world direction of foot that if it that the enemy is retreating that's what makes it a statement so you're not just raising your hands you're saying something you're saying the enemy or what I say retreating not that's later the enemy is present that's what it says the enemy army is present okay so the intention is now not just that there is a bodily movement so its intention and action this ia causes the bodily movement and the bodily movement has conditions of satisfaction with a downhill direction of v that p okay now that is the simplest form of saying something and meaning something this is what with the assertive the assertive is you you have an intention action which causes the bodily movement but now the bodily movement is meaningful the bodily movement has condition of satisfaction and that's what I was getting at when I said the key to understanding meaning is that it is the intentional imposition of conditions of satisfaction on conditions of satisfaction so your intention action causes the bodily movement but now the bodily movement has conditions of satisfaction it's now got a proposition or content it's the propositional content that P and in this case it has it with the downhill or true-false direction of fit yes yes it is an utterance the bodily movement is not a a movement you made with your mouth but it has the perfunctory melt an utterance can be gestures you make marks on paper we have all sorts of utterances that are done with gestures in fact I think the Italians are probably have the most complex hand gestures and I've never figured them out and I'm always reluctant because I fear some of them may be scene and I don't know about it but it doesn't have to come out of your mouth let speech acts do not have to come out of your mouth it's just an accident of our history it's a lucky accident that we have this flap in our jaw and we have a complex set of wet slimy devices that enable us to make a variety of noises that people can discriminate that people can distinguish I so speech acts for us it's a kind of an accidental fact that I we communicate with our mouths and not with our elbows or write a hole in the top of our head but so but it does not have to be words it doesn't you can perform a speech act by gesturing or as you know by writing on paper okay any other question at this point all right so now we've already got the meaning meaning is the intentional imposition of condition satisfaction and now you get communication what do you have to add to this well you have to intend h recognizes recognizes the bodily movement and that the bodily movement has those conditions of satisfaction so the whole package including both a representation and the communication is simply that the movement that the utterance which in this case is an arm movement is meaningful that it has conditioned satisfaction and that the hearer recognized it as meaningful if the guy who you're trying to communicate with recognizes that you're trying to tell him something and what it is exactly that you're trying to tell him you've succeeded you have succeeded in telling it that is the secret of understanding human communication and that's how it differs from other forms of human behavior if everybody recognizes that Joe wants to become president the United States he's still not president i but if he have they recognized that he wants to tell him that it's raining then they he succeeded he succeeded in telling him that it's raining so when I had this mechanic in Skopje and I was trying to communicate to him the condition of my poor bedford engine what I was trying to do was get a situation where he couldn't recognize this guy is trying to tell me something that wasn't hard because it was pretty hard I'm he couldn't have avoided seeing that I was trying to communicate with him but furthermore what it is exactly that I'm trying to tell him when he recognizes those I have succeeded in communicating so I have to took two the total performance of the speech act has to involve both the creation of the package that has condition of satisfaction that's this gesture and it has to involve getting the hair to recognize that I made the gesture and that I made the gesture with those conditions of satisfaction and that's what makes it meaningful it has those conditions of satisfaction okay I want to make sure everybody's got that because that's the key until the other cases the other cases are really like that with this extra self referential feature that you get in orders and promises where the order is obeyed only if the hearer does the thing that he's ordered to do by way of obeying the order that is he does it because he was ordered to do it now I want you to think about that a minute if I ask you to do something and you say well I was gonna do it anyhow then there's a sense in which you didn't obey my order if I tell all of you I order you to keep breathing I can't say afterwards well it's a very obedient class I told them to keep breathing and they all kept breathing because you were going to do that anyway but if I ask you to hand in your homework on such-and-such a date then you will have done what I asked you to do and my request will have been satisfied because the order doesn't just command that a certain state of affairs come into existence it commands that the state of affairs come into existence because I assured this command that is to say the condition of satisfaction of the command and the order our cause our self-reflexive I in a way that we saw that intentions were self-reflexive because the order is obeyed only if you do the thing you're ordered to do because you were ordered to do it does everybody see that point that the condition of satisfaction require reference to the order itself the same story goes for promises I promise to come and see you on Wednesday night on Wednesday I forget all about them promise I totally forgot about it but I go to the fridge and I suddenly discovered we're out of beer and I remember you always keep a fridge full of beer your icebox is loaded with beer so I think I'll go over to your house and borrow some beer I show up on your doorstep Wednesday night saying can I borrow a six-pack of Grolsch I don't I mean the most popular beers are undrinkable I shudder when I think about the best-selling beers but anyway so oh no up team on tour I really want good beer it's your house I go to your house well let's make it really good Pilsner Urquell okay I go to your house and I say can I borrow a six-pack of pilsner urquell that's a Czech beer uh-huh and now have I kept my promise I promise to come in your house to your house on Wednesday I did come to your house on Wednesday it seems to me I have not kept my promise I didn't break it I did after all show up but you keep the promise in the full sense only if you do the thing you promise to do because you promise to do it so the condition of satisfaction are not just that I do a but that I do a because I promised to do wait does everybody see that point and the condition of satisfaction of the order are not just that you do the thing you're ordered to do but that you do it because you are ordered to do it okay any any questions about those because that's our next step is to try to get how I this pattern of analysis carries over to I directives and Cammisa --vs yes at the back your intentionality that is what makes it meaningful that your arms went up is that you raise them with a certain intention remember my French example there's a distinction between the guy who's practicing French and he says over and over a blue blue blue and he doesn't mean anything he's just practicing French then the guy says exactly the same words with the same pronunciation he says them by way of telling me something he says to me in French what's the weather like and I say it blue in that case there is it's the same sounds but it now it has a different status because it's uh turd with a different intention now that my uh Turing those sounds has conditions of satisfaction that it's raining it's now a statement same words in the same order same pronunciation but in the first case I was just practicing in the second case I'm actually meaning something I didn't just say it I meant it yes yeah they want you to write yeah yeah yeah all the same I did not in the full sense keep my promise if I didn't do the thing I probably I do because I promise to do it it's true the purpose of having the institution of promising is that this is the per location Eric purpose typically speech act institutions have a typical per location Airy aim the aim of promising is to create stable expectations and if their expectation is fulfilled they may not give a damn why I showed up but if they're interested in me and my general character they will care about whether or not I I know full sense kept my promise so they may not chew me out for showing up and asking for beer if all they wanted was that I should show up at their house now you're right in this respect typically we need to make clear that the promise has to be done for the benefit of the hearer that's why I can't promise to punch you in the nose if I that if I say I promise to punch in the nose that's a threat we do use the word promise sometimes because it marks commitments I get you when bill I promise you I will i that's not a promise bill can't go home and say to his mom he promised me something today because it was a it was a threat and not a promise so you do have these features the promise that I'm leaving out just I mean they're in the book you can read about them but but the promise is not the same as an invitation in the case of the promise I am committing myself to doing something normally for the benefit of the hearer and typically because the hearer wants me to do do the thing now this is why you get these ambiguities you get the case where the utterance is intended as a promise but the hearer may take it as a threat the father a loyal son of Eli says son I promise to send you a Yale the kid wants to go to Santa Barbara and do nothing but surf God in New Haven so the father says son I promised the senator Yale and the kid thing oh my god I'll never make it to Santa Barbara I and that's what does the kid take it as a promise or not well it may have been intended as a promise but there's defective as a promise if the if the recipient doesn't I want the thing that's promised and of course you get ambiguities the father himself may be partly self-deceptive yes I did intended as a promise but I now realized it was partly a threat I'm sick of the of my son goofing off on beaches all day long let him go and live in New Haven for four years what a thought okay but in any case so III don't want you to see what I'm trying to do is convey the bare bones to you and the bare bones are you in post condition of satisfaction on condition of satisfaction and sometimes those are self-reflexive like promises and orders but I don't want you to forget the incredible complexity of language so one in the same time we have to get across these are the bare bones of speech acts but at the same time in actual social situations they are immensely complicated and if you think about sophisticated people having a conversation about something which is acutely embarrassing to them so they never come out and say anything explicitly Henry James made a career out of write I don't actually like reading Henry James I get impatient because all of his characters have about 18 motives to my one every time I have a motive they've got 18 motives and you can never figure out what's happening or what's going on I must have told you the story about the reviewer who said mr. mr. James stated that and Henry James with furious how could you think I would do anything so crude as to state he never stated anything in his life he beat around the bush for a long time and I grant you I he is a great author I do it my enormous Lee but I I don't actually it's not much fun reading it I prefer Hemingway yeah I guess I do I prefer Hemingway anytime well good Hemingway okay all right now where were we now we're going to go to the next case which is the order now let's suppose we have arranged in advance when I raise my right arm that's an order that means you guys advance on the enemy okay now in that case you have the same initial condition you and this is going to be the directive I you have the intention and action this ia causes B M and now B M has conditions of satisfaction that H does a and now note those conditions of satisfaction have to come with this direction of fit that is the world has to change to match the propositional content and H does a because B M has those conditions of satisfaction okay now we haven't got the communication but that's not going to be hard all it's got to be is H has got to recognize the BM and that the BM has those conditions of satisfaction I'm now slowed down and we're going to go over this in in a tedious low gear because this is the communication part and you can just plug it in down here okay I'm not gonna write it out again oh I don't know maybe that confuse you but let me go over the directive and the directive you perform the utterance you raised your arm that's your question it's an utterance all kinds of things there are facial expressions can be utterances eye noises that don't have definite meaning can be utterances like yeah I don't know maybe that's now a conventional utterance but in any case I there are I've often thought the ideal device to have in a car accident situation would be to get up and be able to throw up at will so if I get an exam between the two cars and throat well I say okay this is a fantasy don't worry about let's get back to the main topic okay now the main topic is i we have arranged in advance and when i raise my right arm that's an order that means you're to advance on the enemy so what constitutes that now is i have the directive this intention action caused the bodily movement and i should make that a separate clause and BM has as condition of satisfaction with the uphill with the world to word direction of fit that h performs an action advancing on the enemy and that h does a because the bodily movement has those conditions of satisfaction that's the package that is communicated that's the package that's meant and then the communication is just the transferring of that package from the speaker of the hearer and that's done when h recognizes the bodily movement and that the bodily movement has those conditions of satisfaction it looks like a mouthful but in fact I think it's intuitively fairly obvious when you give an order to somebody you got to represent what you want them to do and you gotta represent that you want them to do it because you have issued this order because you've represented them as doing it with this direction of fit and now when they understand you they'll recognize all of that so the intention to produce understanding which is the same as the intention to communicate is simply the intention that they should recognize all that other stuff everybody got that I think it's right actually I mean I if you can improve on it I'll be grateful but I think that's the the bare bones of what it is to make a statement and to give an order next we'll do promises yes yes yes that can what now has meaning is your utterance see that this is the miracle of language the miracle of language is I have all this wet slimy stuff in a hole in my face and I make a racket out of it and the racket is meaningful the noise the noises that come out that's the utterance that's the bodily movement is now meaningful it now has conditions of satisfaction yes yes now this is the that the key objection I made to Grice is that I think rice confuses meaning and communication Grice thought to say something and mean something is always to intend to communicate and then if you can analyze successful communication you've analyzed meaning and I pointed out various counter examples to Grice and I mean not all of them arrested on this point but some of them rested on the fact that it's a there's a distinction between saying something and meaning it and saying something and intending to communicate the meaning when you say something and intend to communicate there has to be something that you intend to communicate and that's what I'm called a representational content oh you I think you could call it meaning but I don't want to beg the question against Christ so let's say the full speech at contains two parts it contains the representational part and that's this guy here that has this structure the propositional content and a certain illocutionary force and it also contains the communication part the hearer has to recognize that the utterance has that structure that it's got those conditions of satisfaction and i if he recognizes that that it has those conditions of satisfaction then he's understood it then he's got that it's a meaningful utterance you're with me on you follow that yeah the condition of satisfaction of the condition on the utterance this is why I can say something and mean it and not even intend to communicate so I it is often happened to me in political situations that I knew my audience wasn't listening or they thought I was lying or they didn't like me or whatever and I felt it's my duty to speak the truth even though they won't believe me in the in the Free Speech Movement and in a subsequent events it often happened to me that you address audiences that you know are hostile and they won't believe a word you say but all the same you say what you say and you mean every damn word even though you know i they won't you won't succeed in in convincing them and you may not even succeed in communicating because they may not be paying any attention I once I had a hilarious time addressing what was called a downtown Lions Club in Oakland and I just moved here from Oxford and it was a little bit surprising to me because it was quite different from my experiences in England first of all at lunch they all did the lion's roar and I found that a bit shy making and then after they've done the lion's roar I was introduced and the guy who introduced me said this week we have professor Searle who discuss free speech on the campus next week we're gonna have professor Phil B from the law school who will give a talk entitled the Regents answer back and then it was pretty clear what they were looking forward to and it was pretty clear that they thought I was some communist who'd wandered in off the street but in any case I did I give my speech and I I guess I got a they didn't make too much noise during the speech and some of them may even have been listening but I meant every word I said regardless of whether or not I seated in communicating that's the illocutionary effect or whether or not I succeeded in convincing anybody that's the per location area effect okay let's go the next step and oka missives well Cammisa --vs actually on the bare bones look a lot like directives now what we've got to explain is how the Cammisa --v Korea can create an obligation but at the bare bones of it committed it's just I suppose we have when I raise my left hand I raise my right hand that's an order that means you're too advanced on the enemy I raise both hands that's a statement that means the enemy is present but when I raised my left hand that's an order that means you advance no sorry that let that be a committee let that be a promise I will advance on the enemy so the attention in action here is this ia causes the bodily movement and the bodily movement has conditions of satisfaction again with the uphill direction of fit that s does a and that s does a because the bodily movement has those conditions of satisfaction now this is the promise when I make a promise I perform an utterance in this case I raise my hand and the bottom I make the promise the the utterance the bodily movement now has condition of satisfaction with again with the uphill direction of faith but in this case it's that the speaker does a certain sort of action and that the creation of the speech Act gives the speaker a reason to do the thing that he's doing that he does what he does because the bodily movement has those condition of satisfaction and then communication will be the same you just move this guy I won't write it all out again because it moves over it's the same thing it's just the hearer recognized the bodily movement and recognize that the bodily movement has those conditions of satisfaction okay now the head and this the way that I've described it the order and the promise look a lot alike because in both cases you create a reason for an action in the case of the order you create a reason for the hearer to do something in the case of the Cammisa v' you create a reason for the speaker to do something for yourself to do something why is it then that the obligation is created by the Cammisa v' and not by the directive well that's a little more complicated than I can tell you about just this morning but the basic idea is not a difficult idea and that's this you can impose obligations on yourself in a way that you cannot impose obligations on other people the only time you can impose obligation on other people is when you're in some kind of an institutional structure where you're the officer and it's a he's the private or you're the professor and this is a student and the institutional structure enables you to impose obligations but creating a reason for yourself to do something normally for the benefit of the hearer that can create an obligation on you and how does that come about I think in order to answer that fully I have to introduce the notion of a convention I have to introduce the notion that there are standard conventional devices for doing these things and the standard conventional devices when recognized automatically convinced you commit you if you utter a conventional device like I promise to come and see you and you utter that with the intention of invoking the conventions the conventions on promising then you automatically create an obligation remember Nietzsche said the remarkable thing about the human species is that they're the only species that can create promises how the hell can we ever make promises again back to Gilbert Gilbert's a wonderful dog but he never made a promise to me to do anything he can bark when he wants to be let out he can wag his tail when he's happy to see me he can whine in front of the food closet when he's hungry but he never makes a promise now why not welcome make a promise you've got to be able to bind the will in a certain way and that means the intention the creation of this type of speech act with the intention that it should bind the will and I think in order to do that you have to introduce the notion of a convention which we don't have yet what we've got now is just we're creating these speech acts by creating meaning and the creation of meaning is the intentional imposition of conditions of satisfaction on conditions of satisfaction now any questions about that look we're doing pretty well we got through three major types of speech acts assertive directives and commissars now I think there are certain types of Cammisa --vs that are not necessarily directed to an audience where you're not obligating yourself to the audience when you pledge I pledge allegiance to the flag well you're not really making a pledge to the material object you are pledging allegiance but it's gone public you're pledging allegiance to the general public that here're here is not the flag you're not telling the flag that you're being Allegiant to the flag I and similarly with other sorts of pledges we pledged Our Lives our Fortunes and our sacred honor that's a collective speech Act there again there's no hero who is supposed to be the recipient of the obligation but the favorite example of the Cammisa is the promise and that's what we're on the way to describing here okay I didn't quite get through now before you snap your notebooks let me I'll tell you where we are we're almost through the first part of the course the first part of course I give it a theory of speech acts and the basic idea is to get you see speaking a language is performing intentional actions and when it's done in inside a language like French or English it's done according two rules and we've got to show how that's built up out of pre-linguistic forms of intentionality now what goes for the whole speech Act goes for such things as reference when you refer to Barack Obama that's also an intentional act and it's your intention that makes that refer to Barack Obama and not to my dog Gilbert or the or the or the I the the planet or the constellation ursa is major it refers to Barack Obama and not to the to the Big Dipper because that is the intention you had so we're talking about human intentionality down to the ground and then we're going to see we're trying to see how that is manifested in human behavior and how it becomes articulated and conventionalized in human languages now I hope next time but if not next time then certainly next week we're going to start mainstream philosophy of language you're going to start with Gottlob Fraga and work our way well right up to the present day then at the end when we get to the end of the course I'm going to tell you I'm going to show how we apply some of this stuff to a whole lot of other issues like metaphor and fiction and forms of representation that are not linguistics such as pictures how do pictures represent what kind of a speech act is a photograph or a drawing okay so on with us on Thursday

Channel: SocioPhilosophy

Views: 5,643

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

Id: 5b5V-ZXg_EI

Length: 75min 17sec (4517 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 25 2011