Speech Act Theory

[abudabor]

its a philosophize theory
its going crazy! i don't understand
What does speech act theory talk about?simply as you can
thanks

[arrytus]

Briefly, it was derived by J.L. Austin [influenced by Wittgenstein] in his classical book 'How to Do things with words', and then taken up again by John Searle in the book 'Speech Acts'. austin differentiates betwixt 3 different intensional/contextual types of speech acts called locutionary/illocutionary/perlocutionary acts, which can be understood for example as the difference between saying something, saying that same sentence as a promise, and the result of the sentence taken as an imperative.

[Buh4Bee]

I've never heard of this, but it sounds extremely interesting.

[Wilde woman]

Before Austin and Searle, language was primarily understood in terms of truth value. An utterance was considered either factually true or false. Austin and Searle, as arrytus said, took Wittgenstein's work and furthered it to develop the idea that language is not only about truth value, but that a speaker can actually perform actions through speech. Generally, he calls such utterances "performatives".

For example, when I say something like "I promise to yada yada" your act of saying this is actually performing your promise. Of course, this is contingent on whether or not you carry out what you're promising to do, and Austin outlines the terms for what happens when you don't carry out your promises, and such, in his book How to do Things with Words.

[Perandorrrr]

I hope this helps:

........Austin is a pluralist. In examining ordinary language, he sees that we use words for many different purposes. The logical positivists were fixated on reference -- the use of words to pick out and designate some thing in the world. They believed that meaning resided in correspondence between word and world. Where such correspondence was absent, so was meaning. Austin recognizes referential utterances ("statements, reports or descriptions") as one kind of meaningful speech but chastises logical positivism for failing to notice, or for denigrating when noticing, other kinds including greetings, apologies, imperatives, pleas, curses, exclamations, and counterconditionals ("if I were king, I would..").

In considering this range, Austin attempts in our selection, "Performative Utterances," to make a basic distinction. There are "statements," which refer to an already existing state of affairs but which, instead, bring a state of affairs into existence by being uttered. Performatives are speech acts, cases in which saying something counts as an action: they serve to alter the world, bring something new to existence, or to modify, create, or establish a certain relationship between people. "[P]erformative utterances are not true or false, then"; rather, Austin deems them "felicitous" when they succeed in establishing the state of affairs they strive to create. He is interested in outlining the conditions that must be fulfilled for a performative to be felicitious.

For starters, Austin realizes (as did FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE AND Wittgenstein) that individual utterances rely heavily on "background conditions" in order to make sense. Among these conditions are a whole set of "conventions", as well as the context in which an utterance is made. Austin points out that many conventions, are in fact, institutional, understanding "institutions" as formal organizations of authority. Performative speech acts such as judge's sentencing of a criminal or a minister's "I now pronounce you man and wife" succeed only when uttered by a person with appropriate authority.

Austin also considers noninstitutional causes of infelicity--insincerity, misunderstanding, and nonseriousness. When discussing these sources of "unhappy" utterances and returning to questions of truth and falsehood, Austin finds himself increasingly unable to sort out the different uses of language into seperate bins. He cannot maintain the firm line between statements and performatives. If I say "with a stern look, he opened the debate", am I being merely descriptive, or does my use of the adjective "stern" create a view of events for my auditors? In addition, the verb "opened" is a "dead metaphor".; that is, a word designating physical action ("opening") is used to describe a different action. In other words, Austin runs into the kinds of difficulties FREIDRICH NIETZSCHE describes in the essay "On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense"(1873; see above), difficulties that led Nietsche to eventually claim "there are no facts, only interpretations".

Austin does not phrase the problem in Nietzschean terms. But he does recognize that we seldom speak purely descriptively; we are always doing other things -- even when we say "the chair is blue". We have reason to say "the chair is blue", and that reason is almost always to sway our auditor in some way or another. Austin's essay on performatives thus leads him to recognize the rhetorical element in most utterances. We say things in particular contexts to certain others with the aim of influencing their opinions, attitudes, beliefs, and so on. For this reason, Austin concludes the essay with the suggestion that utterancs have "force" as well as "meaning"; he uses "force" to designate their impact on listeners, an impact that the speaker can try but cannot always manage to control. And he also concludes that we need to "loosen up" the dichotomy "true/false" so we can more subtly appraise the complex relation between facts and utterances.

Austin's notions of performatives and utterances entered literary theory with the JACQUES DERRIDA-John Searle debate of the 1970s. Derrida found Austin's work suggestive but castigated the British philosopher for trying to exclude "non-serious" utterances (a category that included statements in poems) from consideration. The American philosopher Searle defended Austin against what he saw as Derrida's misunderstandings. The pyrotechnics of the debate -- which cemented the hostility between Anglo-American philosophers and "French theory"-- obscured the fact Derrida found Austin's emphasis on how language produces things as well as simply reports them very important. JUDITH BUTLER and EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICH in the 1990s recuperated the performative for literary and cultural theorists by stressing the extent to which gender (and others) identities are produced through the ritualized practices of daily life. Joining Derrida's emphasis on "iteration" (reptition) with Austin's insistence that language is productive, Butler and Sedgwick show how prevailing social scripts (ideaology) acquire reality for individuals through being performed (Leitch, Cain, Finke Johnson and Williams 1429).

Leitch, Cain, Finke, Johnson, Mcgowan and Jeffrey J. Williams, eds. Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2001.

[arrytus]

I hope this helps:

For starters, Austin realizes (as did FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE AND Wittgenstein) that individual utterances rely heavily on "background conditions" in order to make sense. Among these conditions are a whole set of "conventions", as well as the context in which an utterance is made. Austin points out that many conventions, are in fact, institutional, understanding "institutions" as formal organizations of authority. Performative speech acts such as jdge's sentencing of a criminal or a minister's "I now pronounce you man and wife" succeed only when uttered by a person with appropriate authority.

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Austin's notions of performatives and utterances entered literary theory with the JACQUES DERRIDA-John Searle debate of the 1970s. Derrida found Austin's work suggestive but castigated the British philosopher for trying to exclude "non-serious" utterances (a category that included statements in poems) from consideration. The American philosopher Searle defended Austin against what he saw as Derrida's misunderstandings.

This critic elides how Austin's theory of context was foreshadowed not only by Heidegger but more directly by Polanyi [though it's hard to account for all influences, this is somewhat the point of contextual influence, and would later be situated by the hermeneutics most notably proposed by Foucault, Gadamer, and Ricoeur]. And also the fantastic rebuttal to the theory by Gellner in his book Words and Things.

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The book Limited INC by Derrida is hilarious, as it collects the papers from the Searle/Derrida 'debate' and Derrida performs linguistic ju-jitsu to basically undermine all of Searle's points.