Masaya Sato
Affiliation: Kyoto University
Category: Philosophy
Keywords: Linguistic act, Explicit performative, Statement, Truth, Intentionality
Date: Tuesday 2nd of September
Time: 17:00
Location: GSSR Plenary Hall (268)
View the full session: Communicating the Facts
This presentation argues against the statement account on explicit performatives, pointing out its inevitable failure in accommodating the causal flow from utterances to targeted illocutionary acts. In the realm of philosophy and linguistics, performativity of linguistic acts such as stating, ordering and promising has long been a major topic of debate. A number of theorists, including Austin (1962) and Strawson (1964), have proposed their own theories to explain how linguistic acts are realized through the voicing or writing of a certain sequence of words. Central to their debates are explicit performatives, exemplified by an utterance of “I order you to get out of this room.” Revelation of the nature of explicit performatives would include the accommodation of two seemingly contradictive theses:
(i) they are anchored to declarative sentences—typically “triggers” of the acts of the assertive family—and (ii) their illocutionary forces are intuitively exhausted by the forces of the acts named by the appearing verbs, e.g. the force of ordering.
For the sake of the revelation of the mechanism whereby the verbalized acts are performed in explicit performatives, it would be a priority that an explanation should be given as to how these two theses could be aligned. One of the most widely accepted solutions to this puzzle is to place more importance on the thesis (i) than on the thesis (ii), hypothesizing that the utterer of, say, “I order you to get out of this room” is directly performing the act of stating that they order the hearer to leave a certain room, thereby indirectly performing the act of ordering. This account, advocated by Bach and Harnish (1979) and their followers, is characterized by the assumption that the utterer’s indirect performance of the intended illocution depends on the hearers’ inference that their statement should be true. Simchen (2021) objects to the statement account, shedding light on an incomprehensible feature of the alleged, direct statement. In order to truly state that p at t, the utterer must truly believe that p at t – ∂1 for some ∂1 > 0. Additionally, truly believing that p at t – ∂1 demands that it be the case that p at t – ∂2 for some ∂2 ≥ ∂1. Therefore, truly stating that p requires that it be the case that p at some point in time before the stating. In the same vein, Simchen points out that the alleged stating of “I promise” would have to be posterior to the occurrence of the event of promising, obviously inconsistent with the actual performance of promising at the time of or after the utterance. This line of thought brings him to the conclusion that explicit performatives do not contain the act of truly stating that utterers perform such and such. As Simchen explains, truly stating some event, in nature, follows the occurrence of it. Likewise, it should not be neglected that truly stating some event must be, at least partly, caused by the occurrence of the very event. This should be understood in terms of the satisfaction of our intentionality as Searle (1983) details it. One’s intention to do x can be satisfied only if it is, at least part of, the cause of the doing of x. One’s belief that y can be satisfied—or can be true—only if the occurrence of y is at least part of the cause of the induction of the belief. Given that stating that y can be true only if the shared or expressed belief about y is true, truly stating that y is at least partly caused by the occurrence of y. This naturally leads to the idea that the statement account bears a causal distortion as well as a temporal one. If the utterer of “I order you to get out of this room” were truly stating that they order, it would be (partly) caused by their performance of ordering. This would be incompatible with the idea that uttering a performative sentence causes or coincides with the performance of the illocution named by the verb. Rejecting this idea seems to be an insupportable move. Therefore, seen from a causal perspective, utterers of explicit performatives should not be engaged in truly stating that they perform such and such. As mentioned above, the statement account owes the performance of an indirect illocution to the hearers’ inference that the alleged stating is true. To reject this account, it does not suffice to merely argue that the utterers do not make a true statement; some might respond that even if the alleged stating could not be actually true, it does not relate to the hearers’ judgement of the stating as true. Discussions until here support that such a judgement does not take place. If hearers of a stated sentence know that nothing in the world has caused the formation of the utterer’s belief—and thus their performance of stating—they would never take the stating as true. In cases of explicit performatives, the hearers know that the intended illocution has not been performed before the utterance: it is not intuitive to think that some illocution, whether ordering or stating, has been performed toward them without any verbal or nonverbal cues being provided by the utterer. In other words, they know that nothing in the world—no performed illocution—has caused the formation of the utterer’s belief that a certain illocution has been performed. Therefore, the stating aiming to share the belief in question could not be regarded as true. These arguments make the statement account look less attractive. It will be required for theorists to propose accounts that avoid being obsessed with the act of stating.