Abstract
Contrary to most speech acts theorists, Sbisà’s reading of Austin rightly emphasizes the conceptual, or “internal,” link between the necessity of uptake for an illocutionary act to be achieved and its conventional nature. She thus refuses to consider the uptake as a theoretical means to promote an intentionalist account of speech acts. I submit, first, that this is the only correct understanding of Austin’s revolutionary conception of speech efficiency; and second that she is right in drawing such an internal link between “conventionality” and the necessity of some kind of “recognition” or “acknowledgment” for any symbolic (or ritual) action (such as an illocutionary act) to take place. In this chapter, I examine Sbisà’s arguments in favor of this claim and borrow some insights from linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics to reinforce her position. Thus, I will concur with her in defending a conventionalist account of speech acts, including assertions, orders, and so on.
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Notes
- 1.
More precisely, one can contend that it specifies the A conditions. See below.
- 2.
I only give this quote for the sake of convenience because it offers a kind of synthesis of the positions of Searle, Grice, Bach and Harnish. Surely, this quote is taken from a text that is not solely devoted to this issue, but Hornsby develops her position further in Hornsby (1994).
- 3.
Most often, in these approaches, intentional terms are nominalized and “intentions” are therefore understood as “mental states.” For a critique, see “A Plea for Excuses” in Austin (1979).
- 4.
In saying this, I do not claim that all the objections apply to all the authors previously mentioned. They apply to a now widespread framework of analysis.
- 5.
This is debatable, but even in Searle’s model it is difficult to see the illocutionary effect as anything other than ultimately shared beliefs and intentions.
- 6.
“Materialist” is my qualification: I am not sure that Sbisà would accept it. But I think it would be possible to defend this rapprochement in more detail.
- 7.
I use the conditional because, if Sbisà seems to be perfectly aware of this point (see Sbisà 2013, 58), she regularly decides not to insist on it.
- 8.
- 9.
Which, admittedly, would not be a problem for Grice.
- 10.
For a discussion of this point, see Longworth (2019).
- 11.
I am a bit reluctant to qualify the illocutionary effect in terms of “states of affairs,” as Sbisà does—because I think this qualification runs the risk of being understood in an overly substantial manner.
- 12.
- 13.
- 14.
We must add a characteristic peculiar to illocutionary effects, noted by Austin, which distinguishes them from “natural” effects: they are cancellable in a way distinct from physical effects, which cannot be undone but only modified. Sbisà calls this characteristic “defeasibility.” See Sbisà 2007, 465–466; see also Caponetto 2020.
- 15.
Of course, it could produce many other kinds of effects (physical, rhetorical, perlocutionary, cognitive, etc.).
- 16.
This is not to say that intention has no role to play in this process. See Sec. 3 and Moran’s arguments below.
- 17.
In what follows, I will only present schematically some ideas from this very rich and important book.
- 18.
It could be argued, in a way that exceeds the limits of this text, that Austin’s understanding of the intentional character of an act, as analyzed in his texts on action (see “A Plea for Excuses” and “Three Ways of Spilling Ink” in Austin 1979), is not so far from Anscombe’s analyses (Anscombe 1957). Moran implicitly draws on this proximity to propose an analysis of the act of telling as an intentional illocutionary act and to criticize a mentalist reading (encouraged by Grice himself) of Grice’s proposals on communication.
- 19.
Moran devotes a good part of his book to challenging a certain reading of Grice according to which telling can be reduced to a simple transmission of information that would function as a cause (and not only a reason) of the hearer’s beliefs.
- 20.
As Laura Caponetto reminds me, one might be worried that the telling might not be completely sincere, either because the speaker was trying to deceive the interlocutor or because she does not know what she is saying. This is why Moran (2018, 91) insists that the speaker must be prepared to take responsibility for what she says, and present, in her telling, what she takes herself to know.
- 21.
This risk is also due to the fact that Moran (partially) borrows, in an uncritical manner, the analysis of uptake from Hornsby.
- 22.
Rather, one must retain from Moran’s analysis the insistence that an illocutionary act is linked to a question of recognized objective status.
- 23.
Bourdieu speaks of performative efficiency but he clearly has in mind any form of illocutionary efficiency. See De Fornel (1983) for a discussion.
- 24.
According to Bourdieu, each “field” of activity has its own type of capital: money in the economic field, knowledge and integrity in the scientific field, artistic value in the artistic field, and so on. Each capital has its own value. Each capital holds its value according to the recognition it is given, given the functioning of each field. See, for more details, Bourdieu (2000).
- 25.
The same type of remarks was sometimes developed in philosophy, notably in the important work of Rae Langton. See Langton (1993).
- 26.
For more details, see Ambroise (2016).
- 27.
I would even add that it is Sbisà’s particular understanding of the efficiency of language, and thus the particular conceptual framework she constructs, that allows her to be sensitive to these immediately practical aspects of language use. So there are direct moral and political implications of her work on language.
- 28.
Indeed, for a long time, traditional analytical philosophy of language has tended to ignore issues of power and domination in language. There is now a growing trend in contemporary (analytic) philosophy of language that is sensitive to those issues. See, for instance, Langton (1993), Fricker (2007), Lance and Kukla (2009), McGowan (2019), and Stanley (2015).
- 29.
Or, to put it in the form of a criticism of idealism: it is not because we think that the conditions are fulfilled that they become so. However, see Langton (2015), for the opposite idea according to which speaker authority is a felicity condition that can spring into existence thanks to the audience’s acceptance that the speaker has authority. This important and controversial issue would deserve a full treatment, which I cannot offer in the space of this chapter.
- 30.
Again, see Langton (1993).
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Ambroise, B. (2023). On the Conventional Nature of Illocutionary Acts: Uptake, Conventions, and Illocutionary Effects. In: Caponetto, L., Labinaz, P. (eds) Sbisà on Speech as Action. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22528-4_3
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