Abstract
The usual treatment of a dinner table utterance of ‘Can you pass the salt?’ is that it involves an indirect request to pass the salt as well as a direct question about the hearer’s ability to do so: an indirect speech act. These are held to involve two illocutionary forces and two illocutionary acts. Rod Bertolet (1994) has raised doubts about whether consideration of such examples warrants the postulation of indirect speech acts and illocutionary forces other than the literal ones. In a recent article, Mary Kate McGowan, Shan Shan Tam, and Margaret Hall claim to show that these doubts are unfounded. The purpose of this paper is to show that they have not established this.
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Notes
All parties to the debate agree that there are circumstances in which the speaker does no more than ask a question, the orthopedic surgeon’s office being a favored setting for this. But most accept the claim that a request is made as well in the typical dinner table situation.
Thus MTH’s claim that Bertolet “argues that there are no indirect speech acts” (495) is too strong. That is an open question so far as the argument goes. The skeptical hypotheses investigated was qualified: that “there are no indirect speech acts, at least not of the sort that have been prominent in the literature.” (335) It would have been more precise to say at least not of the sort alleged in the examples that have been prominent in the literature.
As we’ll see in a moment, I originally said the speaker has no interest in the hearer’s ability to pass the salt. This is not correct; the point is rather that any such interest is merely instrumental, since the hearer’s salt-passing ability is assumed to be fine.
Compare Green (2015), who also recognizes this. While Green doesn’t endorse my claims, some of his remarks are congenial to them.
See pp. 500–502 for their motivation for these conditions for communication to be linguistic, which seem entirely reasonable assuming the message is one that the speaker or writer intends to convey. It seems likely that they have in mind a condition of this sort for communication. Otherwise you will be linguistically communicating with someone who is snooping through your diary without your knowledge or consent, which does not seem to be the sort of thing they have in mind.
Recall that one of the things at issue is whether the speaker has a request intention.
The three-part classification is from William G. Lycan (1984). An utterance of ‘I don’t like this song’ in reply to ‘Hey, let’s dance’ at a club is an example of this first sort from MTH. Our salt example is of the second type. ‘I’d like a chardonnay, please’ is an example of the third. As I originally acknowledged, the third type of example is the most troublesome for his hypothesis; however, since MTH allow in their section 7 that one of my suggestions about handling these is acceptable, we shall pass over that discussion here.
One reader challenged this argument by claiming that implicatures are illocutionary acts because they fit Austin’s characterization of these as the performance of an act in saying something as opposed to an act of saying something or an act brought about by saying something. But it was Austin who first pointed out that this is a rather rough and unreliable characterization. He says this several times starting in Lecture VIII in Austin (1962), perhaps most unmistakably here: “It certainly is not the case that if we can say ‘in saying x you were y-ing’, then ‘to y’ is necessarily an illocutionary act.” (123) Then what should be require in addition? My suggestion is in the next paragraph of the text.
Different approaches involving appeal to convention or idiomaticity are available in the literature. Perhaps the most developed are in Davis (1998), where he argues that there are implicature conventions determining that some sentences implicate certain contents (166–72) and suggests that ‘Can you drive me home?’ is an idiom that is a direct request (169). Such alternatives might be right. Such approaches of course offer no support for the standard view of indirect speech acts or MTH’s objections to my criticism of it.
References
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I am indebted to Mitchell S. Green for discussion of an earlier draft of this paper and to an anonymous referee for comments on the version that was prepared for blind review. I rewrote it in first-person style after it was accepted for publication.
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Bertolet, R. On the Arguments for Indirect Speech Acts. Philosophia 45, 533–540 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9846-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9846-8