ABSTRACT

Although these are studies performed by different authors and in a certain way independent from one another, the theories of Implicatures by Paul Grice and of Indirect Speech Acts by John Searle are not only deep linked but, in fact, are mutually complementary, for we can see the crucial importance of the comprehension of both of them in order to obtain a better grasp on the notion of “Non-literality.” This work will show the main properties of both theories and how they work together in an organic and symbiotic way.

KEYWORDS:
Literality; Convention; Pragmatics; Illocutionary act; Cooperation

RESUMO

Apesar de terem sido estudos realizados por autores diferentes e de certa forma independente um do outro, as teorias das Implicaturas de Paul Grice e dos Atos de Discurso Indiretos de John Searle não apenas estão intimamente ligadas como, na verdade, são complementares entre si, de modo que se mostra de crucial importância a compreensão dos dois juntos, a fim de se obter um maior domínio da noção de “não literalidade” das enunciações. Este trabalho tratará de mostrar as principais características de ambas as teorias e como elas se inter-relacionam orgânica e simbioticamente.

PALAVRAS-CHAVE:
Literalidade; Convenção; Pragmática; Ato ilocucionário; Cooperação

Introduction

The contemporary study of the language admits as indispensable the pragmatic dimension of the discourse for a more complete comprehension of the aspects and laws which govern the efficient and rational interaction of the ordinary conversation. However, it was not easy to introduce the notion that the utterance as use could really bring us a contribution for a precise understanding of these alleged laws, mainly when that notion seemed to complicate more than explain.

It was in 1975 that Paul Grice presented a paper called Logic and Conversation which would cease once and for all the preconception that there was in thinking that the natural language was intrinsically not systematic and that the everyday communication used to happen almost like an accident. For Grice, couldn’t be by chance the fact that the people could understand each other with a high degree of precision without a minimum mental organization in order to get that effect.

The idealism of the logicians and mathematicians who defended that the language should be always given by a formal notation permitted a more precise and well delimited relation among the linguistics phenomena, but, in the other hand, it simplified them a lot, making many of the details present in the dialogues even from the people who have never had contact with the Linguistics, like irony or the “drop of a hint,” were left behind and the objective of a satisfactory cataloging of these phenomena was itself boycotted by the means of its viabilization (that is, the language sciences). Grice intended to find a way to conciliate the formal and the natural, but without allow these losses to occur: “this logic may be aided and guided by the simplified logic of the formal devices but cannot be supplanted by it” (Grice, 1975GRICE, H. P. Logic and Conversation. William James Lectures, delivered at Harvard University in 1967, and to be published by Harvard University Press. Copyright 1975 by II. Paul Grice., p.43).

In 1969, John Searle, a student under the guidance of the “father” of Speech Acts Theory, John L. Austin, brought a better sophistication of that theory with his book Speech Acts and reformulated the taxonomy proposed by his professor. In 1979, with his Expression and Meaning, he related with this study several topics of the Philosophy of Language, which versed from the problems of Reference (the Descriptivism of Bertrand Russell, Peter Strawson and Keith Donnellan, already mentioned in Searle, 1969SEARLE, J. R. Speech Acts. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1969., p.157) to the problems of Signification (literal and metaphorical meaning) in Mind, Language and Society (Searle, 1998, p.140SEARLE, J. R. Mind, Language and Society. New York: Basic Book – The Mastermind Series, 1998.) about the sentence meaning (lexical) and the speaker meaning (who takes the liberty to alter as much as possible the literal meaning in order to achieve some linguistic interest). This initiative inspired him to think about the indirect speech act phenomenon which defied the traditional notion that says that the comprehension of an utterance was only possible or, at least, optimized, if the people stuck to the literal meanings of the expressions.

On practical terms we see that the violation of the so said constitutive rules (Searle, 1969SEARLE, J. R. Speech Acts. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1969., p.33) of the communication, meaning, the basic laws which form and allow the transmission of the information from a person to another, is in fact “planned” by the participants of the conversation, although not based in an exactly conscious way and we’ll see how this works together with Grice’s Implicature theory.

Let us analyze now the details of the Implicature and Speech Acts theories and how the dependency between them takes place.

1 Implicature Theory

Suppose a situation where the person 1 arrives at a bus stop and asks the other person 2 who was already there: “Hi. Do you know if the bus X has passed by here?” The other then says: “I’m waiting for it.” The person who asked, then, thanks for the answer and stays at the stop waiting for the bus. This situation is so common that we don’t realize the strangeness of what happened. We ask: how is it possible that we are satisfied with the answer offered above until the point that we thanked 1 as a consequence of that answer? The question made demands, in theory, an answer of the “yes or no” kind, but the answer given didn’t only indirectly omit this content but has involved the speaker 2 himself, who represents null interests for 1. Why then 1 has gotten satisfied with the enunciation from 2?

What has occurred was the following (let us suppose that they were two men): although 2 didn’t answer as he “should” to the 1’s question, instead of it meaning that 1 didn’t understand him, 1 not just obtained the answer that he needed but he also acquired other information which could be useful to him in several ways. In fact, 1 supposes that 2 is a person mentally “stable” whose decisions are made in a rational way and if 2 said that he was waiting for the bus to come, he has hidden (Levinson, 1983LEVINSON, S. C. Pragmática. Tradução de Aníbal Mari e Luiz Carlos Borges. São Paulo: Martins Fontes - WMF, 2007., p.102)¹ 1 LEVINSON, S. C. Pragmatics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. the answer expected “no,” when he said “I’m waiting for it,” because if the bus has already passed by that way, he would not be there to talk to 1; he would have boarded the vehicle.

This opens space for the conversation to continue or to think that something else has been said there, because 1 could also suppose that the bus X has already passed by in the presence of 2 at the stop, but maybe it could be full of people or even could have ceased to work and 2 was unable to board it. Both could start to discuss about the governmental neglect concerning the public transportation due to the long waits until the arrival of the vehicles, about the quality of the journey or even about the population rise.

We can note how much relevant information was hidden in the 2’s decision in giving the answer that he gave, instead of a simple negative phrase. 2 had the intention to wake on 1 a tendency to a conversational cooperation, considering that, for example, the inclusion of the personal problems in an enunciation which strictly would exclude them (the content should be restricted to a “yes or no”) shows empathy and interest to help 1, which goes beyond the mechanical and impersonal discourse and brings a more complete e efficient answer. Now we can see how much the 1’s thanking is more than justified!

Another important fact which we cannot avoid noting is that the 1’s question was if 2 knew whether the bus X has passed or not. 2 could perfectly answer this: “yes, I know whether it has passed or not.” This enunciation, by the way, is considered the exact answer which 2 could have given. However, if 1 had received this, not only he would not obtain the desired answer, but he probably would get angry with 2, who has shown complete indifference to the 1’s problems and has not given a simple answer in an informative way. 2 could also say “yes” intending to convey that in some time of the day the bus passed by there, which is not relevant to 1’s purposes, who wanted to estimate how much time it would take for the next bus of the route to pass and, for that, he would have to know when the most recent one passed. Thus, what would the logicians say in this case if the cult of the form, which should make the informational exchange more precise, would turn it totally useless and a way to make people fight each other?

Grice calls this hidden information Implicature (Grice, 1975GRICE, H. P. Logic and Conversation. William James Lectures, delivered at Harvard University in 1967, and to be published by Harvard University Press. Copyright 1975 by II. Paul Grice., p.43) and it could be conventional or conversational. He decided to invent this name so we could not confuse this with the more common notion of “implication,” which content is obtained by logical and not contextual inferences. The main characteristic of an implicature is the fact that it is a not conventional information (although we will see that, due to conventions, we can generate implicatures) which is conveyed intentionally by the speaker, although not necessarily the hearer is always able to understand it. Precisely because of this hiding of the propositional content “inside” or “behind” the words and expressions, it is always possible to cancel the implicatures, although it is perfectly possible that these hidden senses turn to be conventional, as has been shown with the bus example above. In few words, what 2 wanted to say is different from what he said, but the biggest novelty is that the implicature does not restrict itself to just ambiguities, ironies or metaphors.

The implicatures of the conventional kind are those hidden information which depend on the conventions to be executed. More precisely, conventions which can delimit a standard meaning (lexical) for the words. For example, in “she is blond, but she writes well,” although in logical terms we are in front of a conjunction (Bx ^ Wx) of properties Bx (“x” is blond) and Wx (“x” writes well) concerning an individual “x,” grammatically we have a double attribution made by an adversative conjunction (“but”) and it should only be used when the first clause has, in some sense, an opposite idea if compared with the second clause. There is an offensive cultural presupposition which says that women with a blond hair are normally intellectually unable, meaning that someone who actually believes in such absurdity supposes adverse the situation where we can find a blond woman who writes well, which is an activity that demands a reasonable mental effort. Therefore, due to the convention attributed to the meaning of “but” it was possible for the speaker to hide this hateful preconception and convey it in an indirect form. It is important to note that, despite the existence of this presupposition, not all people share this information and, considering that, what the speaker said by implicature might be easily ignored (canceled).

By the way, the case above illustrates a good reason for us to not depend completely on the Classical Logic to deal with the everyday conversation, because while this point of view sees the cited case as a simple conjunction of properties, a pragmatic perspective reveals many others adjacent information which, in fact, were precisely what the speaker wanted to say at the end of day. The literally spoken was reduced to a simple vehicle of the real information that the speaker desired to convey.

The implicature of the conversational kind, on the other hand, are those which are of more interest to Grice, because they are independent of any previous conventional notion (formally established, as grammatical terms) and still surprise us by being constantly utilized and comprehended without further problems. So, how are we capable to understand each other without the sharing of a clear and efficient constitutive rule? Grice will argue that, in fact, such rules do exist, although they are not utilized in a strictly formal (exact) and explicit way, neither they are utilized in a rigorous sense which we could call by a “clear” conscious process, but in an intuitive way.

In fact, it is precisely because of this shared pattern by everyone or, at least, this would be the impression that we have, that Grice defends that in all rational informational exchange the participants of the conversation are observing (Grice, 1975GRICE, H. P. Logic and Conversation. William James Lectures, delivered at Harvard University in 1967, and to be published by Harvard University Press. Copyright 1975 by II. Paul Grice., p.45) a Cooperative Principle (CP) which direct them when they start to perceive that the normative patterns are being violated. We always hope that a “normal” speaker only violates this good sense in a planned way. That is, the participants of the conversation calculate that there must be a reason why the speaker has not used the conversational norm to enunciate what he has enunciated and that he is enunciating something else (the implicature). This calculus will determine the probability to deduce which something else was that, because it is obvious that, by being cancelable, the implicature cannot be fixed, but it is relative to specific elements of the context.

Despite that, there are some situations in which Grice argues that certain implicatures have a high degree of non-detachability (Grice, 1975GRICE, H. P. Logic and Conversation. William James Lectures, delivered at Harvard University in 1967, and to be published by Harvard University Press. Copyright 1975 by II. Paul Grice., p.58) and are maintained even in multiple and diverse contexts. For example, someone would only say of a married man that “he went to see a woman” (using, on purpose, the indefinite article) if the speaker was implying that this man will commit adultery (otherwise he would have said “his wife”).

In any case, there is always an assumption that the hearer does not make irrational decisions and that he does not act aimlessly, randomly. Participants always expect this from each other. According to Grice:

By “disjunction” Grice means the fact that the correct interpretation of the speaker’s purpose in making his utterance is included in a logical list of interpretations given by “A or B or C or...,” in which the capital letters mean each one of the possible meanings that the hearer can assume until he calculates the correct answer: what the speaker hid and really meant.

It is of great relevance to note that by “conversational norm” it is not meant here that everyone has read the grammar and “perfectly” mastered the canonical and modern way of communicating. The highlighted term means that no matter how informal or “tribal” the exchange of information is, it is essential that there be a minimum of regulative rules so that even the most “primitive” (that is, distant from what we commonly call “civilization”) of linguistic interactions fulfills the constitutive role of being able to communicate something. CP is a notion that helps a language with (sufficient) already established rules to maintain a good sense of regularity that allows a minimum informational exchange.

With the CP in mind, we ask: what does it consist of? Grice describes it as an abstract and intuitive guide that constantly “tells” us: “Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged” (Grice, 1975GRICE, H. P. Logic and Conversation. William James Lectures, delivered at Harvard University in 1967, and to be published by Harvard University Press. Copyright 1975 by II. Paul Grice., p.45). The CP is composed of four fundamental categories that give rise to maxims (suggestions) of behaviors. They are: the categories of Quantity, Quality, Relation and Mode.

The Quantity category guides us to the maxim of not being more or less informative than the conversational exchange requires. Violating it can cause confusion of ideas due to the large amount of information or unwanted inferences due to the lack of it. The Quality category guides us to the maxim that the communicated information must always be true or, at least, that there is a minimum effort to present some evidence for it (that there is a true belief about it). Violating it can cause distrust or serious consequences to the hearer who acted believing in a falsehood. The Relation category guides us to the maxim that the communicated information must always be relevant. Violating it can cause an unnecessary deviation from the topic of the conversation and completely miss the purpose of the interaction in question. Finally, we have the Mode category, which guides us to the maxim that we should always communicate information in the most obvious way possible. Violating it can cause ambiguity or a lack of interest in the conversational interaction.

It is clear that if we could know exactly, respectively to the categories, how much, what, about what and only about what we should talk, there would be no conversation, because, in theory, there would be only one thing to be said. We could not expect Grice (or anyone else) to provide us with a law that tells us how we could perfectly respect these maxims, and there is no metaphysical parameter that demonstrates when we speak in the most informative way possible, although that is the function of language, according to the author (Grice, 1975GRICE, H. P. Logic and Conversation. William James Lectures, delivered at Harvard University in 1967, and to be published by Harvard University Press. Copyright 1975 by II. Paul Grice., p.47).² 2 “The conversational maxims, however, and the conversational implicatures connected with them, are specially connected (I hope) with the particular purposes that talk (and so, talk exchange) is adapted to serve and is primarily employed to serve. I have stated my maxims as if this purpose were a maximally effective exchange of information.” For reference, see footnote 1. Expressions like “I hope” shows that Grice did not have the intention to show a perfectly exact theory. By “possible” he means how far our cognition can take us.

So, it is important to highlight that Grice did not intend with this exposition to beg the principle by stating that it is possible to know unequivocally in advance when we are, for example, maximally relevant, even though the CP should precisely guide us to this (it would be absurd to start the composition of a principle from notions which that same principle proposes to expose/define), but that, at least, we try and believe that we are trying to do our best for such a task. His contribution was to delimit four main categories apparently essential for the description of a legitimately rational (not perfect) conversation, based on mostly empirical³ 3 “A dull but, no doubt at a certain level, adequate answer is that it is just a well-recognized empirical fact that people DO behave in these ways; they have learned to do so in childhood and not lost the habit of doing so; and, indeed, it would involve a good deal of effort to make a radical departure from the habit. It is much easier, for example, to tell the truth than to invent lies” (Grice, 1975, p.48). In this excerpt, Grice comments that CP arises from childhood and that we carry it into adulthood out of pure habit. That is, it would be much more difficult to abandon this habit than to maintain it. He sets the example that it is easier to tell the truth than to lie. facts.

We are now in a position to understand how it is possible to calculate the conversational implicature. Participants in a conversation will always reckon that everyone involved is constantly observing these maxims, so that if one of them is violated by a speaker, the hearer will assume that he is still cooperating and that there must be a reason why he has violated it. In the case of the bus above, speaker 1 thinks as follows:

• I. I asked a “yes or no” question, but 2 did not answer that way (he has violated the maxims of quantity and relevance);

• II. I assume he wants to cooperate. Saying “I'm waiting for it” should contain the answer that interests me;

• III. By definition, one only waits for something if this something has not yet come into contact with the person waiting for it or there was an exceptional reason why, even when in contact, it did not occur at a time or in an opportune way;

• IV. Any one of these reasons would be enough for me, as well as 2, not to have entered the bus;

• V. Therefore, regardless of whether the bus has passed or not, it is best for me to wait for the bus as 2 is waiting.

We can see that the answer “no,” hidden by 2 and expected by 1, is highlighted in item IV. It is more informative than the “no” of saying that “the bus didn’t come while I was here” (which would be the standard cooperative response) or the “no” of saying that you just don’t know, because 2, as a reasonably prudent person, may also have meant with “I'm waiting for it” that the bus passed, but the space was full, or that the tire went flat, the engine broke down, or even that the vehicle was being stolen by criminals etc. All these possible inferences demonstrate a greater empathy of 2 in relation to 1 and 2 was “maximally” cooperative. All of this takes place in fractions of a second, despite how complex it may seem. According to Stephen Levinson (1983, p.99)LEVINSON, S. C. Pragmática. Tradução de Aníbal Mari e Luiz Carlos Borges. São Paulo: Martins Fontes - WMF, 2007.:⁴ 4 For reference, see footnote 1.

2 Indirect Speech Acts

To understand what indirect speech acts are about, we must first explore the general notion of Speech Act Theory. The Speech Acts are the way in which we can act and change the world only through enunciation, going against the old notion that language served only to describe the facts of reality. Although we already notice traces of this theory in Saint Augustine, in the De Magistro (1980) of 389 AD (on the difference between action and speech), in The Thought (1956) of Gottlob Frege in 1918FREGE, G. The Thought. Mind, New Series, Oxford University Press/Mind Association, v. 65, n. 259, pp.289-311, 1956. (on the use of the term “force” in relation to linguistic expressions), and mainly in the Philosophical Investigations (2010) by Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1953WITTGENSTEIN, L. Philosophical Investigations. Transl. G. E. M. Anscombre, P. M. S. Hacker and Jochim Schulte. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. (regarding the relationship between meaning and the use of expressions in a certain context), it was John L. Austin’s work, released posthumously, called How to Do Things with Words⁵ 5 AUSTIN, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. London: Clarendon Press, 1962. (1962), that the theory of Speech Acts was actually and precisely developed, though it would become a solid study only later with the refinements and extensions of John Searle and Daniel Vanderveken in Foundations of Illocutionary Logic (1985)SEARLE, J. R.; VANDERVEKEN, D. Foundations of Illocutionary Logic. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985..

These types of utterances occur, for example, when a baby is baptized by a recognized clerical authority; a president declares war on another country; a tycoon inaugurate a theme park or even when someone decides to donate an object or make a promise to someone else. According to Austin, uttering words of this kind in the appropriate circumstances specified above “is not to describe my doing of what I should be said in so uttering to be doing or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it” (Austin, 1962AUSTIN, J. L. Quando dizer é fazer. Trad. Danilo Marcondes de Souza Filho. Porto Alegre: Artes Médicas, 1990., p.6).⁶ 6 For reference, see footnote 4. 24 In the Vanderveken (1990), the author updates this quantity to six, as he unifies components 3 and 7 into a single so-called “degree of strength.” This new conception, which he called “Performative” and it is the opposite of what he called “Constative” (the previous view of language, the one that observes, describes) shook the structures of what was known about language.

By the way, the constative, as its name means, has the function of verifying, describing and reporting what “occurs” (in the ordinary conception of the term). That is, they are statements that, depending on the state of affairs to which they refer, can be classified as true or false (according to the reasoning of the Law of the excluded middle of Logic, without a third option).

With the notion of performative, an idea was created contrary to the possibility of giving (only) a truth value to the utterances, and it is now possible to speak of conditions of satisfaction. If we look closely at a performative, for example, a prediction, we can realize that even if someone who made a mistake about the fact that would happen according to what he said, we cannot deny that the prediction was made. Now, this means that it is not up to us, it does not seem appropriate, in this case, to judge what was said as a “falsehood,” because someone needed to have uttered it first and to have “given” reality to the prediction as a fact in the world, whose origin could only have been that one, to be evaluated somehow later. That is, the enunciation already needed to be true (as a true fact that occurred in the world) so that we could say something about it later (whether its propositional content corresponds or not to the facts of the world, for example). Therefore, what starts to matter from then on is not whether the enunciation occurred or not, but what were the consequences of its manifestation in the world. In this situation, we say that the prediction was infelicitous, flawed, unproductive, vain, but never false (although its propositional content may be obviously false. In this case, the speaker did not satisfy the prediction he made).

The speech act is composed of several stages (although not spaced apart in time), ranging from the very means of enunciation (locution) through the speaker’s intention of action (illocution) until the effects that such speech causes in the hearer (perlocution). Regarding the intention, the speaker’s objective, we call it an Illocutionary Act, which has an Illocutionary Force that delimits one or more of the five general types of possible illocutionary acts, and this will be the stage that really interests us in understanding the notion of indirect (illocutionary) speech acts.

Formally, the illocutionary act is given by “F(P),” where “F” is its constitutive force and “P” is the relevant propositional content on which the speaker acts through the act. An illocutionary act has certain conditions of success (conditions that the speaker must fulfill in order to perform a given intended act) and certain conditions of satisfaction (conditions that must be obtained in the world in order to make the speaker’s goal be achieved while he is performing an act). In the work by Searle and Daniel Vanderveken, Foundations of Illocutionary Logic (1985)SEARLE, J. R.; VANDERVEKEN, D. Foundations of Illocutionary Logic. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985., we find the structure of an illocutionary act in chapter 2, item III, p.12. It is composed of seven²⁴ basic components that constitute its conditions of success:

1. Illocutionary point: it is the speaker’s main objective when he is enunciating something. E.g.: if someone wants to promise, he puts himself in a commitment to someone.

2. Mode of achievement of the illocutionary point: defines the way in which the speaker intends to accomplish his objective. E.g.: one can get another to do him or her a favor either by begging or asking.

3. Degree of strength of the illocutionary point: it is the capacity of an enunciated act to reach the intended objective. E.g.: “beg” has a higher degree than “ask.” It is interesting to note that whoever begs is at the same time asking, but not the other way around.

4. Propositional content conditions: defines the type of content on which the act can deal. E.g.: you cannot make a prediction about the past or declare a library now as “inaugurated” next year.

5. Preparatory conditions: defines what must be presupposed so that the act can be carried out. E.g.: it is necessary that the person who will perform the baptism of a child have some appropriate title of authority.

6. Sincerity conditions: defines which psychological state is being expressed during the performance of an act. E.g.: whoever makes a statement is expressing his belief that the propositional content is the case (even if he does not really believe it, which characterizes what we call a “lie”).

7. Degree of strength of the sincerity conditions: the degree of strength of the illocutionary point is closely linked with how much the speaker wants to achieve his objective. E.g.: the person who begs wants a certain thing to happen more than the person who just asks.

These components are necessary for us to understand what are the success and satisfaction conditions of the illocutionary act. Although every act is a successful attempt, it can be performed defectively (e.g., when a speaker believes that the content of his promise is of benefit to his hearer, but it is not) or it can be failed (e.g. when a speaker tries to fire an employee of a company by saying “I hereby declare you fired from this company” without having the necessary authority to do so). An act carried out without defect is, for example, when someone makes a promise fulfilling the following conditions: it is necessary that that person meets the preparatory conditions so that one can carry out the action with which one has committed oneself and it is of benefit to the hearer; meet the sincerity conditions that one intends to fulfill the promise; and meet the propositional content conditions that it is a future action. Having fulfilled one’s promise (i.e., if the future events took place because of one’s promise and for no other reason) we say that one’s promise has been performed without defect and it was satisfied. This act is a plainly happy act.

So if that person says “I promise to go to the movies with you tomorrow” (one has accomplished the commissive illocutionary point, with a commissive force), as long as one manages to communicate this in some way, the act has been performed (one has tried to accomplish something to the hearer already putting oneself in a commitment with him or her). This person has done so with the “degree = //promise//” (which is less than “degree = //swear//,” for example, as this puts the speaker into a commitment with the further preparatory condition that one risks the loss of a value that is important to him or her, such as “I swear on my mother” etc.) and this characterizes a way of achieving “mode (//promise//).” However, the act will only be satisfied if the promise is actually fulfilled, i.e., if the future events of the promise’s content were fulfilled due to the speaker's actions in favor of this outcome (in this case, going to the cinema with the hearer tomorrow).

The fact that the speaker did not manage to fulfill what he promised does not mean that he was being insincere about his ability or intention to fulfill it. This also does not mean that the speaker uttered “nothing.” The hearer could say: “you promised, but you didn't keep it. That was not a promise! It was like you were silent.” Searle argues that the act is defined at the moment the speaker decides what he intends to accomplish, and that instant is a fixed and real moment in the world (Searle’s Naive Realism). If he is accused of lying, this will not remove the pre-existing sincerity that there was in his intention, even if this reveals an epistemological problem about the following question: how can we know that he was sincere? As we are not omniscient, we say that only the speaker will know and we should expect accessible evidence to contribute to the elucidation of this fact.

Searle, in Expression and Meaning (1979)SEARLE, J. R. Expression and Meaning. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979., will present the taxonomy of types of illocutionary acts and the goals we can accomplish. For him, that number is exhausted at five. He believes that in practice we would hardly have any type of act that does not fit into this classification.

In order to get a better understanding of this classification, however, the notion of Direction of Fit is first necessary (Searle; Vanderveken, 1985SEARLE, J. R.; VANDERVEKEN, D. Foundations of Illocutionary Logic. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985., p.92). There are four directions in the relationship between speech and the world (objects of reality): 1. Language-world: when we describe the world as it is, that is, when the content of the enunciation fits the world; 2. World-language: when the world must adapt to the content of what was stated; 3. Double-direction: when the enunciation, under the right conditions, transforms and at the same time describes the world as it is; 4. Null direction: when the enunciation is irrelevant to the constitution of the world and only expresses a psychological state in relation to it.

By the way, such directions of fit are actually grounded in an even more fundamental realm than speech acts themselves. Searle, despite having written his work Speech Acts in 1969SEARLE, J. R. Speech Acts. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1969., noticed only later (1983)SEARLE, J. R. Intentionality. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. that the functioning of speech acts was based on a more primitive mental property which he called intentionality (a word that also names the work in which he talks about this property, Intentionality, 1983). Intentionality is about our directional capacity which relates mental states to objects and states of affairs in the world. As the name implies, it is naturally based on this directionality that the directions of fit between mental states and things are founded, and when someone has the intention of performing an illocutionary act and expressing one of these states (e.g., an affirmation is an expression of a belief in the truth of the expressed propositional content or an order that expresses the desire that the hearer perform a future action to the speaker or a promise that expresses an intention to carry out a future course of actions in favor of his hearer), the directions of fit of mental states are “transferred” to the illocutionary acts performed.

Nicholas Fotion (2021)FOTION, N. John Searle. Encyclopedia Britannica. Disponível em: https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Searle, 2021.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Joh... mentions in the Encyclopedia Britannica two very important concepts present in Searle’s theory regarding the faculties of the mind and their relationship with the world. They are the Network and the Background: “According to Searle, speech acts do not function in isolation. They are embedded within a ‘Network’ of unarticulated beliefs and other mental states and within a ‘Background’” (Fotion, 2021FOTION, N. John Searle. Encyclopedia Britannica. Disponível em: https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Searle, 2021.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Joh... , about the entry “John Searle”). In other words, the network connects the various concepts we use in such a way as to allow us to understand, for example, that if someone invites us to go to a restaurant, that person knows that only go to restaurants those who know what it means to be hungry, to have a meal, sitting at the table, money, etc. On the other hand, the background is a more problematic concept, as Daniel Barbiero (2004)BARBIERO, D. Background, the Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind. Disponível em: https://sites.google.com/site/minddict/background-the, 2004.
https://sites.google.com/site/minddict/b... says in the Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind in the entry “Background, the.” Searle had to define, to avoid the infinite regress that we “represent representations” in order to understand them, a non-representational plane (assuming this negation is no longer a representation; and another regress would arise. This is why it is problematic) on which we have a deep dimension and another local dimension. Deep down, the human mind must be able to perform innate and universal skills (there would be a lack of representation) such as walking, eating and simply seeing in order not to bump into things. In the local dimension, the human mind must be able to identify some objects and behaviors that are almost naturally recognizable in a given culture or minimally defined society (such as knowing that a fork serves to bring food from a plate to one’s mouth). Without these primary elements of the mind, we would not be able to perform any kind of speech act, direct or indirect, and therefore, Searle defends the primacy of the mind over language.

Back to the classification, we have Assertives: which describe the world and present reasons in doing that and therefore have direction of fit 1. E.g.: affirm, assert, describe, etc.; the Directives: whose function is to make the other carry out something of the speaker’s desire or order and therefore have direction of fit 2 with regard to the hearer (the latter’s actions must suit the content of the enunciation). E.g..: command, ask, pray, etc.; the Commissives: which commit the speaker to a certain future course of his actions and therefore have direction of fit 2 with regard to the speaker (the latter’s actions must suit the content of the enunciation). E.g.: promise, consent, threaten etc.; Declarations: allow us to define a feature of the world under the right conditions, which automatically describes it, and therefore have direction of fit 3. E.g.: declare, name, indicate, etc. Lastly, we have the Expressives, which merely express a psychological state relative to a certain presupposed state of affairs, not adding (as in Directives, Commissives and Declarations) or taking away (as in Assertives) any aspect in (of) the world and have therefore direction of fit 4. E.g.: apologize, thank, congratulate, etc.

With this in mind we can visualize why there are only five types of illocutionary points: since there are only four ways of interacting with the world through language, and considering the fact that directives and commissives differ only in that future action of the propositional content must be carried out respectively by the hearer and the speaker, counting as two types of objectives, we have 3 (assertives, declarations, expressives) + 2 (directives, commissives) = 5 ways of performing an action through language.

Knowing this, we are able to perform all kinds of illocutionary acts directly, that is, when we intend to perform each of these actions and literally use the so-called performative verbs (such as those in the examples given above) for this purpose. It is worth remembering that more than one verb of this type is capable of meeting the same objective of the speaker. For example, whoever asserts or describes, practices the same assertive act, but the first has a greater degree of strength than the second. Although it is the same goal, if the speaker has good evidence to choose to assert rather than just describe, he will have his action attempt with greater efficiency and more convincing power, that is, a greater degree of strength of the illocutionary goal.

3 On the Relationship between the Theories Seen

There is, however, a way to perform illocutionary acts indirectly. That is, by enunciating (doing) one thing, we were actually wanting to do something else. If we remember correctly, this is exactly Grice’s definition of implicature that we saw earlier. The main difficulty of this, which makes the study quite curious, is how it is possible for the hearer to understand that what the speaker said was not what was “really” said. The information must have been conveyed in some way, or conversation would be impossible.

Márcio Galvão, in his short article “Atos de fala indiretos e implicaturas conversacionais” [“Indirect speech acts and conversational implicatures”] (2007, p.1), highlights the method suggested by Grice “whose strength lies precisely in the reconstruction of the implicit elements and indirect uses of language (…) that are beyond the reach of any purely semantic or syntactic analysis.”⁷ 7 In Portuguese: “cuja força está justamente na reconstrução dos elementos implícitos e usos indiretos da linguagem (…) que estão fora do alcance de qualquer análise puramente semântica ou sintática.” He also highlights that, from the point of view of the theory proposed by Austin, “almost all use of language is indirect (not explicit)”⁸ 8 In Portuguese: “quase todo o uso da linguagem é indireto (não explícito).” (GALVÃO, 2007GALVÃO, M. Atos de fala indiretos e implicaturas conversacionais. Disponível em: https://www.academia.edu/42733938/Atos_de_fala_indiretos_e_implicaturas_conversacionais, 2007.
https://www.academia.edu/42733938/Atos_d... , p.3) and that, although we have explicit performative verbs at our disposal, where there is a coincidence between saying the verb and performing the act, as in “to promise” and “to name,” there are certainly non-explicit (indirect) ways of expressing yourself.

Next, we will see the classic example of an indirect act that Searle brings in the second chapter of Expression and Meaning (1979, p.73)SEARLE, J. R. Expression and Meaning. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979.:

1. A proposal was made and the answer was that he has to study; 2. The hearer is cooperating with the conversation; 3. A relevant (cooperative) answer would be: accept or reject; 4. The answer, however, did not take this form; 5. Probably the hearer meant something else; 6. Studying should take the same amount of time as going to the movies; 7. Therefore he cannot do both at the same time; 8. To accept a proposal, the hearer must believe that he can fulfill the commitment; 9. The hearer assumes that he will not be able to comply due to studying for the test; 10. Therefore, he really must have refused the proposal.

It is evident that this analysis is identical to the bus example above. We notice that it is in step 4 of this example that the hearer (from now on, the one who made the proposal), observing the CP, assuming in 3 that the speaker was being cooperative, realizes that the speaker violated the maxim of quantity and relevance, since the illocutionary act expected in the answer would be one of the commissive type (the speaker would commit or not to go to the cinema, respectively, accepting or refusing), but an assertive type was found (the speaker described a situation in the world, namely, that there is a test that will be given to him tomorrow and it is a fact that he has to study), although we can also see it as a commissive type whose commitment is to an activity other than going to the cinema with the hearer (in any case way, it would still be irrelevant to what the hearer expected, in addition to the fact that this view would characterize a beg of a principle, since the question we are analyzing is precisely how an affirmation becomes a commitment and we cannot assume so in advance). In 5 the calculation of the implicature starts. In 6, the hearer perceives that there is a reason, exposed in an affirmation, that would prevent the speaker from accepting the proposal and this should be reason enough to assume that, if there is a reason to refuse and this reason was put in evidence in a mere statement, so the refusal was really what was said (the real intention of the speaker).

Searle calls the Primary Act the one which was in fact the intention of the speaker, although implicit (in the example above, the refusal), and the Secondary Act the one through which the primary act was conveyed with the literal meaning of the words and expressions used and, therefore, in an evident way (in the example above, the one of affirmation). It then becomes clear that it is possible to perform one type of illocutionary act by enunciating another, but it is only due to the elements of the context that the primary act is understood. In the cinema example just given, the hearer probably had contingent knowledge (specific context) of the speaker’s school obligations, which he usually fulfills; that the speaker usually studies for tests for a long period of time that takes up the whole day or just the scheduled time for the exhibition of the movie; also, the full knowledge (general context) that it would be physically impossible to be in two places at the same time.

4 Some Examples

To conclude, we will look at the most famous examples of indirect speech acts that we deal with daily without even realizing the eccentricity of communication. We will use the notions of Grice and Searle and analyze each of them in detail. The main feature of these acts is being able to perform one of the five types of illocutionary acts in the form of another of these five types. It is important not to confuse this with acts that occur at the same time, as when an act of a certain degree of strength obviously presupposes all acts of the same type with lower degrees of strength. The high degree of informality of the examples is intentional, since the objective of this work is precisely to deal with the philosophical aspects of everyday language.

We will separate here five very common groups of types of acts that “transform” into another according to the speaker’s various purposes. The symbol “→” will be used to represent this transformation or, preferably, this disguise. They are the Affirmations, Questions, Orders, Promises and Assumptions. According to Searle, the main motivation for the speaker to opt for this disguise is the attempt to sound more well-mannered, polite, especially when a directive or an insult is going to be made, to achieve a certain euphemism and not make it so obvious that the other is doing one a favor or fulfilling one’s wish, as if the hearer owed him something or was some kind of servant of the speaker (which would sound pejorative).

In all cases, the participants of the conversation will be watching the CP and relying on each other’s conversational cooperation. However, it is very important to expose the exact moment when this phenomenon occurs, which may sound a little repetitive during the examples. Let us first analyze the group of Affirmations:

Affirmations → Insults/Compliments: an assertive can hide an expressive when using irony, that is, saying one thing, but meaning exactly the opposite. Ex.: “Mário is an Albert Einstein,” meaning that he is the complete opposite of one of the most revered and famous scientists in history. This example could also be used as a compliment (and it wouldn't be ironic). The use of metaphors is also a common way of indirectly insulting or praising. E.g.: “Suedson is a machine” can mean that he is “automatic” and not very expressive emotionally, as well as meaning that he works hard and efficiently without complaining.

In these two cases, there is a violation of the maxim of relevance (Relation category), when the speaker purposely compares the individuals in question with people and objects which share some property that should become evident to the hearer who observes the CP and tries to find a reason for the speaker to have “deviated” from the subject. After all, it is obvious that Mario is not Albert Einstein, just as a person cannot be a machine. The main features of these apparently irrelevant mentions become the center of attention, precisely because they are irrelevant, but the hearer assumes that the speaker is being cooperative. The decision for the precise calculation will depend on elements of the context.

We can also talk about a mother who, upon hearing the complaints of her son who calls her “annoying,” replies that “your mother is the annoying one!” The son, if he is smart enough, will notice that his mother apparently insulted herself or, looking at the CP and counting on her cooperation, might assume that the violation of the quality maxim means something else, because he does not believe that she, responding angry to him, really thinks that she is annoying. The mother’s utterance can be translated into an insult, which calls her own son a bastard (after all, she insulted a supposedly other mother of the boy, which was not her).

Assertion → Suggestion: an assertive can hide a directive. For example, someone might say to a friend, who clearly has a beard that is too full and untidy, that “Friend, the barber has children to raise.” The hearer, observing the CP and assuming the cooperation of the speaker, will look for a reason why he said this “out of the blue.” The speaker may not even know which barber the friend usually goes to, much less if he has children. Despite this violation of the maxim of quality, since he has no evidence to say what he said, the important thing is to note that the violation of his maxim of relevance will awaken in the hearer what is most notable in this utterance: that someone who has children need money to feed them. Therefore, it would be interesting if people with excessive beards were to trim it and pay for the service.

It is also possible to make a request via a claim. Let’s imagine a guy interested in a woman at a party and, as he approaches her, he says: “I don’t know your name.” The woman, observing the CP and assuming the young man's cooperation, notices that, by violating the maxim of quantity by bringing such an obviousness into the conversation, he is suggesting (asking) that she tell him her name, as if the fact that the young man did not know that bothered him so much that he had to expose it.

Affirmation → Commitment: an assertive can hide a commissive. Suppose that a boy with no money asks his neighbor to go buy him some bread. The neighbor agrees to do the favor and the boy thanks her. Then she says: “It will cost five dollars.” The boy, cunningly, says: “I thank you even more.” In this case, it was not the neighbor’s intention to offer to pay for the bread, but the young man, abusing her goodwill, made it seem that her statement “it will cost five dollars” was an extension of the favor she had undertaken to do. The boy, observing the CP and assuming her cooperation, proceeds to induce that the neighbor has violated the maxim of quantity, and makes it seem as if she purposely omitted that it will cost “him” five dollars because she was willing to pay. We call those cases, where the implicature occurs without the speaker’s intention, misunderstandings (even though the hearer “understood” that wrong way on purpose).

Someone might also say, “I am ashamed of what I did.” Anyone who is ashamed of something or regrets it is not necessarily saying that he will not do what he did again. However, a hearer, observing the CP and assuming the cooperation of the speaker, may assume that his violation of the maxim of quantity, when the speaker willingly adds the expression of regret to his utterance, implies that he not only despises what he did, but he also says he won’t do it again. In this case, an expressive (through an affirmation) has become a commissive.

Affirmation → Accusation/Confession: an assertive can hide a different assertive (with different propositional content conditions, different degree of strength of the illocutionary point and different degree of strength of the sincerity conditions). Suppose two children commenting on the possibility of cheating on a school test. One of them states: “you can’t cheat on the test with teacher Roberto in the classroom.” The other child, observing the CP and counting on the cooperation of his colleague, may end up assuming that he has already tried to cheat on the test with teacher Roberto in the classroom at least once. This is due to the fact that the speaker violated the maxim of quality when, instead of showing doubt about the possibility of succeeding in cheating, since that was what was being discussed, he showed “certainty,” due to the fact that he had affirmed and not asked, configuring a confession on his part (which is the accusation of himself, but with a greater degree of strength of sincerity conditions, since we assume the belief that someone knows more about oneself than others know this one). It illustrates the famous expression: “you don't even know how to lie.”

An affirmation can also hide a prediction. Suppose a reunion of a group of friends few hours before the New Year’s Eve. One of them asks a friend with a watch: “Please, what time is it?” The bearer of the watch replies: “There are just fifteen minutes left.” The first, observing the CP and assuming that his hearer is cooperating with the conversation, assumes that it must be fifteen minutes before midnight on the 31st of December. This is because the bearer of the watch has clearly violated the maxim of quantity by not saying for what time those fifteen minutes are left. That is, the hearer understands (and predicts) that there is fifteen minutes to midnight even if he does not have this information literally.

Now let’s go to the Questions group.

Question → Invitation: a directive can become a different directive (on conditions on the propositional content, degree of strength of the illocutionary point and degree of strength of the sincerity conditions). A question is a directive in the sense that the speaker is requesting that his hearer fulfill his wish, namely, that he gives him some information. Suppose that two friends are talking, and it is a fact that one of them travels abroad every six months, while the other has never been on a plane before. The first then asks the other, while buying plane tickets on a website: “Have you ever traveled by plane?” The second, observing the CP and counting on the cooperation of the first, assumes that the violation of the maxim of relevance and quantity, when the first brings up a fact that is obvious to both (that the hearer has never traveled by plane) while performing an action which is clearly capable of changing it (by buying tickets) might be hiding that he is inviting the other to travel by plane.

It is also possible to make challenges with a question. Suppose that two men are arguing and one of them says something that the other does not like. The hearer then retorts: “what did you say?” The first person, observing the CP and counting on the cooperation of the other, seeing a clear discontent in his face, will certainly not assume that his hearer did not listen to what he said. In fact, faced with the violation of the maxim of quality, the man who felt offended pretends not to have heard what he heard, actually meaning: “I dare you to say it again!” that is, a challenge.

We cannot fail to mention the most famous example, namely when a question becomes a request. At a restaurant table, while two men are eating together, one of them, who is far from the saltshaker, then asks: “could you pass the salt?” The man, watching the CP and counting on the other’s cooperation, will assume that the other is not asking if he has the physical ability to reach out and pass the salt to him. The speaker, by violating the maxim of quality, since he knew well that his hearer was perfectly capable of carrying out his request, asked him in this way, not to know the answer, but if the friend could do the favor to pass the salt (almost as if he couldn't do it, and if he did it despite that, it would be a great show of kindness, which is a compliment to his hearer).

Question → Help: A directive can become a commissive. Imagine two women talking and one of them is lamenting her precarious financial situation. From there we can already visualize the interesting case of an expressive becoming a directive, namely, that an expression of dissatisfaction about something can be a request for help. By violating the maxim of relevance, one would not have discussed the matter with someone else who could not help (a stranger or enemy, for example). After that, the hearer then asks the question to the complainant: “so, is your problem money?” The complainant thus raises her hopes, as by observing the CP and counting on the friend’s cooperation, she assumes that her understanding of the financial problem exposed through a question would probably indicate that the friend intends to help her. Violation of the maxim of quantity suggests that she would not listen to her friend and would have checked out what her problem really is (if she heard her correctly) with the question if she had not intended to help. It would be unfortunate, though, if whoever asked the question “Is your problem money?” complete: “mine too.”

Next, for reasons of economy, we will see only one example respectively for the Order, Promise and Assumption groups.

Order → Expressive: a directive can hide an expressive. Suppose a general who has taken great sympathy with a certain battalion he has trained utters aloud the following order: “I order you not to die in battle!” It is an order which is actually part of everyone’s desire to fulfill, but it is not a matter of choice, exactly. Especially if the general has tears in his eyes while making such an enunciation, it will be clear to the brave battalion that, while it watches the CP and counts on the general’s cooperation and in front of a violation of the maxim of manner, to carry out an order whose propositional content and preparatory conditions do not exactly (directly) concern the battalion’s competence can only mean that their general wishes (and expresses this wish) that they return home alive.

Promise → Compliment: a commissive can become an expressive. Imagine someone who has just launched a book and is inviting friends to read it. While everyone will say they're going to read it, one of them says, “That’s cool! I promise you that I will read.” The hearer, who observes the CP and counts on his friend’s cooperation, assumes that his violation of the maxim of quantity, by insisting on using the word “promise” to emphasize his commitment (since it is possible to promise by not using the explicit performative, as others have) works as a compliment to your work.

Assumption → Affirmation: an assertive can become an assertive with a higher degree of strength of the illocutionary point. Imagine that two competitors are playing chess and one of them, who is about to perform a clear checkmate, still says to the other: “I think you lost.” The audience, observing the CP and relying on the cooperation of the competitor who enunciated, assumes that the violation of the maxim of quality, when the near-winner (who only expects official recognition of victory in the case that he intends to win) demonstrates doubt about the state of affairs of the world that he won instead of certainty about it, that is to say he was just trying to be polite in front of the loser, who did a great game.

We could still mention the curious case of Hybrid Illocutionary Acts, which, as Searle says, are “events that can be, but need not be, illocutionary acts.” (Searle; Vandeveken, 1985SEARLE, J. R.; VANDERVEKEN, D. Foundations of Illocutionary Logic. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985., p.181). For example, we have the acts of “warning,” “predicting,” or “remembering.” When we see black clouds gathering more and more in the sky, this could be a forecast of rain, which reminds us to go out with an umbrella in hand; the migration of certain birds, as we see them flying, makes a prediction and warns us of winter; certain superstitions believe that the presence of a butterfly that “accidentally” enters a house predicts some case of death in the family; there is even the case of a ship builder who said it was indestructible but, when he sees it sinking, he finds himself “offended” by the laws of physics (or, if he is religious, by God).

In short, these are those acts that can be done by us, linguistic beings, but can also be perceived (interpreted) by us from non-conscious (non-linguistic) sources, as if we embody them. Despite being direct illocutionary acts, they seem somewhat indirect, as they were not “exactly” (consciously) planned, although they disguised themselves in a natural event and in our common tendency to see a rational cause for any effect (in general, a pattern in phenomena) as well as cooperation in conversation.

With that, we end the examples. It is obvious that they are countless and this classification into five groups is purely arbitrary, with the aim of illustrating only a few cases. The attentive reader may have noticed that the examples of the Affirmations group, as well as the violations of the maxim of relevance, are the most numerous. No wonder, ordinary conversation always tries to simplify the work for successful communication and the least expensive ways to express yourself will always be the most trivial, which are the simple exposition of a thought (statement) without much rigor in checking its veracity or strict relevance to the subject (violation of the maxims of quality and relevance, respectively).

Conclusion

We hope to have demonstrated, as Grice wanted, that ordinary language, despite its name, does not imply an empty linguistic system, much less an inefficient one. On the contrary, our tendency to simplify things is so great that not even Formal Logic, which intended precisely to follow this clearer and more evident path of simplification, managed to deal with all the variables of a constant impetus for the reform of communication in favor of ease and cooperation. With the help of Grice's Theory of Implicatures, which seems to be the basis for any theory within Linguistic Pragmatics, we had good conditions to understand well how this other very important study of Indirect Speech Acts works, which reveals all the details that Grice didn't elaborate on his short article.

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