What is this thing called Philosophy of Language? by Kemp Gary

Author:Kemp, Gary
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

• 2 SPEECH ACT THEORY

Yet another way is to say something like:

I ask you whether you are going to eat raw fish.

Indeed, instead of the rather complicated conventions in English by which we express force, we could eliminate distinctions of mood entirely from the language, and employ a set of operators like ‘I ask you whether…’:

I assert that you are going to eat raw fish.

I ask you whether you are going to eat raw fish.

I command that you are going to eat raw fish.

In his famous paper ‘Performative Utterances’ (1961), John Austin noticed that such forms do exist in English, and furthermore that their grammatical structure can be misleading, at least to a philosopher. Consider the second one, ‘I ask you whether you are going to eat raw fish’. Superficially, one might say that this is really an assertion, namely an assertion that the speaker is asking the listener whether he or she is going to eat raw fish. But this, Austin held, is a confusion. The purpose of ‘I ask you’ is not to describe the speaker; when you utter ‘I ask you whether you are going to eat raw fish’, your aim is not to describe yourself. For it if it were, it looks as if you would be describing yourself falsely, and a wag could rightly say: ‘No you're not!’ The purpose of such an utterance, obviously, is to bring it about that the speaker asks a question whose content is expressed by the words that come after. This is clear from the fact that someone making that utterance, in the right circumstance, does thereby succeed in asking a question.

Austin's idea is that there are certain sorts of words such that, in saying them, one thereby performs a certain kind of act – the act which, on a more superficial view, they might seem to describe or announce. The point is clearer from examples like this:

I apologise.

I hereby bequeath my cigar case to my nephew.

I promise to do that.

I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth.

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