How performatives really work: A reply to searle

Bach, Kent; Harnish, Robert M.

doi:10.1007/bf00635834

Cited by 58 publications

(37 citation statements)

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“…I think that this view is a faithful explication of Searle's 'declaration' in Searle (1989). My terminology, as well as the analogy, avoids mistaking this act as the 'declarative' in conventional speech acts (see Bach and Harnish 1979). In the final section, the present account will be aligned and contrasted with the competing work by Searle and Bach and Harnish in more detail.…”

Section: The Last Step: Definementioning

confidence: 97%

“…Section 3 introduced a semantic treatment of hereby and performative verbs which captures the observation that performative utterances refer to themselves (Bach and Harnish 1992;Jary 2007; see Reichenbach's 1966 notion of token reflexivity as a predecessor). The present section introduced a second way to achieve self-referential readings.…”

Section: Low Scope Existentialsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Not any old event e and verb VERB are such that speakers can attempt to define ''e be of kind VERB''. The resulting picture takes up and clarifies many remarks to this point in Searle (1989), Bach and Harnish (1992) and later literature. To make or not to make the definition defines the boundary between descriptive and performative uses of performative sentences.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…For instance, the version of his theory that Bach and Harnish (1992) reconstruct and criticize can perhaps be read into the formulations in Searle (1989). However, I do not think that their interpretation does justice to the original proposal.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…• Are performative acts primarily statements of a proposition, which then bring about the performative act (as claimed e.g. by Bach and Harnish 1992)? • Or is there a primary performative act?…”

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confidence: 99%

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Hereby explained: an event-based account of performative utterances

Eckardt

2012

Linguist and Philos

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Several authors propose that performative speech acts are self-guaranteeing due to their self-referential nature (Searle 1989;Jary 2007). The present paper offers an analysis of self-referentiality in terms of truth conditional semantics, making use of Davidsonian events. I propose that hereby can denote the ongoing act of information transfer (more mundanely, the utterance) which thereby enters the meaning of the sentence. The analysis will be extended to cover self-referential sentences without the adverb hereby. While self-referentiality can be integrated in ordinary truth conditional semantic analysis without being a mystery, the resulting account shows that self-referentiality in this sense is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for performative utterances. I propose that the second ingredient of performative utterances consists in an act of the speaker defining her utterance to be an act of the respective kind. The final theory can successfully predict the performativity, or lack thereof, of a wide range of performative sentences, and leads to an explicated interface between compositional sentence meaning and speech act.

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Section: The Last Step: Definementioning

confidence: 97%

Section: Low Scope Existentialsmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Hereby explained: an event-based account of performative utterances

Eckardt

2012

Linguist and Philos

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Bibliography

2006

The Handbook of Pragmatics

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Pragmatics and the Philosophy of Language

Bach¹

2006

The Handbook of Pragmatics

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Many topics in the philosophy of language pertain to pragmatics and there are many to which pragmatics pertains. Ones of the first sort, in PHILOSOPHY OF PRAGMATICS, include performatives, speech acts, communication, conversational implicature, and the question of how to distinguish pragmatic from semantic matters. Topics of the second sort, in APPLIED PRAGMATICS, concern various terms, distinctions, and problems of philosophical interest. Our survey of them will illustrate how certain seemingly semantic problems can be resolved by enforcing a cogent semantic-pragmatic distinction, for in many cases apparent matters of meaning turn out to be matters of use. Brief BackgroundDuring the first half of the twentieth century, philosophy of language was generally concerned less with language use than with meanings of linguistic expressions. Indeed, meanings were abstracted from the linguistic items that have them, and (indicative) sentences were often equated with statements, which in turn were equated with propositions. Although Frege, the founder of modern philosophy of language, noted various respects in which there is more to the total signification of an utterance than the thought it expresses, he was mainly concerned with the latter. And it is no exaggeration to say that such philosophers as Russell and the early Wittgenstein paid only lip service to natural language, never mind its use, for they were more interested in deep and still daunting problems about representation, which they hoped to solve by studying the properties of ideal ("logically perfect") languages, in which forms of sentences mirror the forms of what sentences symbolize. Russell, with his logical atomism, and Wittgenstein, with his picture theory of meaning, neglected non-assertive uses of language, as did philosophers generally. As Austin complains at the beginning of How to Do Things with Words, it was assumed by philosophers (he had the logical positivists in mind, like Schlick, Carnap, and Ayer) that "the business of a [sentence] can only be to 'describe' some state of affairs, or to 'state some fact,' which it must do either truly or falsely" (1962, p.1).Austin and the later Wittgenstein changed all that. Austin observed that there are many uses of language which have the linguistic appearance of fact-stating but are really quite different. Philosophy of Pragmatics Speech acts and communicationThis section is intended to complement the Speech Acts and Implicature in Part I of this volume. From a philosophical point of view, the important questions concern three relationships: between explicit performatives and illocutionary acts generally, between illocutionary acts and communicative intentions, and between what a speaker says and what he thereby intends to communicate. A somewhat historical approach to these topics, through the work of Austin, Strawson, and Grice, will perhaps shed some conceptual light on the main issues they raise. Performatives and illocutionary forceParadoxical though it may seem, there are certain things one can do ju...

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How performatives really work: A reply to searle

Cited by 58 publications

References 6 publications

Hereby explained: an event-based account of performative utterances

Hereby explained: an event-based account of performative utterances

Bibliography

Pragmatics and the Philosophy of Language

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