Austin's Locutionary Act as Normative Commitment — Epoche B2
Searle's objection to the locutionary act attacks a claim Austin never made The received story The standard account of what happened to J. L. Austin's threefold distinction runs like this [1] . Austin separated the locutionary act [2] , saying something with a definite sense and reference, from the illocutionary act, what one does in saying it. John Searle then showed that the separation cannot be maintained [3] , because the locutionary level already carries force. Searle replaced it with the propositional act — reference and predication [4] , stripped of force — and speech act theory has proceeded on Searle's scheme since. This review argues that the received story misreports both parties. Austin did not claim that the locutionary act is force-free; he says the opposite, in the lecture that introduces the distinction, in a sentence that is among the most quoted things he wrote. What his distinction marks is something else, and Searle's replacement does not preserve it. The claim defended here is that the loss is real and that Searle's scheme is worse for it — a claim that a great many philosophers of language would reject, and I say at the end on what ground. 1955: what Austin set up Austin delivered How to Do Things with Words as the William James Lectures in 1955; the book appeared in 1962, after his death. Its first half develops a contrast between constative utterances, which state, and performative utterances, which do — 'I promise', 'I name this ship'. Its second half abandons that contrast, on the ground that stating is itself something one does, and replaces it with the threefold distinction that is now the standard apparatus. The locutionary act is introduced in the eighth lecture and analysed into three. The phonetic act is the uttering of noises. The phatic act is the uttering of those noises as words belonging to a vocabulary and conforming to a grammar. The rhetic act is the use of those words with a definite sense and reference. Performing all three is saying something. The illocutionary act is what one does in saying it: warning, promising, ordering, conceding. The perlocutionary act is what one brings about by saying it: persuading, alarming, deterring — effects that are not conventional and need not have been intended. Austin then writes the sentence that the received story leaves out: To perform a locutionary act is in general, we may say, also and eo ipso to perform an illocutionary act. He is not conceding a difficulty. He is stating the relationship. The three are not three separable performances laid end to end, one of which could be done on its own; they are three things one and the same utterance can be considered as. The saying is always also a doing. Austin's word for what he is doing here is abstraction: he is distinguishing aspects, not components. 1968: what Searle objected to Searle's paper 'Austin on Locutionary and Illocutionary Acts' appeared in 1968, and its argument turns on Austin's own examples. Austin illustrates the rhetic act by reports in indirect speech: he said that the cat was on the mat; he told me to get out; he asked whether it was in Oxford. Searle's observation is that the second and third of these already give the force. 'He told me to get out' does not report a neutral saying that I would get out; it reports an order or a request. So the reports Austin offers as reports of locutionary acts are not force-neutral, and if they are the tests for what a locutionary act is, the locutionary act is not force-neutral either. Searle draws the conclusion that Austin's category is unstable and should be replaced. In Speech Acts (1969) the residue is the propositional act: reference and predication, the p in F(p). Every complete illocutionary act consists of an illocutionary force F applied to a propositional content p. 'I promise to come', 'Will you come?' and 'Come!' share a content — you, coming — and differ only in F. The apparatus is clean and it has been enormously productive. Why the objection misses its target Set Searle's premise beside Austin's sentence. Searle's premise is that Austin's rhetic-act reports carry force. Austin's sentence says that performing a locutionary act is eo ipso performing an illocutionary act. These agree. Searle has established, carefully, something Austin had already asserted. The misfire has a source. If one assumes that Austin's three acts are three ingredients — that the locutionary act is a self-standing performance to which force is later added — then showing that force is present at the locutionary level is a refutation. But Austin never treats them as ingredients. He treats them as three ways of taking one act, and he says so when he says the doing is eo ipso in the saying. On that reading the presence of force at the locutionary level is not an anomaly to be explained away; it is what the doctrine predicts. What, then, is the distinction for? Not to isolate a force-free layer. It is to mark that the same utterance can be reported in two ways which can come apart in truth value. I can be right about what you said and wrong about what you did in saying it, or the reverse. What Searle's replacement cannot report Now the part that matters, and where the review's own claim lies. The propositional act is defined as reference plus predication. That is narrower than what Austin's rhetic act covers, and the narrowing has a cost. Consider a dispute about a recorded conversation. Everyone agrees that the speaker issued a warning; what is disputed is whether he said the animals were in the field or that they were near the road. That dispute is about the locution. Searle handles it easily, because it is a dispute about propositional content. Now consider a different dispute. Everyone agrees the content concerned the speaker's leaving; what is disputed is whether he said 'I am leaving' or 'Am I leaving?'. Here Searle's scheme has an awkwardness. The two utterances share their reference and predication, so they share p