Fatal consequences

This page may be the most important one on the present website. As we already said above, we expect you not to believe us, at first, that the central terms of "speech act theory" are polysemic, that polysemy involves heavy problems, and that due to such problems, "speech act theory" is in fact a useless (or rather, even detrimental) device.  In order to convince you nevertheless, the best thing we can probably do is to show that they are true, with reference to clear and concrete cases. This is what we are doing here.

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xxx faulty definition (e.g., unjustified re-definition); ...

xxx ambiguous expressions; ...

   + terminological incompetence

xxx ambiguous utterances; ... 

   + terminological incompetence

xxx misinterpretation;

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(2) From the very beginnings of "speech act theory", it had been a commonplace that the act of promising is a prototypical example of an "illocutionary act". Thus, the question, "Is promising an illocutionary act?" can actually be expected to deserve a clear and unambiguous answer, namely, yes. The polysemization of the term "illocutionary act", however, has the bewildering consequence that it is quite unclear whether what is actually supposed to be the prototype of an "illocutionary act" actually is such an act at all or not.

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(3) One of the best-established terms in the "theory of speech acts" is that of a "performative utterance", and the most prominent "speech-act theoretical debate" ever led was that between Searle and Bach/Harnish concerning the nature of "performative utterances". Since "performative utterances" are defined as performances of "illocutionary acts", their identity depends directly on the definition of "illocutionary acts". Yet the definitions of an "illocutionary act" which are applied by Searle on the one hand, and Bach/Harnish on the other, are quite different. Since in the debate, each of the parties sticks to their own definition, their claims about "performative utterances" are claims about completely different subjects. Accordingly, their respective arguments completely miss their targets. Since both parties fail to recognize that they are thematizing different subjects, the problem goes unnoticed. As a result, the debate, engaged though the two parties lead it, is in fact just perfectly futile.

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(4) Above we said that "speech act theorists" do not recognize the problems which of, and caused by, the polysemization of their central terms. The fatal consequences of this ignorance can well be seen in the SEP entry about "Speech Acts". Obviously, an acceptable entry to speech act theories would have to represent the actual state of the art concerning its subject matter. In the case of "Speech Acts", this would of course include an exposition of many different definitions and theories, proposed by authors such as JL Austin, WP Alston, JR Searle, S Schiffer, K Bach & RM Harnish, to name but a few. In the SEP entry to "Speech Acts", however, Mitchell Green represents not any of these theories, and none of the corresponding definitions. First, he does not define the subject of the entry at all. Then, even worse, he suddenly goes on to palm off his own idiosyncratic definition on to the reader, without discussing its (il-)legitimacy, but apparently just assuming its superiority over any of those proposed by the leading speech act theorists. In so doing he not only detains the identity of the entry's subject from the reader; he actively misleads them (1) by giving the impression that there exists a unitary definition of "illocutionary acts", and (2) by giving the impression that his own definition represented this unitary subject appropriately (both of these insinuations are quite false).

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