Different interests served by the term "illocutionary act"

Why, actually, do different authors use and determine one and the same term in different ways?, you may ask. Why do they not just use and determine one and the same term in one and the same unitary way?

(1) One of the reasons is surely that most philosophical authors, including the (perceived) champions of philosophy, do not analyse texts by other authors diligently enough to actually know precisely how those others use and define the terms they use.

(2) But another reason seems to be the fact that different "speech act theorists" use the characteristic terminology of "speech act theory" in hte pursuit of a tremendous diversity of interests. In general, the course of scholarly debates obviously is, among other things, strongly governed by the magic of fashion. Among the elements to which such magic adheres are new, shiny, fashionable terms. Since the late sixties, and during the seventies and eighties, the terms "speech act" and "illocutionary act" actually were shiny and fashionable in this sense. Thus, philosophers of language showed a strong tendency towards applying these terms, thereby representing themselves as part of a 'new movement' associated with the usage of those terms. This means that people who in fact were interested in (or working on) a diversity of subjects not only started applying these terms, but, indeed, started applying these terms for the diversity of different subjects they were studying, respectively.

What they did not is, analyse precisely what the term means, what exactly it refers to. What they did instead is, use and (re-)define the term in such a way as to express notions significant in their own field of interest.

Now what are the particular subjects which the leading "speech act theorists" were or are targeting? Here is a list of examples.

(a) The first of all "speech act theories" is that proposed by JL Austin (How to Do Things with Words, 1962). What intrigued Austin was a pecularity of certain sentences. The characteristic of these sentences is that they seem to express descriptions of actions and to be true or false, but really do not describe, and are not truth-evaluable (according to Austin). Examples are "I hereby name this ship the Queen Elizabeth", "I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow", and "I bequeath my watch to my brother". Such sentences are not true or false, and do not express descriptions, Austin contends; rather, they serve the performance of certain actions (he calls them "illocutionary acts") and are "happy" or "unhappy", depending on whether the performance of the act is "felicitous" or "infelicitous". The peculiar cases of acts Austin initially focussed on were acts which involve the creation of "institutional facts" (that term was established by JR Searle) by communicating to someone that the act is (being) performed. Austin defined "illocutionary acts" accordingly.

(b) WP Alston ("Linguistic Acts", 1964, and Illocutionary Acts and Sentence Meaning, 2000) is interested in the connection between rule-following and linguistic meaning (as famously adumbrated by Wittgenstein); he defines "illocutionary acts" (in 1964: "lingustic acts") as referring to behaviour following linguistic (or proto-linguistic) rules, that is, roughly, as referring to the act of saying something (in one sense of that term).

(c) S Schiffer, in Meaning (1972), was interested in Grice's idea of a speaker's meaning something (by or in making an 'utterance'--Grice develops an 'intention-based' alternative to Wittgenstein's 'rule-based' construal). Schiffer (1972, 95) defines "illocutionary acts" as as instances of 'speaker meaning'.

(d) JR Searle, in Speech Acts (1969), sets out to unite a number of different issues. According to his exposition, an "illocutionary act" satisfies the following features: 

(a) The "illocutionary act" is the minimal unit of communication.

(b) "Illocutionary acts" are constituted by constitutive rules, where these rules are the rules underlying the conventions of a particular language (the language used for the performance of the act, presumably).

While (a) represents the "illocutionary act" as an act of communication, (b) represents it as a "conventional act" in Austin's sense. (Since an act cannot possibly satisfy both conditions, Searle's conception is clearly inconsistent. Furthermore, his notion of "illocutionary-act" constituting rules which underlie the conventions of languages is obviously nonsense.)

(e) K Bach & RM Harnish (Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts, 1979) are mainly interested in how linguistic meaning facilitates communicative success. They define the term "illocutionary act" as referring to attempts at communication (perhaps including the success of these attempts--this remains unclear).

(f) Bach & Harnish do recognize that Austin used the term for (a certain variety of) institutional acts, and they apparently want to 'account for this' somehow; approximately following an idea of P.F. Strawson, they try so by additionally introducing the notion of a "conventional illocutionary act", defining that term as referring to institutional acts (the 'securing of uptake' plays no role here). (The characteristic "conventional"/"communicative" dichotomy in Bach & Harnish's account goes back to PF Strawson's article "Intention and Convention in Speech Acts" (1964))

? (g) JS Andersson (How to Define 'Performative', 1975) recognized that the term 'illocutionary act' is defined in many different ways; he suggested keeping track of the variety of different definitions (unfortunately, his contribution was largely overlooked or ignored by Speech Act Theorists).