"Speech act theory"--a brief historical outline
under development!
Austin's hits upon a peculiar variety of institutional acts
When J.L. Austin's lecture series about words and deeds appeared in (1962) under the title "How to Do Things With Words", this was the beginning of a new area. Austin was originally dealing with a peculiar class of actions, able of performance by 'explicit formulas' like "I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth" and "I bequeath my watch to my brother". These are a peculiar variety of 'institutional acts' (acts whose existence rests upon collectively recognized views like 'To communicate ... is to perform ___'), characterised by the feature that for the performance of the act it is necessary to 'make public', in a sense, that the act is (being) performed—Austin famously speaks of the necessity of 'securing uptake' in other participants. Among the acts which seem to belong to this peculiar class are baptizing, bequeathing and wedding, but apparently also more mundane acts like promising, ordering and asking a question. Austin introduced a technical term to designate these acts: he baptized them "illocutionary acts". Click here for more details about Austin's conception of 'Illocutionary Acts'.
The term "Speech Act Theory" is introduced
So the performance of an 'illocutionary act' (in Austin's sense of the term) requires the
'securing of uptake'. To 'secure uptake', people typically communicate (though in fact, communication is not always necessary). Communication, in turn, typically takes place in the form
of verbal communication—speaking, in short (though non-verbal communication is often quite sufficient). Prematurely assuming an essential connection between 'illocutionary acts' and the
act of speaking (induced by some of Austin's own remarks), philosophers started using the terms 'illocutionary act' and 'speech act' interchangeably. The term "Speech Act Theory"
was established.
The terms "Illocutionary Act" and "Speech Act" become popular
The new subject quickly grew and developed. Or rather, the new terms, including in particular "illocutionary act" and "speech act",
became buzzwords, exerting truly magnetic attraction on all those who wanted to belong to the rich and famous in the philosophy of language. A two-digit number of approaches were published in
which the terms 'Illocutionary Act' and 'Speech Act' were given a central role, among them J.R. Searle's Speech Acts (1969), S. Schiffer's Meaning (1972), Sadock's Towards a
Linguistic Theory of Speech Acts (1974), Bach & Harnish's Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts and Searle's Expression and Meaning (1979).
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This continued to be true when new issues came in vogue within philosophy: the enthusiasm about the term "illocutionary" continued, but then a rather weird thing
happened: People started applying the term "illocutionary act" to all sorts of phenomena they were dealing with, but which are quite clearly not identical with those peculiar institutional
acts which Austin had considered. That means, philosophers started using the term "Illocutionary Act" for various other things, and even started re-defining the term "Illocutionary Act" in
various ways, accordingly. (This process started already with Austin's writings. Apparently, Austin believed that the acts he was investigating are strongly connected to language. Thus, he
intensely searched for grammatical or semantical peculiarities of what he called "performativce utterances", sentences whose very characteristic is that their utterance serves
the performance of an "Illocutionary act".)
How authors defined the term "illocutionary act", apparently, depended largely on what they happened to be interested in. [LINK!]:
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Then, the use of terms like "illocutionary act" and "illocutionary force" brimmed over and flooded vicinary studies such as
linguistics, literary studies, theology and religious studies, sociology and jurisprudence. Above all, however, being fresh and sexy, and associated with the notion of 'speech', then fashionable,
the notions "Speech Act" and "Speech Act Theory" captured the hearts of the famous and the rich amongst the philosophers of language by storm. Within barely fifteen years, at least five
very prominent, and very different, approaches to 'Speech Acts' ('Illocutionary Acts') appeared in press, including Alston's (1964) "Linguistic Acts", Searle's (1969) Speech Acts,
Schiffer's (1972) Meaning, Bach & Harnish's (1979) Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts, and Searle's (1979) Expression and Meaning.
The terms "Illocutionary Act" and "Speech Act" are (each) defined and re-defined in various
different ways
What may appear as a great success was in fact the beginning of a great disaster. While Austin had used the term "illocutionary act" for a certain kind of institutional actions, like christening and bequeathing, each of his (seeming) 'followers' used it for quite different things—things different, not only from what Austin referred to, but also (mostly) different from what each other philosopher used the term for.
W.P. Alston, for instance, uses the term for acts 'of saying'; S. Schiffer applies it to 'speaker meaning'; K. Bach & R.M. Harnish define the term for two different kinds of act—mere institutional acts on the one hand (which do not, nota bene, require the 'securing of uptake'); and for the expressing of an attitude on the other. Searle's 'classical' account, which is widely held to be an elaborate theory, offers several different, yet inconsistent hints concerning how 'Illocutionary Acts' might be defined. For a more thorough exposition of the differences between the leading "Speech Act" conceptions click here.
Different definitions refer to different subject matters
So different Speech Act Theorists define the terms 'Speech Act' and 'Illocutionary Act', in different ways. When you suggest this fact to philosophers, they often turn to the following optimistic speculation: The different definitions of the terms 'Speech Act' and 'Ilocutionary Act' are, surely, just different ways of capturing one phenomenon, one unitary phenomenon!—Unfortunately, on closer inspection this hopeful speculation simply proves false. De facto, the different definitions do pick out different phenomena. For an illustration of the diversity of issues picked out by those terms click here.)
"Speech act theorists" regularly confuse the different "speech act"
phenomena
Yet even when confronted with the diversity of issues picked our by those terms, many philosophers remain unconcerned about the consistency of 'Speech Act Theory', typically turning to another optimistic speculation: Speech Act Theorists, at least the more prominent ones, surely are quite aware of the terminological diversity, and the diversity of issues under consideration, and are able to keep track of the distinctions and differences within their debates.—Yet again, closer inspection shows that these hopes are in vain.
The SEP entry to 'Speech Acts', for example, perhaps the place where we would expect an accurate introduction most urgently, fails even to take notice of the definitorial variance, and accordingly just overlooks the diversity of subjects. It fails to define the notion in the beginning, then introduces its own idiosyncratic definition in passing, and continues to address various subject matters which do not fit this definition at all, blindly representing subject matters for whose formulation the terms 'Speech Act' or 'Illocutionary Acts' have been used. The variety and diversity of definitions given to the terms 'Illocutionary Act' and 'Speech Act', and the diversity of issues thereby addressed, remains perfectly unnoticed. For details click here.
The debate about 'How "performatives" (really) work', led between K. Bach & R.M. Harnish on the one hand, and J.R. Searle on the other, is another fine example of the perfect disregard of differences in the definition (and, consequently, the designation) of the term 'Illocutionary Act'. Both parties define (thus far: properly) 'performative utterances' in terms of 'illocutionary acts'. They then ask 'how "performatives" work'. Yet they have and apply different conceptions of what an 'illocutionary act' is supposed to be, and this renders the whole debate perfectly hollow. Searle uses the term for institutional acts; according to him, 'performatives' work by 'satisfying a convention' (the convention constituting the institutional act, of course). Bach & Harnish use the term for communicative behaviour; according to them, 'performatives' work by furthering the audience's identification of the communicated content. Obviously, the two parties are not giving different answers to a certain question, but rather different answers to different question. In fact the debate was completely pointless. For details click here.