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Speech acts.

Mitchell Green Mitchell Green Philosophy, University of Connecticut
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.200
Published online: 29 March 2017

Speech acts are acts that can, but need not, be carried out by saying and meaning that one is doing so. Many view speech acts as the central units of communication, with phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties of an utterance serving as ways of identifying whether the speaker is making a promise, a prediction, a statement, or a threat. Some speech acts are momentous, since an appropriate authority can, for instance, declare war or sentence a defendant to prison, by saying that he or she is doing so. Speech acts are typically analyzed into two distinct components: a content dimension (corresponding to what is being said), and a force dimension (corresponding to how what is being said is being expressed). The grammatical mood of the sentence used in a speech act signals, but does not uniquely determine, the force of the speech act being performed. A special type of speech act is the performative, which makes explicit the force of the utterance. Although it has been famously claimed that performatives such as “I promise to be there on time” are neither true nor false, current scholarly consensus rejects this view. The study of so-called infelicities concerns the ways in which speech acts might either be defective (say by being insincere) or fail completely.

Recent theorizing about speech acts tends to fall either into conventionalist or intentionalist traditions: the former sees speech acts as analogous to moves in a game, with such acts being governed by rules of the form “doing A counts as doing B”; the latter eschews game-like rules and instead sees speech acts as governed by communicative intentions only. Debate also arises over the extent to which speakers can perform one speech act indirectly by performing another. Skeptics about the frequency of such events contend that many alleged indirect speech acts should be seen instead as expressions of attitudes. New developments in speech act theory also situate them in larger conversational frameworks, such as inquiries, debates, or deliberations made in the course of planning. In addition, recent scholarship has identified a type of oppression against under-represented groups as occurring through “silencing”: a speaker attempts to use a speech act to protect her autonomy, but the putative act fails due to her unjust milieu.

performative
illocutionary force
communicative intentions
perlocution
felicity condition
speaker meaning
presupposition
indirect speech act
illocutionary silencing

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What is a Speech Act?

A speech act is an utterance that serves a function in communication. We perform speech acts when we offer an apology, greeting, request, complaint, invitation, compliment, or refusal. A speech act might contain just one word, as in "Sorry!" to perform an apology, or several words or sentences: "I’m sorry I forgot your birthday. I just let it slip my mind." Speech acts include real-life interactions and require not only knowledge of the language but also appropriate use of that language within a given culture.

Here are some examples of speech acts we use or hear every day:

Greeting: "Hi, Eric. How are things going?" Request: "Could you pass me the mashed potatoes, please?" Complaint: "I’ve already been waiting three weeks for the computer, and I was told it would be delivered within a week." Invitation: "We’re having some people over Saturday evening and wanted to know if you’d like to join us." Compliment: "Hey, I really like your tie!" Refusal: "Oh, I’d love to see that movie with you but this Friday just isn’t going to work."

Speech acts are difficult to perform in a second language because learners may not know the idiomatic expressions or cultural norms in the second language or they may transfer their first language rules and conventions into the second language, assuming that such rules are universal. Because the natural tendency for language learners is to fall back on what they know to be appropriate in their first language, it is important that these learners understand exactly what they do in that first language in order to be able to recognize what is transferable to other languages. Something that works in English might not transfer in meaning when translated into the second language. For example, the following remark as uttered by a native English speaker could easily be misinterpreted by a native Chinese hearer:

Sarah: "I couldn’t agree with you more. " Cheng: "Hmmm…." (Thinking: "She couldn’t agree with me? I thought she liked my idea!")

An example of potential misunderstanding for an American learner of Japanese would be what is said by a dinner guest in Japan to thank the host. For the invitation and the meal the guests may well apologize a number of times in addition to using an expression of gratitude (arigatou gosaimasu) -- for instance, for the intrusion into the private home (sumimasen ojama shimasu), the commotion that they are causing by getting up from the table (shitsurei shimasu), and also for the fact that they put their host out since they had to cook the meal, serve it, and will have to do the dishes once the guests have left (sumimasen). American guests might think this to be rude or inappropriate and choose to compliment the host on the wonderful food and festive atmosphere, or thank the host for inviting them, unaware of the social conventions involved in performing such a speech act in Japanese. Although such compliments or expression of thanks are also appropriate in Japanese, they are hardly enough for native speakers of Japanese -- not without a few apologies!

Back to Speech Acts .

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(pragmatics) Goal-directed actions performed with words in interpersonal communication, defined primarily with reference to the speaker's intentions and the effects on the listener(s). The term was introduced by Austin and is also associated with Searle in an analytical approach called speech act theory . Some regard speech acts as the basic units of discourse. The term is frequently used synonymously with illocutionary act. See also discourse analysis; locutionary act; performatives; perlocutionary act; compare conversation analysis.

From: speech act in A Dictionary of Media and Communication »

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35 Speech Acts and Performatives

Jennifer Hornsby, Birkbeck College, University of London

Published: 02 September 2009
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This article aims to connect Austin's seminal notion of a speech act with developments in philosophy of language over the last forty odd years. It starts by considering how speech acts might be conceived in Austin's general theory. Then it turns to the illocutionary acts with which much philosophical writing on speech acts has been concerned, and finally to the performatives which Austin's own treatment of speech as action took off from.

The total speech act in the total speech situation is the only actual phenomenon which, in the last resort, we are engaged in elucidating. J. L. Austin (1962: 147)

At the start of How to Do Things with Words , 1 Austin spoke of a ‘revolution’ in philosophy—a revolution instigated by claims to the effect that there are indicative sentences whose use is not to make statements of fact. His own claim was that certain sentences—the performatives—disguise themselves as truth‐evaluable but aren't really such. By the end of the book, Austin allowed that performativity in some sense is a feature of any speech; and he said that we need a ‘general theory of speech acts’ (1962: 147).

This chapter aims to connect Austin's seminal notion of a speech act with developments in philosophy of language over the last forty odd years. It starts by considering how speech acts might be conceived in Austin's general theory. Then it turns to the illocutionary acts with which much philosophical writing on speech acts has been concerned, and finally to the performatives which Austin's own treatment of speech as action took off from.

35.1 Speech Acts and Linguistic Meaning

Austin believed that by considering sentences in abstraction from actual speech situations, theorists had privileged ‘constative’ (i.e. statement‐making) uses of language and forgotten about the great variety of things that people do using words. Someone who utters words does lots of things; and this is to say that she performs many speech acts , constituting on any occasion some ‘total speech act’. Here, for example, are just a few of the things that might have been done on the occasion of an utterance: emitting such and such sounds, saying ‘The train leaves at 12.07’, telling X when the train leaves, reminding X that it's time to go, prompting X to put her coat on . All these things are speech acts. 2

Some of these acts might be done without the others: the act of reminding someone that it's time to go might be done by saying ‘It's time to go’, and without saying when the train leaves; saying ‘The train leaves at 12.07’ might be done in the course of contriving a plan, and without reminding anyone of anything; someone might tell someone when the train leaves by using words of some language other than English. Which speech acts are done along with which others obviously depends on the particularities of the occasion of utterance. Yet equally obviously there are some very definite limits on possible combinations. For example, in a very wide range of situations, a speaker of English who does this—come out with noises corresponding to ‘The train leaves at 12.07’—also does this—assert something about the time of some train's departure.

35.1.1 Speech Acts as Classificatory

An illuminating description of the use of a language should have something to say about, very roughly, which speech acts are apt to go together, and what explains their going together when they do. A principled way of organizing speech acts would provide a framework into which the particularities of occasions on which one or another is done could potentially be fitted so as to provide for full and fully illuminating re‐descriptions of utterances. What is needed is a theoretically motivated classification, which requires in the first place the isolation of important sorts of speech act.

The number of sorts that Austin distinguished by name in the first instance was six: phonetic, phatic, rhetic, locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary. Here we can focus on just three of Austin's six, which, disregarding details, can be specified as follows ( Ibid .: 92 – 3, 95):

Phatic of uttering certain words, i.e. noises of certain types belonging to and uttered as belonging to a certain vocabulary in a certain construction Rhetic of using one's words with a certain more or less definite sense and reference, i.e. linguistic meaning. Illocutionary done in doing an act of the rhetic sort, in virtue of which a certain force accrues to the use of the words.

This short list leaves out perlocutionary acts, which Austin defined in terms of speech's consequences, and which it seems an account of the workings of language proper might not need to be especially concerned with (see further Section 35.2.1 ). And it leaves out phonetic acts—the ‘uttering of certain noises’—whose study belongs to specialists in phonetics. It also leaves out locutionary acts. Well, Austin said that he meant by ‘locutionary act’ simply ‘the sum of the phonetic, phatic and rhetic’ acts ( Ibid .: 109). So we might employ Austin's word ‘locutionary’ not to name any sort of speech act, but instead to mark that portion of a description of the use of language which is concerned to relate phatic acts with rhetic acts. ( Strawson, 1973 , explores Austin on the subject of locutionary meaning, and reveals difficulties in finding a consistent interpretation of Austin's own terminology. My suggestion here is that we avoid ‘locutionary act’ for the time being and focus on Austin's own definition of ‘rhetic act’. In due course, I shall follow others, and use ‘locutionary act’ as others do, to make a contrast with ‘illocutionary act’.)

Austin himself said little about what a theory of locution should, or could, achieve: in this connexion, he spoke of ‘sense and reference’ and of the ‘artificial abstraction’ of ‘traditional conceptions’. But we know that the locutionary portion of an overall account of language use will treat a specific language—English, Spanish, Pashto, or whatever—and that it must specify the linguistically meaningful (‘rhetic’) things that speakers of the language do when they produce particular sentences (when they do ‘phatic’ things). So a theory of locution for L, if it were stated quite in abstraction from speakers' use of L, would simply assign a meaning—to any of L's sentences * * * *. And in order to incorporate such a theory (gestured at here with a schema) into a speech act account of L's use, it would only need to be laid down that:

Utterances in which the speaker's phatic act is producing * * * * are utterances in which the speaker's rhetic act is one whose meaning is that——. 3

There are two very obvious reasons why this won't work as it stands. In the first place, sentences of natural languages typically contain indexical and demonstrative elements, and it isn't possible to say what rhetic acts may be done with sentences containing these except by specifying contexts for their utterance. Secondly, a theory that provides a general way of specifying rhetic acts must presumably fill ‘——’, in any instance, with a sentence expressing something propositional; but that means that only indicative sentences would be accommodated: sentences in the interrogative, or imperative mood wouldn't belong.

Well, these two obvious points were of no particular concern to Austin. And theorists surely do take account of them; although of course there is much more to be said about how exactly they are to be accommodated. Thus even though Austin's writings may convey the impression that a speech act account of language use enforces some radical departures from a ‘traditional’ view of linguistic meaning, it can seem now as if a treatment of a language as (roughly) a meaningful system might be tailor‐made for the locutionary portion of an overall account of the speech acts of users of that language. Those who advocate truth‐conditional semantics, for instance, may claim that, so long as expressions' context‐sensitivity is properly accommodated, a theory with theorems on the pattern of ‘* * * * is true if and only if——’ can serve to effect pairings of speakers' phatic acts with their rhetic ones. And this now is just the upshot of a pairing of sentences with what are often called their propositional contents, now specified by using sentences. The proposal then may be that speech act theory proper belongs in the realm of pragmatics, where pragmatics for its part is concerned with illocutionary acts—i.e. with what speakers do in performing those rhetic acts that a purely semantic, truth‐conditional theory for their language would predict. (To accommodate non‐indicatives, a notion of ‘rhetic’ that includes more than indicative saying would need to be introduced [cp. Hornsby, 1986] , or some other account be given.)

Some writing in the area of speech acts has been opposed to such a proposal (see Sections 35.1.2 , 2.2 , and end of 2.3 ), and some of it supportive (see Section 35.1.3 ).

35.1.2 The Changing Conditions of Speech

Opposition to this proposal comes from those concerned with context‐sensitivity of a different sort from that which indexicals and demonstratives exhibit. One of Austin's examples was the sentence ‘France is hexagonal’. Pointing out that its utterance would serve different purposes in different contexts, Austin said that this ‘is good enough for a top‐ranking general, perhaps, but not for a geographer’. Austin sometimes spoke as if ‘true’ and ‘false’ lacked any application in the case of such a sentence: ‘It is just rough.. [and] not a true or false description [of France]’. If this was right, then we should have here further examples of sentences belonging in a category to which Austin put his performatives—sentences that can't be evaluated for truth. But there is a way of understanding Austin's point which avoids the idea that it is actually improper to predicate ‘true’ or ‘false’ of utterances of ‘France is hexagonal.’ 4 On this other understanding, whether a speaking of those words is true depends upon whether— in all the particular circumstances , including, for instance, whether one is addressing a geographer—using ‘hexagonal’ of France is a fair and reasonable thing to do.

Charles Travis believes that context‐sensitivity of this kind is a feature of nearly all natural‐language predicates. In Travis's view, it cannot be stated once and for all what semantic properties words have: these vary from one speaking of them to another. By thinking about linguistic meaning from the standpoint of speech acts, Travis wants to expose difficulties for the idea that a language can be isolated as a semantic system divorced from the conditions of speech. (See e.g. Travis, 1994 , 1996 .) Here, then, we find one sort of departure from a view of a semantic theory for a language as in principle separable from a speech act account of its use. (Travis's is a thoroughgoing ‘contextualist’ position. See Recanati, 1994 , for one account of the difference between contextualism and anti‐contextualism.)

A different kind of departure was urged by Derrida (1972 , 1977 ). Inasmuch as Austin and writers following him take linguistic meaning to go hand in hand with rhetic acts (or locutionary acts: see above), they often place restrictions on the utterances under consideration—so that language used by people who are joking, acting a part, or creating poetry is to be excluded and treated as parastic on ‘fully normal use’. In his 1977, Searle defended Austin against Derrida, saying that the theorist is obliged to work from ‘standard cases’ in which words are used according to reigning conventions. Derrida, 1972 , however, had maintained that it is only a sort of conservatism that leads some theorists to set aside some uses of expressions as non‐standard. According to him, such theorists overlook the dynamic aspect of a language: linguistic change may be effected in new contexts of use, so that contexts cannot be confined to those that are supposed to be standard.

Searle saw Derrida's intervention as a challenge from a different (‘Continental’) philosophical tradition. But Davidson, whose work certainly belongs in the ‘analytical’ tradition, would be at one with Derrida in denying that an idea of utterances conforming to linguistic conventions can be used to isolate speech acts in which words have standard meanings (see e.g. Davidson, 1982) . Thus a speech act account of language use might be subversive of one aspect of a ‘traditional’ view of linguistic meaning without doing any damage to the conception of the distinction between semantics and pragmatics which Austin's classification seems naturally to lead to. At the very least, a speech act approach might be used in the formulation of disputed questions about the border between semantics and pragmatics. (For illuminating accounts of (a) different ways to draw the distinction; (b) the significance of Derrida's intervention; and (c) the exchange between Derrida and Searle, see (a) ‘The Distinction between Semantics and Pragmatics’ in this volume; (b) Moore, 2000 and (c) Richmond, 1996 .)

35.1.3 Beyond the Rhetic: Force, Indirect Speech Acts, Implicature

Austin emphasized the variety of illocutionary things that could be done with a single sentence on different occasions—or the different ‘forces’ it might be used with. To take an example found in Austin and in Strawson (1964: 444) , ‘Don't go’ may be used now as an order, now as a request, now as an entreaty—where ordering, requesting and entreating are different things that can be done in uttering those words, or different forces that might attach to one or another utterance of those words.

Austin sometimes wrote as if any particular utterance corresponded to the speaker's doing of exactly one locutionary thing and exactly one illocutionary thing. But actually what a speaker conveys with an utterance is very often not captured by specifying a single illocutionary act she does. Much of the literature under the head of speech act theory has aimed to accommodate this.

Recognizing that more than one illocutionary thing may be done with an utterance, Searle introduced the idea of an indirect speech act. ‘For example a speaker may utter the sentence “Can you reach the salt?” and mean it not merely as a question but as a request to pass the salt’ (1975 [1979: 30]). Here an illocutionary act of requesting the salt is performed indirectly—by way of performing an illocutionary act of questioning. This works, according to Searle, because the hearer will be in a position to infer that the speaker has some purpose beyond discovering whether the salt is in the hearer's reach. A nice example, in which quite different indirect speech acts would be performed depending on the circumstances, was given by Sperber and Wilson B replies to A's ‘Would you like some coffee?’ with ‘Coffee would keep me awake.’ According as the circumstances are such that what A knows about B is that she would prefer to remain wakeful or that she hopes soon to go to sleep, B will indirectly have accepted or indirectly refused the offer of coffee. (Treatments of different kinds may be offered of these examples: see ‘Relevance Theory—New Directions and Developments’ in this volume.)

Notable among many philosophers' examples of indirect speech acts is an apparent discrepancy between the grammatical mood of the sentence used and the illocutionary force of the speech act indirectly performed: an interrogative sentence is used to make a statement, or an indicative to issue a command, for example. But there need not be such a discrepancy for the content of a speaker's illocutionary act to diverge from the content of her rhetic act. Indeed the phenomenon of a speaker conveying to her hearer something different from what is meant by the words she uses is utterly pervasive. Grice's theory of conversational implicature provides an account of the phenomenon. It gives a systematic way of thinking about the inferences that linguistic communication involves, by treating the use of language as a cooperative enterprise. At its most general, Grice's claim is that a speaker S conversationally implicates that which she must be assumed to believe given (a) what S ‘strictly and literally says’, (b) what S and her audience know to be known by S and her audience, and (c) that S is co‐operating. Since speakers must often be assumed to believe much more than what they ‘strictly and literally say’, they often convey much more to their interlocutors than what they strictly and literally say.

Grice's ‘strict and literal saying’ may seem to invoke Austin's notion of the rhetic on the present construal of this. But when indirect speech acts are encompassed by conversational implicature, speakers are seen as getting across that which their utterances strictly and literally say: it is in getting across ‘the literal meaning’ that a speaker ‘indirectly’ gets her real message across. In such cases, then, there is something the speaker does—namely state something to another—which is not merely rhetic but whose content is just the content of her rhetic act. These can be distinguished from cases (also covered by conversational implicature) in which the content of a speaker's rhetic act is not something she intends to convey. The latter are cases of ‘non‐literalness’ in the terminology of Bach and Harnish, 1979 . For example, a speaker says that a certain book weighs a ton, intending to convey that it is very heavy. There are further cases where non‐literalness is not in question, and where the speaker's rhetic act is inexplicit and at most a starting point for the determination of what they convey. (For a treatment of these cases—of ‘conversational impliciture’—and resulting additions to the Gricean framework, see Bach, 1994a and 1994b .)

Grice's introduction of conversational implicature shows that an account of what speakers mean may be thought of as supplementary to an account of what is meant by the sentences they use. So whereas Austin's emphasis on (as he saw them) non‐truth‐evaluable indicative sentences suggests that he thought that a speech‐act approach would make difficulties for truth‐conditional semantics, it seems now that, on the contrary, speech‐act notions might take over where truth‐conditional semantics leaves off.

There is a great deal more to be said, however. In addition to conversational implicatures, Grice postulates conventional implicatures, in order to deal with a component of sentences' content which appears to be rule‐based but not truth‐conditional. To consider a single example: ‘and’ and ‘but’ differ in meaning (in some sense) but are equivalent in point of truth‐affectingness; and one may take this on board by seeing the difference between them as a difference in what speakers who use them conventionally implicate. Here again, then, we find the idea of using a speech‐act notion to mop up some of the facts about what speakers mean which truth‐conditional semantic theories of their languages cannot explain on their own. But it is a real question whether any worked‐out implementation of this idea is acceptable—a question to which Barker, 2003 returns a negative answer.

(See Grice, 1967 , for the two kinds of implicature. The idea of conversational implicature shows that an ability to contribute to conversations is an element of people's linguistic competence; and speech acts have been treated in the framework of discourse [see e.g. Edmondson, 1981 ; Merin, 1994 ] and dialogue [see e.g. Vanderveken, 2000].)

35.2 Illocution

Austin thought that the study of language had been too much focussed on words at the expense of failing to take into account what speakers do . Put in other terms, he thought that the emphasis had been too much on locution at the expense of illocution. Austin's warnings against eliding the illocutionary—against allowing it to be swallowed up either by the locutionary or by the perlocutionary (1962:103)—were directed against those who believed that one could deal with language by dealing with ‘sense and reference’, and that anything else alluded to extra‐linguistic consequences of language use. But despite his placing emphasis on it, and despite his struggling to isolate it, Austin himself had rather little to say about the illocutionary, beyond associating it with conventions. Subsequent theorists have engaged in attempts to characterize, or analyse, what it is for an act to be illocutionary.

35.2.1 Illocution and Communication

Strawson (1964) showed that Austin's doctrine of the conventional nature of illocutionary acts does not hold generally. In order to characterize the illocutionary, Strawson used a notion of a speaker's non‐naturally meaning something by an utterance, which he took from Grice. The analysis that Strawson worked with had it that in order for S to mean something by an utterance, S must intend (at least) three things: (i) to produce by that utterance a certain response in an audience A; (ii) that A recognize intention (i); and (iii) that this recognition function as part of A's reason for the response.

Supplements to such a treatment of speaker meaning have been made in an attempt to avoid certain counterexamples. The result is analyses of tremendous complexity, which portray speakers as possessing multiple iterated intentions. (See Schiffer, 1972 , and for useful commentary Avramides, 1989.) Many have objected to the complexity as artificial, and psychologically implausible. (See e.g. Blackburn, 1984: 116 ; Harman, 1986: 87 – 8 .) But this does nothing to detract from Strawson's reason for invoking a Gricean notion of speaker‐meaning in connection with illocution. Grice's idea was that there are audience‐directed intentions whose fulfilment constitutes a piece of communication. Strawson's idea was that performing an illocutionary act was a kind of communication. Now speaker's communicative intentions, rather than being thought of as the iterative intentions which Strawson set off from, may be thought of as reflexive in character, as indeed Grice himself originally thought of them (1957: 383). Then an illocutionary act is conceived as one whose fulfilment consists in its recognition. (See Bach and Harnish, 1979 for the first statement of this idea; for variations, see McDowell, 1980 ; Hornsby, 1994 .)

Many people have found reflexive intentions problematic. Bach, 1987 diagnosed their fears of paradox as based in a misunderstanding about what an account of reflexive intentions need involve. When reflexive intentions are introduced into an account of the illocutionary, not only are spuriously complex iterated intentions avoided, but also it becomes relatively clear why acts whose performance is the fulfilment of such intentions should not be counted as perlocutionary in Austin's sense. Austin defined perlocutionary acts in terms of effects or consequences. And it can seem as if one was told about something perlocutionary when a speaker's getting something across is said to be a matter of her producing a response or of her getting of an audience to recognize something (see Searle, 1969: 47 ; Recanati, 1987: 181 ff .). But when the intended response on the part of the audience is recognition only of the very intention that generates the response, then the response counts simply as understanding the speaker. Austin called such a response ‘uptake’, and he would not have counted it among perlocutionary effects. Uptake, if it is an effect of speech, is an effect of a special sort, which embodies the special overtness of linguistic communication. Illocutionary acts, then, are communicative acts.

Alston, 2000 , has given a fully developed account of illocution of his own, which brings out the normative dimension of language use. He characterizes a speaker's doing something illocutionary in terms of their assuming responsibility for the obtaining of a state of affairs related to the proposition they express. What distinguishes illocutionary act concepts from others that are intelligible in such terms, says Alston, is ‘the fact that they also include the condition that U utters the sentence with the intention of getting the addressee to realize that U is [assuming responsibility.. ]’. Alston claims that the intention here is a communicative one, and he rejects accounts of communication based in perlocutionary intentions. But it may be objected that someone's realizing that S is assuming responsibility for a state of affairs is not simply a matter of ‘uptake’: it actually looks very like a perlocutionary effect. (The matter is complicated: Alston distinguishes between performing some illocutionary act and achieving recognition of which illocutionary act one has performed.)

35.2.2 Illocution and Meaning

Alston calls upon illocutionary speech acts in order to deal with the semantic side of language. He takes illocutionary acts to be those reported in typical indirect discourse locutions in which both an illocutionary force and some propositional content are specified: ‘She warned me that it might fall off’, for instance. In Alston's account, propositional content isn't introduced at the level of sentences, but enters the theoretical scene only when a potential illocutionary act is associated with a sentence. Thus there is no place in Alston's picture for the kind of abstraction that rhetic acts (as understood in §1.1 above) represent: a sentence's meaning is to be thought of as deriving from its potential for use in the performance of illocutionary acts.

The claim that meaning is illocutionary act potential is one that Alston has defended for a long time (see Alston, 1963) . His recent, fully worked‐out account (in Alston, 2000) enables a very definite content to be attached to the much‐voiced slogan ‘Meaning is use’. But the account may be thought to face problems. One problem is the accommodation of non‐literalness (see ends of Sections 35.1.2 and 1.3 above). Another is the treatment of word meaning. Alston allows that sentences' meanings are determinable from the meanings of their constituents, and thus that sentence meaning must be treated compositionally. But it can seem as if any steps that Alston might take in the direction of compositional theories would require using a notion of reference , so that meaning would be detached from illocution and the special features of Alston's approach would thereby be subverted. Alston objects to compositional theories that leave reference unexplained ( Ibid .: 288 – 300). But some of his opponents will wish to treat reference as a primitive relation, or as one whose explication is independent of specific speech act notions.

Brandom 1994 gives an account of referential relations in terms ultimately of inferential relations among claims. The leading idea of his ‘inferentialism’ is that any sentence's semantic content is determined by the norms that govern inferences to and from it. Brandom is not usually considered a speech act theorist (perhaps because he does not use Austinian terminology, and perhaps because his account touches on such a range of topics in metaphysics and epistemology as well as in philosophy of language). But, like Alston, Brandom emphasizes the normative character of things that people do using sentences; and, like Alston, he bases semantics on pragmatics.

35.2.3 Taxonomies of Illocutionary Acts

Illocutionary acts—communicative things that can be done with words—are plentiful. (Austin said that a list of the English verbs that stand for illocutionary things has ‘the order of the third power of 10’, 1962:149.) A taxonomy of illocutionary acts brings these very various acts under broad heads—it furnishes determinables or genera of which particular speech acts are determinations or species.

Austin approached a taxonomy somewhat in the manner of a botanist impressed by the variety of species. But as accounts of speech acts have been developed, others' taxonomies have been caught up with one or another theoretical stance, and even where authors' taxonomies coincide, they may be informed by differences in theoretical perspective. In Alston's, for instance, the genera of illocutionary acts can be differentiated by reference (very roughly, and excepting assertions: see 2000: 130 – 4) to patterns of commitment that a speaker may make. Alston's taxonomy departs from Austin's own at the level of genera only insofar as Austin had a category of behabitives, and no category of assertives. Alston's five genera, with a few species for illustration, are as follows ( Ibid: 34):

Assertives, e.g. assert, allege, report, answer, deny, predict, complain . Directives, e.g. ask, request, implore, tell, suggest, recommend, propose . Commissives, e.g. promise, bet, guarantee, invite, offer . Expressives, e.g. thank, apologize, commiserate, compliment, express —, where—may be enthusiasm, interest, relief, intention, delight . Exercitives, e.g. adjourn, appoint, pardon, name, hire, fire, approve .

(See Allan, 1999 for a comparison of the taxonomies to be found in Austin Ibid ., Vendler, 1972 ; Searle, 1969 ; Bach and Harnish, 1979 ; Allan, 1986 .)

Searle's taxonomy (in his 1975) differs from this one in having a category of declaratives in place of exercitives. Searle uses his classification to further a kind of individualism that he promotes in the philosophy of mind. He has claimed (e.g. 1983: 9 – 10 and 174 – 9; 1986; 1991) that his five categories of illocution map onto kinds of psychological attitude, and that a speaker's doing something illocutionary is a matter of their expressing one or another of the five basic kinds of attitudes towards a proposition. Searle's arguments for necessary connections between types of attitude and types of expressed mental state have been questioned, however, e.g. by Tsohatzidis, 1994 . (For a summary account of Searle's view, see his 1999: 146 – 52 .)

Vanderveken's 1994 taxonomy uses Searle's categories (see Searle and Vanderveken, 1985) . And it provides the foundation for a logical system, in which each of the five genera of act corresponds to a basic illocutionary point, from which all possible non‐basic illocutionary acts are recursively derivable. Vanderveken's system, if it yielded a correct description, would show the need to transcend a purely truth‐conditional account of sentences' propositional content. Vanderveken's claim is that a semantic theory, insofar as it is truth‐conditional, can only be a sub‐theory, for assertive speech acts, of a more general theory of satisfaction for speech acts with an arbitrary illocutionary force. So here, once again, we find speech act theory used to challenge an orthodox conception of semantic theory.

35.3 Performatives

Some sentences seem obviously fit to be used in stating whatever proposition it is that they express; and Austin called these constatives . But some sentences, even though they are indicative grammatically speaking, seem designed for a quite different use. Austin called these performatives.

35.3.1 Explicit Performatives

‘Performative’, as philosophers of language use it nowadays, is usually confined to what Austin came to call explicit performatives. Paradigm examples of explicit performatives are of the form:

I Φ—where, in any instance, ‘Φ’ is replaced by a verb in the simple (non‐continuous) present tense, and ‘—’ is replaced by a that‐clause or sentence.

There are variant forms, inasmuch as (a) some speech‐act verbs belong in different constructions, and (b) there are second‐ and third‐person examples. Examples are: (a) ‘I apologize’, ‘I implore you to —’; (b) ‘You're fired’, ‘Passengers are hereby given notice —’. But always the main verb in a performative sentence is a word for what the speaker can be reported as having done in uttering the sentence. Thus when someone uses an explicit performative, something they do in using their words is explicit in the very words they use.

One of Austin's early examples of a performative was ‘I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth ’; a ‘felicitious’ utterance of this is a christening of a ship ( Ibid .: 5). Another was ‘Out’ as said by an umpire in a cricket match; an utterance of this ensures that the batsman is out ( Ibid .: 43). In these two cases, utterances of the sentence work as they do as the result of institutions, conventions or rules that are not themselves linguistic (see Urmson, 1978) 5 It may be that Austin's characterization of the illocutionary as involving convention resulted from his focusing initially on examples like these. At any rate, it is now widely accepted that, save for these sorts of case, there need be nothing especially conventional about performatives, no more than there is anything especially conventional about illocution (see Section 35.1.2 ). (Searle, 1989, however, defends a role for convention in a general account of performatives.)

Austin made two claims about utterances of performatives: they aren't statements; they don't have truth‐values. Because Austin assumed that the notions of statement and truth go hand in hand, he based the latter claim upon the former without disentangling the two. But these two claims should be kept separate: the former remains controversial (compare Schiffer, 1972 with Lewis, 1972 ); the latter is denied by almost everyone nowadays (see e.g. Lemmon, 1962 ; Warnock, 1973 ; Heal, 1974 ; Bach, 1975 , Price 1979).

Those on Austin's side in denying that explicit performatives are used to make statements may point out that they appear to be cut out for a use that is incompatible with making a statement. If someone states that p , then usually it is possible to think of her as coming out with her words because she already believes, or takes herself to know, that p ; by contrast, someone who says that she promises to return the book, usually intends to make it the case that, by speaking, she will come to have promised this. 6 The contrast made here, in order to suggest that performatives are not used for making statements, appears to require that they are assessable for truth. A speaker utters ‘I Φ—’ with the intention of bringing it about that they have Φ‐d. In that case, where they succeed in what they intend, they have Φ‐d. But if so, their utterance's success consists precisely in its truth. As Austin put it himself, ‘Saying makes it so’.

Part of Austin's basis for his claim that performatives lack truth‐values was an opposition he saw between the ‘infelicity’ of performatives and the falsity of statements. Consider, for example, the utterance of someone who, although they are in no position to enact a naming ceremony, comes out with ‘I name this ship Potemkin’. It does not come naturally to call their utterance false, although the utterance certainly fails in some dimension. Still there are many ways in which utterances of any sort can go wrong apart from their not being true; so that explicit performatives' possible infelicity gives no immediate argument for their not being evaluable for truth. Austin could easily agree that someone who uses an explicit performative purports to do what they say they do. And surely the simplest explanation of their doing what they say they do—when all is well and they do what they purport to—will allow that what they say is true . (On this account, there is no need to say that a speaker of an explicit performative states anything. The idea of what the speaker says can be the idea of their rhetic act. The ‘say’ that one needs here, then, need not be the ‘say’ of everyday indirect speech reports, where it often appears to mean something close to ‘state’ or ‘assert’.)

Austin's belief that performatives' grammatical character is misleading as to their true nature led him to call them ‘masqueraders’: performatives give the appearance of being usable for making truth‐evaluable statements, he thinks, even though they aren't really usable so. Lewis, 1972 , wanted to turn the tables, and to treat sentences which give the appearance of not being usable for making truth‐evaluable statements as the masqueraders. In giving a semantic account of non‐indicative sentences, Lewis subjects them to paraphrase, taking them to be equivalent to explicit performatives. If this treatment were right (and if explicit performatives are truth‐evaluable, as Lewis in company with most philosophers believes), then truth‐evaluability would be an utterly ubiquitous feature of utterances. But it is open to doubt whether Lewis's paraphrases are genuine. (See e.g. Hornsby, 1986 ; Alston, 2000: 301 – 3 .)

35.3.2 Performativity

In Austin's book, the idea of a performative covers much more ground than utterances of explicit performatives. For example ‘I shall be there’, when used to make a promise, is, in Austin's terms, a ‘primary’ performative ( Ibid .: 69; he sometimes says ‘implicit performative’ [32], sometimes ‘primitive performative’ [33]). Although a category of primary (or implicit or primitive) performatives is not recognized nowadays, of course the non‐explicit performance of illocutionary acts—their performance without the use of words such as ‘I promise …’— is recognized. Indeed the non‐explicit performance of illocutionary acts is as ubiquitous as the use of language. Even with utterances of what Austin called constatives, an illocutionary act—namely stating (non‐explicitly)—is typically performed. This is why Austin's initial distinction between constatives and performatives breaks down, as Austin himself acknowledged that it does.

What Austin acknowledged here is that every piece of language use is performative in his ‘primary’ sense. It is no wonder then that those who want to treat language as belonging in the sphere of human agency have taken over Austin's terms. Speech act theory has a continuing influence not only in philosophy and linguistics, but also, for example, in literary studies and in agent‐based communication systems developed in computer science (e.g. Labrou et al . 1999) . Moreover, as we started to see in Section 35.1.2 in connexion with Derrida, a political dimension has been introduced into the study of speech acts. In introducing such a dimension, various writers have extended speech act theory—principally in two directions, to be touched on briefly now before concluding.

Some speech acts require a certain social position for their performance. In certain examples this is rather obvious: a speaker needs to have authority of some kind or other if their utterance is to have the force of an order, for instance. But the ability to perform certain speech acts may also be affected in less obvious ways by a person's power or authority (cp. Richmond, 1996) . And the idea that illocutionary success can depend upon how one is situated in relations of power has played a role in discussions of pornography (e.g. Dwyer, ed., 1995) , of free speech e.g. (Hornsby and Langton, 1998) , and of hate speech e.g. (Butler, 1997) . In these treatments, speakers' possible illocutionary acts are sometimes brought under the head of ‘performativity’.

In other writing, the idea of ‘performativity’ is given a more special sense, connected with the use of explicit performatives. In the sociology of economics, for example, it has been claimed that advancing theory may lead to the creation of the very institutions and behaviours that the theory purports to describe. Some of the utterances of economists are then labelled ‘performatives’: they are thought of as sharing with explicit performatives the property of making themselves true by being uttered. (See articles in Callon, ed., 1998 , and Mackenzie and Millo, 2001.) The idea here—that saying, from the mouths of those with a particular influence, makes it so—has been urged in a variety of different connexions, not always with the ‘performative’ label. The idea gives rise to one understanding of ‘social construction’, for instance. (For a discussion of the idea in connexion with feminism, see Langton, 2000, 135 – 45 .)

35.3.3 Conclusion

Political applications of speech act theory were surely far from Austin's mind when he spoke of a ‘revolution’ in philosophy. If speech act theory had indeed had a genuinely revolutionary influence, then the view that semantic notions should receive a speech act theoretic explication would have won the day. In fact, however, this view is at odds with current orthodoxy. (The view is however endorsed, for different reasons and to different effects, by Travis, Alston, Brandom, and Vanderveken: see above.)

Austin's own emphasis on non‐truth‐evaluability may suggest that he would be a staunch opponent of truth‐conditional semantics. And certainly truth‐conditional semantics is integral to the orthodoxy which present‐day allies of Austin set themselves against. But we saw in Section 35.1 that things that Austin himself said actually appear to lead towards a proposal about the shape of an overall account of language use in keeping with this orthodoxy. And we should remember that the orthodoxy has taken shape since Austin wrote, and could not for him have been a definite target. 7

However this may be, the idea of a speech act has surely found an enduring place in the study of the use of natural language. Work in speech act theory has encouraged philosophers of language to appreciate that truth is not the only dimension of assessment even of indicative utterances, and that ‘context’ in the broadest possible sense, embracing everything relevant to the shared understandings of speakers and hearers, is a determinant of the extremely various things that people do with words. 8

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Austin himself used the term ‘speech act’ with less frequency but with greater generality [having application to a wider class of acts] than subsequent writers. Most contributors to the philosophical literature use ‘speech act theory’ having in mind something like the account of illocutionary acts that Searle, 1969 , developed. See Hornsby, 1988 , for an attempt at a definition of ‘speech act’ in line with Austin's very broad use.

This formulation makes explicit a view of the individuation of action. Utterances are treated as particulars—as actions (each one ‘fixed and physical’ as Austin put it). The idea that there is a variety of speech acts on the occasion of a single utterance is then the idea that the utterance is the agent's doing one act, and is her doing another … For those who prefer to talk about redescription, it is the idea that the utterance (action) can be redescribed. (Different views about actions' individuation may be part of the explanation of differences in the use of ‘speech act’: cp. n.2 above.)

And thus allows that the sentence is not true or false simply. Austin's own uses of ‘utterance’ and ‘sentence’ fails systematically to distinguish between these. For example, his claims about what he called performatives (see Section 35.3 below) are sometimes claims about sentences, sometimes about utterances of those sentences. I attempt to gloss over this here.

Warnock 1973 subsumes such cases under his Mark 1 performatives, to distinguish them from others where specific extralinguistic conventions are not in play. Warnock's Mark 2 performatives are the explicit ones. But he acknowledges that the two Marks overlap, so that the notion of an explicit performative covers many of Austin's early examples, even if these examples are, as Urmson stresses, themselves of a special sort.

This argument relies upon the use of a simple, non‐continuous present tense in explicit performatives. It is much more plausible that ‘I am Φ‐ing [continuous present]’ can be used to describe or state what one is doing than that ‘I Φ [simple present]’ can (as Austin was aware: Ibid .: 53 ). Cp. Jack, 1981 .

When Austin speaks of ‘sense and reference, i.e. linguistic meaning’, he seems not to have envisaged truth‐conditional semantics. He gave telling me to get out and asking whether it was in Oxford or Cambridge as examples of rhetic acts (1962: 95), suggesting that he took non‐indicatives to present no special problem for an account of linguistic meaning. Yet those who endorse truth‐conditional semantics must have something particular to say about non‐indicatives, given that these are not truth‐evaluable (or at most are only arguably so: see Lewis's treatment, end of Section 35.3.1 above).

Speech act theory has ramified in the last fifty years, and many debates are hardly touched on in the present chapter. A view of some of these can be got from Tsohatzidis, ed., 1994 , and Vanderveken and Kubo, eds., 2000.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literary Terms and Techniques › Speech Act Theory

Speech Act Theory

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on October 11, 2020 • ( 0 )

Speech act theory accounts for an act that a speaker performs when pronouncing an utterance, which thus serves a function in communication. Since speech acts are the tools that allow us to interact in real-life situations, uttering a speech act requires knowledge not only of the language but also of its appropriate use within a given culture.

Speech act theory was first developed by J. L. Austin whose seminal Oxford Lectures in 1952–4 marked an important development in the philosophy of language and linguistics. Austin’s proposal can be viewed as a reaction to the extreme claims of logical positivists, who argued that the meaning of a sentence is reducible to its verifiability, that is to an analysis which verifies if utterances are true or false. Austin contended that most of our utterances do more than simply making statements: questions and orders are not used to state something, and many declarative sentences do not lend themselves to being analysed in terms of their falsifiability. Instead, they are instruments that allow speakers to change the state of affairs. This is tantamount to saying that we use language mainly as a tool to do things, and we do so by means of performing hundreds of ordinary verbal actions of different types in daily life, such as make telephone calls, baptise children, or fire an employee.

The fact that not all sentences are a matter of truth verifiability was first advanced by Aristotle who, in his De Interpretatione , argued that:

there are in the mind thoughts which do not involve truth or falsity, and also those which must be either true or false, so it is in speech. [. . .] A sentence is a significant portion of speech [. . .] Yet every sentence is not a proposition; only such are propositions as have in them either truth or falsity. [. . .] Let us therefore dismiss all other types of sentence but the proposition, for this last concerns our present inquiry, whereas the investigation of the others belongs rather to the study of rhetoric or of poetry. (1–4)

Although he explicitly deems the nature of sentences to be uninteresting in his inquiry on apophantic logos, Aristotle represents the first account of language as action.

J. L. Austin/The Times Literary Supplement

Aristotle’s standpoint influenced the study of language for centuries and paved the way for a tradition of research on verifiability, but several German and British philosophers anticipated a view of language as a tool to change a state of affairs. The issues of language and conversation were addressed by Immanuel Kant who anticipated some concepts like ‘context’ and ‘subjective idealisation’, the rules that articulate conversation, and the para-linguistic gestures used in the accomplishment of speech acts. But it was only at the end of the nineteenth century that a more elaborate treatment of language as action was initiated.

The first, although non-systematic, study of the action-like character of language was conducted by Thomas Reid, who described different acts that can be performed through language, and grouped them into two categories: ‘solitary acts’ like judgements, intentions, deliberations and desiring, which can go unexpressed; and ‘social operations’ like commanding, promising or warning, which, by their very social nature, must be expressed. Reid’s contribution to the inception of a speech act theory can be fully understood if viewed from the wider perspective of the philosophical developments of his time.

Franz Brentano’s distinction between physical and psychological phenomena is particularly relevant in this respect because it reintroduced to philosophy the scholastic concept of‘intentionality’, which allows for a distinction between mental acts and the external world. As far as speech act theory is concerned, suffice it here to say that Brentano argued that every mental, psychological act has a content and is directed at an object (the intentional object), which means that mental phenomena contain an object intentionally within themselves and are thus definable as objectifying acts. The Brentanian approach to intentionality* allows for a distinction between linguistic expressions describing psychological phenomena and linguistic expressions describing non-psychological phenomena. Furthermore, Brentano claimed that speaking is itself an activity through which we can initiate psychic phenomena. Edmund Husserl picked up the importance of what Brentano’s psychological investigation could bring to logic*, in particular the contrast between emotional acts and objectifying acts. Husserl tackled the issue of human mental activities (‘acts’) and how they constitute the ‘object’ of knowledge through experience. In his Logical Investigations (1900/1) he developed a theory of meaning based on ‘intentionality’ which, for him, meant that consciousness entails ‘directedness’ towards an object. It is on the notion of ‘objectifying acts’, that is acts of representation, that Husserl shaped his theory of linguistic meaning, thus emphasising the referential use of language. Collaterally he treated the non-representational uses of language, that is acts like asking questions, commanding or requesting.

Following Brentano and moving within the field of psychology, Anton Marty offered the first account of uses of language meant to direct others’ behaviour, like giving an order, requesting, or giving encouragement. Marty stated that sentences may hint at the speaker’s psychic processes and argued that ‘deliberate speaking is a special kind of acting, whose proper goal is to call forth certain psychic phenomena in other beings’ (1908: 284). Stemming from Brentano’s tripartite subdivision of mental phenomena into presentation, judgements, and phenomena of love and hate, Marty discriminated linguistic forms into names, statements and emotives (utterances arousing an interest), which is a model that closely resembles Karl Bühler’s Sprachtheorie. It is precisely to Bühler that we owe the coinage of the label ‘speech act theory’. He offered the first thorough study of the functions of language – Darstellung (representation), Kindgabe (intimation or expression), and Auslösung (arousal or appeal) – thus endowing non-representational sentences with their own status.

A more complete treatment we find in the work of Adolf Reinach, who offered the first systematic theory of speech acts. Reinach received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Munich; his dissertation was on the concept of cause in penal law. It was within the context of legal language that Reinach argued in favour of the relevance of speech acts which he referred to, presumably independently of Reid’s work, as ‘social acts, that is acts of the mind that are performed in the very act of speaking’. Reinach (1913) provided a detailed taxonomy of social acts as performative* utterances and their modification, and stated very clearly that the utterance ( Äusserung ) of a social act is different from the inner experience of emotions like anger or shame and from statements ( Konstatierungen ) about experiences. It is precisely the recourse to the physical medium, the Äusserung , that transforms the philosophical category of action into a social act. Drawing on previous literature, Reinach separated actions from internal experiences. Then he discriminated between external actions like kissing or killing and linguistic actions, and within this class he distinguished between social acts, which are performed in every act of speaking, and actions, where signs are used but no speech act is performed such as in ‘solitary asserting’ and emotive uses of language. The final distinction refers to the linguistic actions performed in uttering performative formulae and the linguistic and nonlinguistic actions whose performance has an effect on the state of affairs and even changes it.

While Reinach’s ideas were spreading through the Munich scholars, at Oxford A. J. Ayer, considered the philosophical successor of Bertrand Russell, deemed philosophically interesting only those sentences that can be subject to the truth-condition analysis. In line with the logical positivism* of the Vienna Circle, Ayer developed the verification principle in Language, Truth and Logic (1936) where he stated that a sentence is meaningful only if it has verifiable import. Sentences expressing judgements, evaluation and the like were not to be objects of scientific inquiry. This stance, which is now known as the ‘descriptive fallacy’, led him into conflict with Oxford linguist philosophers like Gilbert Ryle and J. L. Austin, who instead were greatly influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein. He claimed that a language consists of a wide multiplicity of structures and usages that logical positivists had neglected to analyse but which encompass the majority of what human beings say in their construction of meaning.

Following Wittgenstein’s insights into language and putting himself against the positivist background, Gilbert Ryle rejected the Cartesian mind-body dualism in The Concept of Mind ( 1949), and revived the centrality of the standard uses of language, thus contributing to the development of ‘ordinary language philosophy’* in Oxford.

Taking the same veil and influenced by Husserl, Austin rejected the account that only sentences that are meant to describe a state of affairs are worth studying, and he observed that verifiable sentences are only a small part of the large amount of utterances produced by language users. Not all utterances express propositions: many perform actions as, for example, greetings or orders, which resist a truth-conditional analysis. Indeed, most of the sentences uttered by speakers are used in such a way as to perform more fundamental things in verbal interactions, such as naming a ship, marrying a couple, or making a request. In daily life we perform many ordinary verbal actions, and utterances are used in speech events to accomplish all that is achieved through language. Austin’s speech act theory was first delineated in the notes he prepared for some lectures interestingly entitled Words and Deeds which he delivered at Oxford University from 1952 to 1954. Such notes constituted the basis on which he developed his Harvard lectures in 1955, posthumously published in 1962. In the first phase of development of his theory, Austin retained the Aristotelian distinction between apophantic and non-apophantic logos, and introduced the terms of constative utterances and performative utterances, where the former describe or constate a state of affairs and the latter perform actions. Austin later realised that a clear distinction between the two types of utterances is unsustainable. If, for example, we say ‘There is a rat under your chair’, we do more than assert a state of affairs: we warn someone about a possible danger. Assertions can thus be used to perform such acts as to warn, to apologise, and many more. Austin then abandoned the dichotomy and contended that to say something equals to perform something.

According to Austin, when we say something, we perform three acts simultaneously: a locutionary act, an illocutionary act, and a perlocutionary act. At the locutionary level, a speaker produces sounds (phonetic act) which are well ordered with respect to the phonological system and grammar of a particular language (phatic act), and carry some sense with respect to the semantic and pragmatic rules of that language (rhetic act). At the illocutionary level, he is expressing his intention by virtue of conventions shared in his speech community. At the perlocutionary level, he performs a third act which includes the consequences of his speaking, and he has only limited control over them. In order for the speechact to be successful, it must fulfil some appropriateness conditions, or ‘felicity’ conditions: locution is successful if words and sounds are correctly produced; illocution is appropriate if it meets the conditions for its realisation; perlocution may be effective when it produces consequences desired by the producer. The notion of illocutionary force embodies the philosophical notion of intentionality, which can be expressed by performing a speech act through three modalities: (1) directly or indirectly through the performance of another speech act (‘Pass me the salt’ versus ‘Can you pass me the salt?’); literally or non-literally depending on the way words are used (‘Stick it in your head’); (3) explicitly or inexplicitly when meaning is spelled out fully or incompletely (‘I’ll be back later, Mary’s ready’). Indirectness and nonliterality are disambiguated by way of a conversational implicature*, whereas explicitation is achieved through expansion or completion of what one says.

John Searle, one of Austin’s students, contributed widely to developing speech act theory, which he addressed from the viewpoint of intentionality. Specifically he conceived of linguistic intentionality as derived from mental intentionality. In his Speech Acts (1969) Searle claimed that Austin’s ‘felicity conditions’ are constitutive rules of speech acts to the extent that to perform a speech act means to meet the conventional rules which constitute a specific speech act. Moving from this approach and analysing the act of promising, Searle proposed a classification of speech acts into four categories: (1) propositional content (what the speech act isabout); (2) preparatory condition, which states the prerequisites for the speech act; (3) sincerity condition (the speaker has to sincerely intend to keep a promise); and (4) essential condition (the speaker’s intention that the utterance counts as an act and as such is to be recognised by the hearer). One of Searle’s major contributions to the theory refers to indirectness, that is the mismatch between an utterance and an illocutionary force.

The interpretation of indirect speech acts has drawn a great deal of attention. Drawing on H. P. Grice’s pragmatics, most scholars assume that some inferential work on the part of the hearer is required in order to identify the speaker’s communicative intention and the core question is how such inference can be computed. Searle (1975) assumes that the hearer recognises both a direct-literal force, which he understands as the secondary force, and an indirect-nonliteral force, which is the primary force. Similarly Dan Gordon and George Lakoff (1975) argue that inference rules that they label ‘conversational postulates’ reduce the amount of inferential computing necessary to disambiguate an indirect speech act. Jerrold Sadock (1974) departs from the inferential hypothesis and proposes ‘the idiom model’ by claiming that a speech act like ‘Can you pass me the salt?’ is promptly interpreted as a request and needs no inference.

Speech act theory received great attention and valid theoretical proposals from cognitive linguists. Klaus Panther and Linda Thornburg (1998) claim that our knowledge of illocutionary meaning may be systematically organised in the form of what they call ‘illocutionary scenarios’. They are formed by a before, a core, and an after component. If a person wants someone to bring him his pen, he can utter a direct speech act like ‘Bring me my pen’, which exploits the core component, or he can make his request indirectly exploiting either the before component (‘Can you bring me my pen?’) where the modal verb ‘can’ points to the hearer’s ability to perform the action, or the after component (‘You will bring me my pen, won’t you?’) where the auxiliary ‘will’ instantiates the after component of the request scenario. Panther (2005) makes the point that metonymies provide natural ‘inference schemas’ which are constantly used by speakers in meaning construction and interpretation. Scenarios may be accessed metonymically by invoking relevant parts of them. Indirect requests like ‘Can you open the door?’, ‘Will you close the window?’, ‘Do you have hot chocolate?’ exploit all pre-conditions for the performance of a request, that is, the ability and willingness of the hearer, and his possession of the required object. Such pre-conditions are used to stand for the whole speech act category. By means of the explicit mention of one of the components of the scenario, it is possible for the speaker to afford access to the hearer to the whole illocutionary category of ‘requesting’ in such a way that the utterance is effortlessly interpreted as a request. With a view to improving Panther’s proposal, Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza (2007) contends that illocutionary meaning is directly tied to the notion of Idealised Cognitive Models (ICMs), which are principle-governed cognitive structures. Illocutionary scenarios represent the way in which language users construct interactional meaning representations abstracted away from a number of stereotypical illocutionary situations. In an indirect request like ‘I fancy going out for dinner’ the hearer understands the implicated meaning by relying on high-level situational ICMs – that is, on the generic knowledge that expressing a wish indirectly corresponds to asking for its fulfillment. Thus, it is exactly the quick and easy retrieval from our long-term memory of a stored illocutionary scenario that allows us to identify the nature of indirectness.

Speech act theory is a thought-provoking issue which has attracted the interest of philosophers of language and linguists from diverse theoretical persuasions. Manifold aspects of the theory are being debated such as the classification of speech acts, the relationship between speech acts and culture, and the acquisition of speech acts by children, which proves how this area of language research still provides room for developments and new insights.

Primary sources Aristotle (1941). De Interpretatione. New York: Random House. 38–61. Austin, J. L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gordon D. and G. Lakoff (1975). ‘Conversational postulates’. In P. Cole and J. L. Morgan (eds), Syntax and Semantics, Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press. 83–106. Husserl, E. (1900/1). Logische Untersuchungen. Halle: Nyemeier.Panther, K. U. and L. Thornburg (1998). ‘A cognitive approach to inferencing in conversation’. Journal of Pragmatics 30: 755–69. Panther K. U. (2005). ‘The role of conceptual metonymy in meaning construction’. In F. Ruiz de Mendoza and S.Peña (eds), Cognitive Linguistics. Internal Dynamics and Interdisciplinary Interaction. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 353–86. Reinach, A. (1913). ‘Die apriorischen Grundlagen des bürgerlichen Rechtes’. In Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 1: 685–847. Ruiz de Mendoza, F. (2007). ‘High level cognitive models: in search of a unified framework for inferential and grammatical behavior’. In Krzysztof Kosecki (ed.), Perspectives on Metonymy. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. 1130. Ryle G. (1949). The Concept of Mind. London: Hutchinson. Sadock J. (1974). Toward a Linguistic Theory of Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press. Searle J. R. (1969). Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Searle J. R. (1975). ‘Indirect speech acts’. In P. Cole and J. L. Morgan (eds), Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press. 59–82. Wittgenstein L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.

Further reading Ayer, A. J. (1936). Language, Truth and Logic. London: Gollancz. Brentano, F. (1874). Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt. Leipzig: Duncke and Humbolt. Marty, A. (1908). Untersuchungen zur Grundlegung der allgemeinen Grammatik und Sprachphilosophie. Halle: Nyemeier. Reid, T. (1894). The Works of Thomas Reid. Edinburgh: Maclachlan and Stewart.

Source: Key Ideas in Linguistics and the. Philosophy of Language. Edited by Siobhan Chapman and Christopher Routledge. Edinburgh University Press. 2009.

Speech Acts and Conversation

Language use: functional approaches to syntax, language in use, sentence structure and the function of utterances, speech acts, the cooperative principle, violations of the cooperative principles, politeness conventions, speech events, the organization of conversation, cross-cultural communication.

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When are words just words, and when do words force action? Linguist J.L. Austin divided words into two categories: constatives (words that describe a situation) and performatives (words that incite action). For instance, is a “No running” sign describing your gait, or are you not running because the sign prohibits it? Colleen Glenney Boggs describes how these categorizations give power to words and, ultimately, to your actions.

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10.3: Indirect speech acts

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Paul Kroeger
Dallas International University via Language Library Press

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The Nigerian professor Ozidi Bariki describes a conversation in which he said to a friend:

“I love your left hand.” (The friend had a cup of tea in his hand). The friend, in reaction to my utterance, transferred the cup to his right hand. That prompted me to say: “I love your right hand”. My friend smiled, recognized my desire for tea and told his sister, “My friend wants tea”… My friend’s utterance addressed to his sister in reaction to mine was a representative, i.e. a simple statement: “my friend wants a tea”. The girl rightly interpreted the context of the representative to mean a directive. In other words, her brother (my friend) was ordering her to prepare some tea. (Bariki 2008)

This brief dialogue contains two examples of indirect speech acts. In both cases, the utterance has the form of a simple statement, but is actually intended to perform a different kind of act: request in the first case and command in the second. The second statement, “My friend wants tea,” was immediately and automatically interpreted correctly by the addressee. (In African culture, when an older brother makes such a statement to his younger sister, there is only one possible interpretation.) The first statement, however, failed to communicate. Only after the second attempt was the addressee able to work out the intended meaning, not automatically at all, but as if he was trying to solve a riddle.

Bariki uses this example to illustrate the role that context plays in enabling the hearer to identify the intended speech act. But it also shows us that context alone is not enough. In the context of the first utterance, there was a natural association between what was said ( your left hand ) and what was intended (a cup of tea); the addressee was holding a cup of tea in his left hand. In spite of this, the addressee was unable to figure out what the speaker meant. The contrast between this failed attempt at communication and the immediately understood statement My friend wants tea , suggests that there are certain principles and conventions which need to be followed in order to make the illocutionary force of an utterance clear to the hearer.

We might define an indirect speech act (following Searle 1975) as an utterance in which one illocutionary act (the primary act) is intentionally performed by means of the performance of another act (the literal act). In other words, it is an utterance whose form does not reflect the intended illocutionary force. My friend wants tea is a simple declarative sentence, the form which is normally used for making statements. In the context above, however, it was correctly interpreted as a command. So the literal act was a statement, but the primary act was a command.

Most if not all languages have grammatical and/or phonological means of distinguishing at least three basic types of sentences: statements, questions, and commands. The default expectation is that declarative sentences will express statements, interrogative sentences will express questions, and imperative sentences will express commands. When these expectations are met, we have a direct speech act because the grammatical form matches the intended illocutionary force. Explicit performatives are also direct speech acts.

An indirect speech act will normally be expressed as a declarative, interrogative, or imperative sentence; so the literal act will normally be a statement, question, or command. One of the best-known types of indirect speech act is the Rhetorical Question, which involves an interrogative sentence but is not intended to be a genuine request for information.

Why is the statement I love your left hand not likely to work as an indirect request for tea? Searle (1969; 1975) proposes that in order for an indirect speech act to be successful, the literal act should normally be related to the Felicity Conditions of the intended or primary act in certain specific ways. Searle restated Austin’s Felicity Conditions under four headings: preparatory conditions(background circumstances and knowledge about the speaker, hearer, and/ or situation which must be true in order for the speech act to be felicitous); sincerity conditions (necessary psychological states of speaker and/or hearer); propositional content (the kind of situation or event described by the underlying proposition); essential condition (the essence of the speech act; what the act “counts as”). These four categories are illustrated in Table 10.1 using the speech acts of promising and requesting.

Generally speaking, speakers perform an indirect speech act by stating or asking about one of the Felicity Conditions (apart from the essential condition). The examples in (7) show some sentences that could be used as indirect requests for tea. Sentences (7a–b) ask about the preparatory condition for a request, namely the hearer’s ability to perform the action. Sentences (7c–d) state the sincerity condition for a request, namely that the speaker wants the hearer to perform the action. Sentences (7e–f) ask about the propositional content of the request, namely the future act by the hearer.

(7) a. Do you have any tea?

b. Could you possibly give me some tea?

c. I would like you to give me some tea.

d. I would really appreciate a cup of tea.

e. Will you give me some tea?

f. Are you going to give me some tea?

All of these sentences could be understood as requests for tea, if spoken in the right context, but they are clearly not all equivalent: (7b) is a more polite way of asking than (7a); (7d) is a polite request, whereas (7c) sounds more demanding; (7e) is a polite request, whereas (7f) sounds impatient and even rude.

Not every possible strategy is actually available for a given speech act. For example, asking about the sincerity condition for a request is generally quite unnatural: # Do I want you to give me some tea ? This is because speakers do not normally ask other people about their own mental or emotional states. So that specific strategy cannot be used to form an indirect request.

We almost automatically interpret examples like (7b) and (7e) as requests. This tendency is so strong that it may be hard to recognize them as indirect speech acts. The crucial point is that their grammatical form is that of a question, not a request. However, some very close paraphrases of these sentences, such as those in (8), would probably not be understood as requests in most contexts.

(8) a. Do you currently have the ability to provide me with tea?

b. Do you anticipate giving me a cup of tea in the near future?

We can see the difference quite clearly if we try to add the word please to each sentence. As we noted in Chapter 1, please is a marker of politeness which is restricted to occurring only in requests; it does not occur naturally in other kinds of speech acts. It is possible, and in most cases fairly natural, to add please to any of the sentences in (7), even to those which do not sound very polite on their own. However, this is not possible for the sentences in (8). This difference provides good evidence for saying that the sentences in (8) are not naturally interpretable as indirect requests.

(9) a. Could you possibly give me some tea, please?

b. Will you give me some tea, please?

c. I would like you to give me some tea, please.

d. Are you going to give me some tea (?please)?

e. Do you currently have the ability to provide me with tea (#please)?

f. Do you anticipate giving me a cup of tea in the near future (#please)?

The contrast between the acceptability of (7b) and (7e) as requests vs. the unacceptability of their close paraphrases in (8) suggests that the form of the sentence, as well as its semantic content, helps to determine whether an indirect speech act will be successful or not. We will return to this issue below, but first we need to think about a more fundamental question: How does the hearer recognize an indirect speech act? In other words, how does he know that the primary (intended) illocutionary force of the utterance is not the same as the literal force suggested by the form of the sentence?

Searle suggests that the key to solving this problem comes from Grice’s Cooperative Principle. If someone asks the person sitting next to him at a dinner Can you pass me the salt?, we might expect the addressee to be puzzled. Only under the most unusual circumstances would this question be relevant to the current topic of conversation. Only under the most unusual circumstances would the answer to this question be informative, since few people who can sit up at a dinner table are physically unable to lift a salt shaker. In most contexts, the addressee could only believe the speaker to be obeying the Co-operative Principle if the question is not meant as a simple request for information, i.e., if the intended illocutionary force is something other than a question.

Having recognized this question as an indirect speech act, how does the addressee figure out what the intended illocutionary force is? Searle’s solution is essentially the Gricean method of calculating implicatures, enriched by an understanding of the Felicity Conditions for the intended speech act. Searle (1975) suggests that the addressee might reason as follows: “This question is not relevant to the current topic of conversation, and the speaker cannot be in doubt about my ability to pass the salt. I believe him to be cooperating in the conversation, so there must be another point to the question. I know that a preparatory condition for making a request is the belief that the addressee is able to perform the requested action. I know that people often use salt at dinner, sharing a common salt shaker which they pass back and forth as requested. Since he has mentioned a preparatory condition for requesting me to perform this action, I conclude that this request is what he means to communicate.”

So it is important that we understand indirect speech acts as a kind of conversational implicature. However, they are different in certain respects from the implicatures that Grice discussed. For example, Grice stated that implicatures are “non-detachable”, meaning that semantically equivalent sentences should trigger the same implicatures in the same context. However, as we noted above, this is not always true with indirect speech acts. In the current example, Searle points out that the question Are you able to pass me the salt? , although a close paraphrase of Can you pass me the salt? , is much less likely to be interpreted as a request (# Are you able to please pass me the salt? ). How can we account for this?

Searle argues that, while the meaning of the indirect speech act is calculable or explainable in Gricean terms, the forms of indirect speech acts are partly conventionalized. Searle refers to these as “conventions of usage”, in contrast to normal idioms like kick the bucket (for ‘die’) which we might call conventions of meaning or sense.

Conventionalized speech acts are different from normal idioms in several important ways. First, the meanings of normal idioms are not calculable or predictable from their literal meanings. The phrase kick the bucket contains no words which have any component of meaning relating to death.

Second, when an indirect speech act is performed, both the literal and primary acts are understood to be part of what is meant. In Searle’s terms, the primary act is performed “by way of” performing the literal act. We can see this because, as illustrated in (10), the hearer could appropriately reply to the primary act alone (A1), the literal act alone (A2), or to both acts together (A3). Moreover, in reporting indirect speech acts, it is possible (and in fact quite common) to use matrix verbs which refer to the literal act rather than the primary act, as illustrated in (11–12).

(10) Q: Can you (please) tell me the time? A1: It’s almost 5:30. A2: No, I’m sorry, I can’t; my watch has stopped. A3: Yes, it’s 5:30.

(11) a. Will you (please) pass me the salt? b. He asked me whether I would pass him the salt.

(12) a. I want you to leave now (please). b. He told me that he wanted me to leave.

In this way indirect speech acts are quite similar to other conversational implicatures, in that both the sentence meaning and the pragmatic inference are part of what is communicated. They are very different from normal idioms, which allow either the idiomatic meaning (the normal interpretation), or the literal meaning (under unusual circumstances), but never both together. The two senses of a normal idiom are antagonistic, as we can see by the fact that some people use them to form (admittedly bad) puns:

(13) Old milkmaids never die — they just kick the bucket. 7

Birner (2012/2013: 196) points out that under Searle’s view, indirect speech acts are similar to generalized conversational implicatures. In both cases the implicature is part of the default interpretation of the utterance; it will arise unless it is blocked by specific features in the context, or is explicitly negated, etc. We have to work pretty hard to create a context in which the question Can you pass the salt? would not be interpreted as a request, but it can be done. 8

Searle states that politeness is one of the primary reasons for using an indirect speech act. Notice that all of the sentences in (7), except perhaps (7f), sound more polite than the simple imperative: Give me some tea! He suggests that this motivation may help to explain why certain forms tend to be conventionalized for particular purposes.

7 Richard Lederer (1988) Get Thee to a Punnery. Wyrick & Company.

8 Searle (1975: 69) suggests that a doctor might ask such a question to check on the progress of a patient with an injured arm.

Illocutionary Act

Making an Explicit Point

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An Introduction to Punctuation
Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
B.A., English, State University of New York

In speech-act theory , the term illocutionary act refers to the use of a sentence to express an attitude with a certain function or "force," called an illocutionary force , which differs from locutionary acts in that they carry a certain urgency and appeal to the meaning and direction of the speaker.

Although illocutionary acts are commonly made explicit by the use of performative verbs like "promise" or "request," they can often be vague as in someone saying "I'll be there," wherein the audience cannot ascertain whether the speaker has made a promise or not.

In addition, as Daniel R. Boisvert observes in "Expressivism, Nondeclarative, and Success-Conditional Semantics" that we can use sentences to "warn, congratulate, complain, predict, command, apologize, inquire, explain, describe, request, bet, marry, and adjourn, to list just a few specific kinds of illocutionary act."

The terms illocutionary act and illocutionary force were introduced by British linguistic philosopher John Austin in 1962's "How to Do Things With Words, and for some scholars, the term illocutionary act is virtually synonymous with speech act .

Locutionary, Illocutionary, and Perlocutionary Acts

Acts of speech can be broken down into three categories: locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts. In each of these, too, the acts can either be direct or indirect, which quantify how effective they are at conveying the speaker's message to its intended audience.

According to Susana Nuccetelli and Gary Seay's "Philosophy of Language: The Central Topics," locutionary acts are "the mere act of producing some linguistic sounds or marks with a certain meaning and reference," but these are the least effective means of describing the acts, merely an umbrella term for the other two which can occur simultaneously.

Speech acts can therefore further be broken down into illocutionary and perlocutionary wherein the illocutionary act carries a directive for the audience, such as promising, ordering, apologizing and thanking. Perlocutionary acts, on the other hand, bring about consequences to the audiences such as saying "I will not be your friend." In this instance, the impending loss of friendship is an illocutionary act while the effect of frightening the friend into compliance is a perlocutionary act.

Relationship Between Speaker and Listener

Because perlocutionary and illocutionary acts depend on the audience's reaction to a given speech, the relationship between speaker and listener is important to understand in the context of such acts of speech.

Etsuko Oishi wrote in "Apologies," that "the importance of the speaker's intention in performing an illocutionary act is unquestionable, but, in communication , the utterance becomes an illocutionary act only when the hearer takes the utterance as such." By this, Oishi means that although the speaker's act may always be an illocutionary one, the listener can choose to not interpret that way, therefore redefining the cognitive configuration of their shared outer world.

Given this observation, the old adage "know your audience" becomes especially relevant in understanding discourse theory, and indeed in composing a good speech or speaking well in general. In order for the illocutionary act to be effective, the speaker must use language which his or her audience will understand as intended.

Speech Acts in Linguistics
Locutionary Act Definition in Speech-Act Theory
Speech Act Theory
The 9 Parts of Speech: Definitions and Examples
Perlocutionary Act Speech
Illocutionary Force in Speech Theory
Phonetic Prosody
Felicity Conditions: Definition and Examples
Performative Verbs
Explicature (Speech Acts)
Appropriateness in Communication
Verbal Hedge: Definition and Examples
Coherence in Composition
Mental-State Verbs
Information Content (Language)
The Power of Indirectness in Speaking and Writing

Speech Acts

Speech acts are a staple of everyday communicative life, but only became a topic of sustained investigation, at least in the English-speaking world, in the middle of the Twentieth Century. [ 1 ] Since that time “speech act theory” has been influential not only within philosophy, but also in linguistics, psychology, legal theory, artificial intelligence, literary theory and many other scholarly disciplines. [ 2 ] Recognition of the importance of speech acts has illuminated the ability of language to do other things than describe reality. In the process the boundaries among the philosophy of language, the philosophy of action, the philosophy of mind and even ethics have become less sharp. In addition, an appreciation of speech acts has helped lay bare an implicit normative structure within linguistic practice, including even that part of this practice concerned with describing reality. Much recent research aims at an accurate characterization of this normative structure underlying linguistic practice.

1. Introduction

2.1 the independence of force and content, 2.2 can saying make it so, 2.3 seven components of illocutionary force, 3. illocutions and perlocutions, and indirect speech acts, 4. force, fit and satisfaction, 5.1 force conventionalism, 5.2. an objection to force conventionalism, 6.1 grice's account of speaker meaning, 6.2 objections to grice's account, 6.3 force as an aspect of speaker meaning, 7.1 speech acts and conversation analysis, 7.2 speech acts and scorekeeping, 8. force-indicators and the logically perfect language, 9. do speech acts have a logic, further reading, other internet resources, related entries.

One way of appreciating the distinctive features of speech acts is in contrast with other well-established phenomena within the philosophy of language. Accordingly in this entry I will consider the relation among speech acts and: semantic content, grammatical mood, speaker-meaning, logically perfect languages, perlocutions, performatives, presuppositions, and implicature. This will enable us to situate speech acts within their ecological niche.

Above I shuddered with quotation marks around the expression ‘speech act theory’. It is one thing to say that speech acts are a phenomenon of importance for students of language and communication; another to say that we have a theory of them. While, as we shall see below, we are able to situate speech acts within their niche, having a theory of them would enable us to explain (rather than merely describe) some of their most significant features. Consider a different case. Semantic theory deserves its name: For instance, with the aid of set-theoretic tools it helps us tell the difference between good arguments and bad arguments couched in ordinary language. By contrast, it is not clear that “speech act theory” has comparable credentials. One such credential would be a delineation of logical relations among speech acts, if such there be. To that end I close with a brief discussion of the possibility, envisioned by some, of an “illocutionary logic”.

2. Content, Force, and How Saying Can Make It So

Construed as a bit of observable behavior, a given act may be done with any of a variety of aims. I bow deeply before you. So far you may not know whether I am paying obeisance, responding to indigestion, or looking for a wayward contact lens. So too, a given utterance, such as ‘You'll be more punctual in the future,’ may leave you wondering whether I am making a prediction or issuing a command or even a threat. The colloquial question, “What is the force of those words?” is often used to elicit an answer. In asking such a question we acknowledge a grasp of what those words mean. However, given the dizzying array of uses of ‘meaning’ in philosophy and related cognitive sciences, I will here refer instead to content. While different theories of content abound (as sets of possible worlds, sets of truth conditions, Fregean senses, ordered n -tuples, to name a few), the phenomenon is relatively clear: What the speaker said is that the addressee will be more punctual in the future. The addressee or observer who asks, “What is the force of those words?” is asking, of that content, how it's to be taken–as a threat, as a prediction, or as a command. The addressee is not asking for a further elucidation of that content.

Or so it seems. Perhaps whether the utterance is meant as a threat, a prediction or a command will depend on some part of her content that was left unpronounced? According to this suggestion, really what she said was, “I predict you'll be more punctual,” or “I command you to be more punctual,” as the case may be. Were that so, however, she'd be contradicting herself in uttering ‘You'll be more punctual in the future’ as a prediction while going on to point out, ‘I don't mean that as a prediction.’ While such a juxtaposition of utterances is surely odd, it is not a self-contradiction, any more than “It's raining but I don't believe it,” is a self-contradiction when the left conjunct is put forth as an expression of belief. What is more, ‘I predict you'll be more punctual,’ is itself a sentence with a content, and will be being put forth with some force or other when–as per our current suggestion—the speaker says it in the course of making a prediction. So that sentence, ‘I predict you'll be more punctual’ is put forth with some force–say as an assertion. This implies, according to the present suggestion, that really the speaker said, ‘I assert that I predict that you'll be more punctual.’ Continuing this same style of reasoning will enable us to infer that performance of a single speech act requires saying–though perhaps not pronouncing—infinitely many things. That is reason for rejecting the hypothesis that implied it, and for the rest of this entry I will assume that force is no part of content.

In chemical parlance, a radical is a group of atoms normally incapable of independent existence, whereas a functional group is the grouping of those atoms in a compound that is responsible for certain of the compound's properties. Analogously, it is often remarked that a proposition is itself communicatively inert; for instance, merely expressing the proposition that snow is white is not to make a move in a “language game”. Rather, such moves are only made by putting forth a proposition with an illocutionary force such as assertion, conjecture, command, etc. The chemical analogy gains further plausibility from the fact that just as a chemist might isolate radicals held in common among various compounds, the student of language may isolate a common element held among ‘Is the door shut?’, ‘Shut the door!’, and ‘The door is shut’. This common element is the proposition that the door is shut, queried in the first sentence, commanded to be made true in the second, and asserted in the third. According to the chemical analogy, then:

Illocutionary force : propositional content :: functional group : radical

In light of this analogy we may see, following Stenius 1967, that just as the grouping of a set of atoms is not itself another atom or set of atoms, so too the forwarding of a proposition with a particular illocutionary force is not itself a further component of propositional content.

Encouraged by the chemical analogy, a central tenet in the study of speech acts is that content may remain fixed while force varies. Another way of putting the point is that the content of one's communicative act underdetermines the force of that act. That's why, from the fact that someone has said, “You'll be more punctual in the future,” we cannot infer the utterance's force. The force of an utterance also underdetermines its content: Just from the fact that a speaker has made a promise, we cannot deduce what she has promised to do. For these reasons, students of speech acts contend that a given communicative act may be analyzed into two components: force and content. While semantics studies the contents of speech acts, pragmatics studies, inter alia , their force. The bulk of this entry may be seen as an elucidation of force.

Need we bother with such an elucidation? That A is an important component of communication, and that A underdetermines B , do not justify the conclusion that B is an important component of communication. Content also underdetermines the decibel level at which we speak but this fact does not justify adding decibel level to our repertoire of core concepts for the philosophy of language. Why should force be thought any more worthy of admission to this set of core concepts than decibel level? One reason for an asymmetry in our treatment of force and decibel level is that the former, but not the latter, seems to be a component of speaker meaning : Force is a feature not of what is meant but of how it is meant; decibel level, by contrast, is a feature at most of the way in which something is said. This point is developed in Section 6 below.

Speech acts are not to be confused with acts of speech. One can perform a speech act such as issuing a warning without saying anything: A gesture or even a minatory facial expression will do the trick. So too, one can perform an act of speech, say by uttering words in order to test a microphone, without performing a speech act. [ 3 ] For a first-blush delineation of the range of speech acts, then, consider that in some cases we can make something the case by saying that it is. Alas, I can't lose ten pounds by saying that I am doing so, nor can I persuade you of a proposition by saying that I am doing so. On the other hand I can promise to meet you tomorrow by uttering the words, “I promise to meet you tomorrow,” and if I have the authority to do so, I can even appoint you to an office by saying, “I hereby appoint you.” (I can also appoint you without making the force of my act explicit: I might just say, “You are now Treasurer of the Corporation.” Here I appoint you without saying that I am doing so.) A necessary and, perhaps, sufficient condition of a type of act's being a speech act is that acts of that type can–whether or not all are—be carried out by saying that one is doing so.

Saying can make it so, but that is not to suggest that any old saying by any speaker constitutes the performance of a speech act. Only an appropriate authority, speaking at the appropriate time and place, can: christen a ship, pronounce a couple married, appoint someone to an administrative post, declare the proceedings open, or rescind an offer. Austin, in How To Do Things With Words, spends considerable effort detailing the conditions that must be met for a given speech act to be performed felicitously . Failures of felicity fall into two classes: misfires and abuses . The former are cases in which the putative speech act fails to be performed at all. If I utter, before the QEII, “I declare this ship the Noam Chomsky,” I have not succeeded in naming anything simply because I lack the authority to do so. My act thus misfires in that I've performed an act of speech but no speech act. Other attempts at speech acts might misfire because their addressee fails to respond with an appropriate uptake : I cannot bet you $100 on who will win the election unless you accept that bet. If you don't accept that bet, then I have tried to bet but have not succeeded in betting.

Some speech acts can be performed–that is, not misfire—while still being less than felicitous. I promise to meet you for lunch tomorrow, but haven't the least intention of keeping the promise. Here I have promised all right, but the act is not felicitous because it is not sincere. My act is, more precisely, an abuse because although it is a speech act, it fails to live up to a standard appropriate for a speech act of its kind. Sincerity is a paradigm condition for the felicity of speech acts. Austin foresaw a program of research in which individual speech acts would be studied in detail, with felicity conditions elucidated for each one. [ 4 ]

Here are three further features of the “saying makes it so” condition. First, the saying appealed to in the “saying makes it so” test is not an act of speech: My singing in the shower, “I promise to meet you tomorrow for lunch,” when my purpose is simply to enjoy the sound of my voice, is not a promise, even if you overhear me. Rather, the saying (or singing) in question must itself be something that I mean. We will return in Section 6 to the task of elucidating the notion of meaning at issue here.

Second, the making relation that this “saying makes it so” condition appeals to needs to be treated with some care. My uttering, “I am causing molecular agitation,” makes it the case that I am causing molecular agitation. Yet causing molecular agitation is not a speech act on any intuitive understanding of that notion. One might propose that the notion of making at issue here marks a constitutive relation rather than a causal relation. That may be so, but as we'll see in Section 5, this suggests the controversial conclusion that all speech acts depend for their existence on conventions over and above those that imbue our words with meaning.

Finally, the saying makes it so condition has a flip side. Not only can I perform a speech act by saying that I am doing so, I can also rescind that act later on by saying (in the speech act sense) that I take it back. I cannot, of course, change the past, and so nothing I can do on Wednesday can change the fact that I made a promise or an assertion on Monday. However, on Wednesday I may be able to retract a claim I made on Monday. I can't take back a punch or a burp; the most I can do is apologize for one of these infractions, and perhaps make amends. By contrast, not only can I apologize or make amends for a claim I now regret; I can also take it back. Likewise, you may allow me on Wednesday to retract the promise I made to you on Monday. In both these cases of assertion and promise, I am no longer beholden to the commitments that the speech acts engender in spite of the fact that the past is fixed. Just as one can, under appropriate conditions, perform a speech act by saying that one is doing so, so too one can, under the right conditions, retract that very speech act.

Searle and Vanderveken 1985 distinguish between those illocutionary forces employed by speakers within a given linguistic community, and the set of all possible illocutionary forces. While a certain linguistic community may make no use of a force such as conjecturing or appointing, these two are among the set of all possible forces. (These authors appear to assume that while the set of possible forces may be infinite, it has a definite cardinality.) Searle and Vanderveken go on to define illocutionary force in terms of seven features, claiming that every possible illocutionary force may be identified with a septuple of such values. The features are:

1. Illocutionary point : This is the characteristic aim of each type of speech act. For instance, the characteristic aim of an assertion is to describe how things are; the characteristic point of a promise is to commit oneself to a future course of action.

2. Degree of strength of the illocutionary point : Two illocutions can have the same point but differ along the dimension of strength. For instance, requesting and insisting that the addressee do something both have the point of attempting to get the addressee to do that thing; however, the latter is stronger than the former.

3. Mode of achievement : This is the special way, if any, in which the illocutionary point of a speech act must be achieved. Testifying and asserting both have the point of describing how things are; however, the former also involves invoking one's authority as a witness while the latter does not. To testify is to assert in one's capacity as a witness. Commanding and requesting both aim to get the addressee to do something; yet only someone issuing a command does so in her capacity as a person in a position of authority.

4. Propositional content conditions : Some illocutions can only be achieved with an appropriate propositional content. For instance, I can only promise what is in the future and under my control. I can only apologize for what is in some sense under my control and already the case. For this reason, promising to make it the case that the sun did not rise yesterday is not possible; neither can I apologize for the truth of Snell's Law.

5. Preparatory conditions : These are all other conditions that must be met for the speech act not to misfire. Such conditions often concern the social status of interlocutors. For instance, a person cannot bequeath an object unless she already owns it or has power of attorney; a person cannot marry a couple unless she is legally invested with the authority to do so.

6. Sincerity conditions : Many speech acts involve the expression of a psychological state. Assertion expresses belief; apology expresses regret, a promise expresses an intention, and so on. A speech act is sincere only if the speaker is in the psychological state that her speech act expresses.

7. Degree of strength of the sincerity conditions : Two speech acts might be the same along other dimensions, but express psychological states that differ from one another in the dimension of strength. Requesting and imploring both express desires, and are identical along the other six dimensions above; however, the latter expresses a stronger desire than the former.

Searle and Vanderveken suggest, in light of these seven characteristics, that each illocutionary force may be defined as a septuple of values, each of which is a “setting” of a value within one of the seven characteristics. It follows, according to this suggestion, that two illocutionary forces F 1 and F 2 are identical just in case they correspond to the same septuple.

I cannot lose ten pounds by saying that I am doing so, and I cannot convince you of the truth of a claim by saying that I am doing so. However, these two cases differ in that the latter, but not the former, is a characteristic aim of a speech act. One characteristic aim of assertion is the production of belief in an addressee, whereas there is no speech act one of whose characteristic aims is the reduction of adipose tissue. A type of speech act can have a characteristic aim without each speech act of that type being issued with that aim: Speakers sometimes make assertions without aiming to produce belief in anyone, even themselves. Instead, the view that a speech act-type has a characteristic aim is akin to the view that a biological trait has a function. The characteristic role of wings is to aid in flight, but some flightless creatures have wings.

Austin called these characteristic aims of speech acts perlocutions (1962, p. 101). I can both urge and persuade you to shut the door, yet the former is an illocution while the latter is a perlocution. How can we tell the difference? We can do this by noting that one can urge by saying, “I urge you to shut the door,” while there are no circumstances in which I can persuade you by saying, “I persuade you to shut the door.” A characteristic aim of urging is, nevertheless, the production of a resolution to act. (1962, p. 107)

Perlocutions are characteristic aims of one or more illocution, but are not themselves illocutions. Nevertheless, a speech act can be performed by virtue of the performance of another one. For instance, my remark that you are standing on my foot is normally taken as, in addition, a demand that you move; my question whether you can pass the salt is normally taken as a request that you do so. These are examples of so-called indirect speech acts (Searle 1975b).

Indirect speech acts are less common than might first appear. In asking whether you are intending to quit smoking, I might be taken as well to be suggesting that you quit. However, while the embattled smoker might indeed jump to this interpretation, we do well to consider what evidence would mandate it. After all, while I probably would not have asked whether you intended to quit smoking unless I hoped you would quit, I can evince such a hope without suggesting anything. Similarly, the advertiser who tells us that Miracle Cream reversed hair loss in Bob, Mike, and Fred, also most likely hopes that I will believe it will reverse my own hair loss. That does not show that he is (indirectly) asserting that it will. Whether he is asserting this depends, it would seem, on whether he can be accused of being a liar if in fact he does not believe that Miracle Cream will staunch my hair loss.

Whether, in addition to a given speech act, I am also performing an indirect speech act would seem to depend on my intentions. My question whether you can pass the salt is also a request that you do so only if I intend to be so understood. My remark that Miracle Cream helped Bob, Mike and Fred is also an assertion that it will help you only if I intend to be so committed. What is more, these intentions must be feasibly discernible on the part of one's audience. Even if, in remarking on the fine weather, I intend as well to request that you pass the salt, I have not done so. I need to make that intention manifest in some way.

How might I do this? One way is by virtue of inference to the best explanation. All else being equal, the best explanation of my asking whether you can pass the salt is that I mean to be requesting that you do so. All else equal, the best explanation of my remarking that you are standing on my foot, particularly if I use a stentorian tone of voice, is that I mean to be demanding that you desist. By contrast, it is doubtful that the best explanation of my asking whether you intend to quit smoking is my intention to suggest that you do so. Another explanation at least as plausible is my hope that you do so. Bertolet 1994, however, develops an even more skeptical position than that suggested here, arguing that any alleged case of an indirect speech act can be construed just as an indication, by means of contextual clues, of the speaker's intentional state–hope, desire, etc., as the case may be. Postulation of a further speech act beyond what has been (relatively) explicitly performed is explanatorily unmotivated.

These considerations suggest that indirect speech acts, if they do occur, can be explained within the framework of conversational implicature–that process by which we mean more than we say, but in a way not due exclusively to the conventional meanings of our words. Conversational implicature, too, depends both upon communicative intentions and the availability of inference to the best explanation. (Grice, 1989). In fact, Searle's 1979b account of indirect speech acts was in terms of conversational implicature. The study of speech acts is in this respect intertwined with the study of conversations; we return to this connection in Section 7.

Force is often characterized in terms of the notions of direction of fit and conditions of satisfaction. The first of these may be illustrated with an example derived from Anscombe (1963). A woman sends her husband to the grocery store with a list of things to get; unbeknownst to him he is also being trailed by a detective concerned to make a list of what the man buys. By the time the husband and detective are in the checkout line, their two lists contain exactly the same items. The contents of the two lists is the same, yet they differ along another dimension. For the contents of the husband's list guide what he puts in his shopping cart. Insofar, his list exhibits world-to-word direction of fit : It is, so to speak, the job of the items in his cart to conform to what is on his list. By contrast, it is the job of the detective's list to conform with the world, in particular to what is in the husband's cart. As such, the detective's list has word-to-world direction of fit : The onus is on those words to conform to how things are. Speech acts such as assertions and predictions have word-to-world direction of fit, while speech acts such as commands have world-to-word direction of fit.

Not all speech acts appear to have direction of fit. I can thank you by saying “Thank you,” and it is widely agreed that thanking is a speech act. However, thanking seems to have neither of the directions of fit we have discussed thus far. Similarly, asking who is at the door is a speech act, but it does not seem to have either of the directions of fit we have thus far mentioned. Some would respond by construing questions as a form of imperative (e.g., “Tell me who is at the door!”), and then ascribing the direction of fit characteristic of imperatives to questions. This leaves untouched, however, banal cases such as thanking or even, “Hooray for Arsenal!” Some authors, such as Searle and Vanderveken 1985, describe such cases as having “null” direction of fit. That characterization is evidently distinct from saying such speech acts have no direction of fit at all. (The characterization is thus analogous to the way in which some non-classical logical theories describe some proposition as being neither True nor False, but as having a third truth value, N : Evidently that is not to say that such propositions are bereft of truth value.) It is difficult to discern from such accounts how one sheds light on a speech act in characterizing it as having a null direction of fit, as opposed to having no direction of fit at all. [ 5 ]

Direction of fit is also not so fine-grained as to enable us to distinguish speech acts meriting different treatment. Consider asserting that the center of the Milky Way is inhabited by a black hole, as opposed to conjecturing that the center of the Milky Way is so inhabited. These two acts seem subject to norms: The former purports to be a manifestation of knowledge, while the latter does not. This is suggested by the fact that it is appropriate to reply to the assertion with, “How do you know?”, while that is not an appropriate response to the conjecture. (Williamson 1996) Nevertheless, both the assertion and conjecture have word-to-world direction of fit. Might there be other notions enabling us to mark differences between speech acts with the same direction of fit? This is not to say that the difference between assertion and conjecture cannot be expressed as a difference among Searle and Vanderveken's seven components of illocutionary force; for instance that difference might be thought of as a difference in parameter 2, namely the degree of strength of illocutionary point. Rather, what we are seeking is an account of, rather than a label for, that difference.

One suggestion might come from the related notion of conditions of satisfaction . This notion generalizes that of truth. As we saw in 2.3, it is internal to the activity of assertion that it aims to capture how things are. When an assertion does so, not only is it true, it has hit its target; the aim of the assertion has been met. A similar point may be made of imperatives: It is internal to the activity of issuing an imperative that the world is enjoined to conform to it. The imperative is satisfied just in case it is fulfilled. Assertions and imperatives both have conditions of satisfaction–truth in the first place, and conformity in the second. In addition, it might be held that questions have answerhood as their conditions of satisfaction: A question hits its target just in case it finds an answer, typically in a speech act, performed by an addressee, such as an assertion that answers the question posed. Like the notion of direction of fit, however, the notion of conditions of satisfaction is too coarse-grained to enable us to make some valuable distinctions among speech acts. Just to use our earlier case again: An assertion and a conjecture that P have identical conditions of satisfaction, namely that P be the case. May we discern features distinguishing these two speech acts, and that may enable us to make finer-grained distinctions among other speech acts as well? I shall return to this question in Section 7.

5. Mood, Force and Convention

Just as content underdetermines force and force underdetermines content; so too even grammatical mood together with content underdetermine force. ‘You'll be more punctual in the future’ is in the indicative grammatical mood, but as we have seen that fact does not determine its force. The same may be said of other grammatical moods. Although I overhear you utter the words, ‘shut the door’, I cannot infer yet that you are issuing a command. Perhaps instead you are simply describing your own intention, in the course of saying, “I intend to shut the door.” If so, you've used the imperative mood without issuing a command. So too with the interrogative mood: I overhear your words, ‘who is on the phone.’ Thus far I don't know whether you've asked a question. After all, you may have so spoken in the course of stating, “John wonders who is on the phone.” Might either or both of initial capitalization or final punctuation settle the issue? Apparently not: What puzzles John is the following question: Who is on the phone?

Mood together with content underdetermine force. On the other hand it is a plausible hypothesis that grammatical mood is one of the devices we use, together with contextual clues, intonation and so on to indicate the force with which we are expressing a content. Understood in this weak way, it is unexceptionable to construe the interrogative mood as used for asking questions, the imperatival mood as used for issuing commands, and so on. So understood, we might go on to ask how speakers indicate the force of their speech acts given that grammatical mood and content cannot be relied on alone to do so.

One well known answer we may term force conventionalism . According to a strong version of this view, for every speech act that is performed, there is some convention that will have been invoked in order to make that speech act occur. This convention transcends those imbuing words with their literal meaning. Thus, force conventionalism implies that in order for use of ‘I promise to meet you tomorrow at noon,’ to constitute a promise, not only must the words used possess their standard conventional meanings, there must also exist a convention to the effect that the use, under the right conditions, of some such words as these constitutes a promise. J.L. Austin, who introduced the English-speaking world to the study of speech acts, seems to have held this view. For instance in his characterization of “felicity conditions” for speech acts, Austin holds that for each speech act

There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances… (1962, p. 14).

Austin's student Searle follows him in this, writing

…utterance acts stand to propositional and illocutionary acts in the way in which, e.g., making an X on a ballot paper stands to voting. (1969, p. 24)

Searle goes on to clarify this commitment in averring,

…the semantic structure of a language may be regarded as a conventional realization of a series of sets of underlying constitutive rules, and …speech acts are acts characteristically performed by uttering sentences in accordance with these sets of constitutive rules. (1969, p. 37)

Searle espouses a weaker form of force conventionalism than does Austin in leaving open the possibility that some speech acts can be performed without constitutive rules; Searle considers the case of a dog requesting to be let outside (1969, p. 39). Nevertheless Searle does contend that speech acts are characteristically performed by invoking constitutive rules.

Force-conventionalism, even in the weaker form just adumbrated, has been challenged by Strawson, who writes,

I do not want to deny that there may be conventional postures or procedures for entreating: one can, for example, kneel down, raise one's arms, and say, “I entreat you.” But I do want to deny that an act of entreaty can be performed only as conforming to such conventions….[T]o suppose that there is always and necessarily a convention conformed to would be like supposing that there could be no love affairs which did not proceed on lines laid down in the Roman de la Rose or that every dispute between men must follow the pattern specified in Touchstone's speech about the countercheck quarrelsome and the lie direct. (1964, p. 444)

Strawson contends that rather than appealing to a series of extra-semantic conventions to account for the possibility of speech acts, we explain that possibility in terms of our ability to discern one another's communicative intentions. What makes an utterance of a sentence in the indicative mood a prediction rather than a command, for instance, is that it is intended to be so taken; likewise for promises rather than predictions. This position is compatible with holding that in special cases linguistic communities have instituted conventions for particular speech acts such as entreating and excommunicating.

Intending to make an assertion, promise, or request, however, is not enough to perform one of these acts. Those intentions must be efficacious. The same point applies to cases of trying to perform a speech act, even when what one is trying to do is clear to others. This fact emerges from reflecting on an oft-quoted passage from Searle:

Human communication has some extraordinary properties, not shared by most other kinds of human behavior. One of the most extraordinary is this: If I am trying to tell someone something, then (assuming certain conditions are satisfied) as soon as he recognizes that I am trying to tell him something and exactly what it is I am trying to tell him, I have succeeded in telling it to him. (1969, p. 47.)

An analogous point would not apply to the act of sending : Just from the facts that I am trying to send my addressee something, and that he recognizes that I am trying to do so (and what it is I am trying to send him), we cannot infer that I have succeeded in sending it to him. However, while Searle's point about telling looks more plausible at first glance than would a point about sending, it also is not accurate. Suppose I am trying to tell somebody that I love her, and that she recognizes this fact on the basis of background knowledge, my visible embarrassment, and my inability to get past the letter ‘l’. Here we cannot infer that I have succeeded in avowing my love for her. Nothing short of coming out and saying it will do. Similarly, it might be common knowledge that my moribund uncle is trying, as he breathes his last, to bequeath me his fortune; still, I won't inherit a penny if he expires before saying what he was trying to. [ 6 ]

The gist of these examples is not the requirement that words be uttered in every speech act–we have already observed that speech acts can be performed silently. Rather, its gist is that speech acts involve intentional undertaking of one or another form of commitment; further, that commitment is not undertaken simply by virtue of my intending to undertake it, even when it is common knowledge that this is what I am trying to do. Can we, however, give a more illuminating characterization of the relevant intentions than merely saying that, for instance, to assert P one must intentionally put forth P as an assertion? [ 7 ] Strawson (1964) proposes that we can do so with aid of the notion of speaker meaning–a topic to which I now turn.

6. Speaker-Meaning and Force

As we have seen, that A is an important component of communication, and that A underdetermines B , do not justify the conclusion that B is an important component of communication. One reason for an asymmetry in our treatment of force and decibel level is that the former, but not the latter, seems to be a component of speaker meaning. I intend to speak at a certain volume, and sometimes succeed, but in most cases it is no part of what I mean that I happen to be speaking at the volume that I do. On the other hand, the force of my utterance is part of what I mean. It is not, as we have seen, part of what I say–that notion being closely associated with content. However, whether I mean what I say as an assertion, a conjecture, a promise or something else will be a feature of how I mean what I do.

Let us elucidate this notion of speaker meaning (née non-natural meaning). In his influential 1957 article, Grice distinguished between two senses of ‘mean’. One sense is exemplified by remarks such as ‘Those clouds mean rain,’ and ‘Those spots mean measles.’ The notion of meaning in play in such cases Grice dubs ‘natural meaning’. Grice suggests that we may distinguish this sense of ‘mean’ from another sense of the word more relevant to communication, exemplified in such utterances as

In saying “You make a better door than a window”, George meant that you should move,

In gesticulating that way, Salvatore means that there's quicksand over there,

Grice used the term ‘non-natural meaning’ for this sense of ‘mean’, and in more recent literature this jargon has been replaced with the term ‘speaker meaning’. [ 8 ] After distinguishing between natural and (what we shall heretofore call) speaker meaning, Grice attempts to characterize the latter. It is not enough that I do something that influences the beliefs of an observer: In putting on a coat I might lead an observer to conclude that I am going for a walk. Yet in such a case it is not plausible that I mean that I am going for a walk in the sense germane to speaker meaning. Might performing an action with an intention of influencing someone's beliefs be sufficient for speaker meaning? No: I might leave Smith's handkerchief at the crime scene to make the police think that Smith is the culprit. However, whether or not I am successful in getting the authorities to think that Smith is the culprit, in this case it is not plausible that I mean that Smith is the culprit.

What is missing in the handkerchief example is the element of overtness. This suggests another criterion: Performing an action with the, or an, intention of influencing someone's beliefs, while intending that this very intention be recognized. Grice contends that even here we do not have enough for speaker meaning. Herod presents Salome with St. John's severed head on a charger, intending that she discern that St. John is dead and intending that this very intention of his be recognized. Grice observes that in so doing Herod is not telling Salome anything, but is instead deliberately and openly letting her know something. Grice concludes that Herod's action is not a case of speaker meaning either. The problem is not that Herod is not using words; we have already considered hunters who mean things wordlessly. The problem seems to be that to infer what Herod intends her to, Salome does not have to take his word for anything. She can see the severed head for herself if she can bring herself to look. By contrast, in its central uses, telling requires a speaker to intend to convey information (or alleged information) in a way that relies crucially upon taking her at her word. Grice appears to assume that at least for the case in which what is meant is a proposition (rather than a question or an imperative), speaker meaning requires a telling in this central sense. What is more, this last example is a case of performing an action with an intention of influencing someone's beliefs, even while intending that this very intention be recognized; yet it is not a case of telling. Grice infers that it is not a case of speaker meaning either.

Grice holds that for speaker meaning to occur, not only must one (a) intend to produce an effect on an audience, and (b) intend that this very intention be recognized by that audience, but also (c) one must intend this effect on the audience to be produced at least in part by their recognition of the speaker's intention. The intention to produce a belief or other attitude by means (at least in part) of recognition of this very intention, has come to be called a reflexive communicative intention .

It has, however, been shown that intentions to produce cognitive or other effects on an audience are not necessary for speaker meaning. Davis 1992 offers many cases of speaker meaning in the absence of reflexive communicative intentions. Indeed, he forcefully argues that speaker meaning can occur without a speaker intending to produce any beliefs in an audience. [ 9 ] [ 10 ] Instead of intentions to produce certain effects in an audience, some authors have proposed that speaker meaning is a matter of overtly indicating some aspect of oneself. (Green, 2007). Compare my going to the closet to take out my overcoat (not a case of speaker meaning), with the following case: After heatedly arguing about the weather, I march to the closet while beadily meeting your stare, then storm out the front door while ostentatiously donning the coat. Here it's a lot more plausible that I mean that it's raining outside, and the reason seems to be that I am making some attitude of mine overt: I am not only showing it, I am making clear my intention to do just that.

How does this help to elucidate the notion of force? One way of asserting that P , it seems, is overtly to manifest my commitment to P , and indeed commitment of a particular kind: commitment to defend P in response to challenges of the form, “How do you know that?” I must also overtly manifest my liability to be either right or wrong on the issue of P depending on whether P is the case. By contrast, I conjecture P by overtly manifesting my commitment to P in this same “liability to error” way; but I am not committed to responding to challenges demanding justification. I must, however, give some reason for believing P ; this much cannot, however, be said of a guess.

We perform a speech act, then, when we overtly commit ourselves in a certain way to a content–where that way is an aspect of how we speaker-mean that content. One way to do that is to invoke a convention for undertaking commitment; another way is overtly to manifest one's intention to be so committed. We may elucidate the relevant forms of commitment by spelling out the norms underlying them. We have already adumbrated such an approach in our discussion of the differences among asserting and conjecturing. Developing that discussion a bit further, compare

conjecturing

All three of these acts have word-to-world direction of fit, and all three have conditions of satisfaction mandating that they are satisfied just in case the world is as their content says it is. Further, one who asserts, conjectures, or guesses that P is right or wrong on the issue of P depending on whether P is in fact so. However, as we move from left to right we find a decreasing order of stringency in commitment. One who asserts P lays herself open to the challenge, “How do you know that?”, and she is obliged to retract P if she is unable to respond to that challenge adequately. By contrast, this challenge is inappropriate for either a conjecture or a guess. On the other hand, we may justifiably demand of the conjecturer that she give some reason for her conjecture; yet not even this much may be said of one who makes a guess. (The “educated guess” is intermediate between these two cases.)

We may think of this illocutionary dimension of speaker meaning as characterizing not what is meant, but rather how it is meant. Just as we may consider your remark, directed toward me, “You're tired,” and my remark, “I'm tired,” as having said the same thing but in different ways; so too we may consider my assertion of P , followed by a retraction and then followed by a conjecture of P , as two consecutive cases in which I speaker-mean that P but do so in different ways. This idea will be developed a bit further in Section 9 under the rubric of “mode” of illocutionary commitment.

Speaker meaning, then, applies not just to content but also to force, and we may elucidate that claim with a further articulation of the normative structure characteristic of each speech act: When you overtly display a commitment characteristic of that speech act, you have performed that speech act. Is this a necessary condition as well? That depends on whether I can perform a speech act without intending to do so—a topic for Section 9 below. For now, however, compare the view at which we have arrived with Searle's view that one performs a speech act when others become aware of one's intention, or at least one's attempt, to perform that act. What is missing from Searle's characterization is the notion of overtness: The agent in question must not only make her intention to undertake a certain commitment manifest; she must also intend that that very intention be manifest. There is more to overtness than wearing one's heart (or mind) on one's sleeve.

7. Force, Norms, and Conversation

In elucidating this normative dimension of force, we have brought speech acts into their conversational context. That is not to say that speech acts can only be performed in the setting of a conversation: I can approach you, point out that your vehicle is blocking mine, and storm off. Here I have made an assertion but have not engaged in a conversation. Perhaps I can ask myself a question in the privacy of my study and leave it at that–not continuing into a conversation with myself. However, it might reasonably be held that a speech act's ecological niche is nevertheless the conversation. In that spirit, while we may be able to remove it from its environment and scrutinize it in isolated captivity, doing so may leave us blind to some of its distinctive features.

This ecological analogy sheds light on a dispute over the question whether speech acts can profitably be studied in isolation from the conversations in which they occur. An empiricist framework, exemplified in John Stuart Mill's, A System of Logic , suggests attempting to discern the meaning of a word, for instance a proper name, in isolation. By contrast, Gottlob Frege (1884) enjoins us to understand a word's meaning in terms of the contribution it makes to an entire sentence. Such a method is indispensable for a proper treatment of such expressions as quantifiers, and represents a major advance over empiricist approaches. Yet students of speech acts have espoused going even further, insisting that the unit of significance is not the proposition but the speech act. Vanderveken writes,

Illocutionary acts are important for the purpose of philosophical semantics because they are the primary units of meaning in the use and comprehension of natural language. (Vanderveken, 1990, p. 1.)

Why not go even further, since speech acts characteristically occur in conversations? Is the unit of significance really the debate, the colloquy, the interrogation?

Students of so-called conversation analysis have contended precisely this, remarking that many speech acts fall naturally into pairs. [ 11 ] For instance, questions pair naturally with assertions when the latter purport to be answers. Likewise, offers pair naturally with acceptances or rejections, and it is easy to multiply examples. Searle, who favors studying speech acts in isolation, has replied to these considerations (Searle 1992). There he issues a challenge to students of conversation to provide an account of conversations parallel to that of speech acts, arguing as well that the prospects for such an account are dim. One of his reasons is that unlike speech acts conversations do not as such have a point or purpose. More recently, Asher and Lascardes 2003 have defended a more systematic treatment of speech acts in their conversational setting that responds to Searle's challenge.

Much literature concerned with speech acts is curiously disconnected from certain traditions flowing from work in the semantics of natural language emphasizing pragmatic factors. For instance, Stalnaker (1972, 1973, 1974) Lewis (1979, 1980), Thomason (1990) and others have developed models of the evolution of conversations aimed at understanding the role of quantification, presupposition (both semantic and pragmatic), anaphora, deixis, and vagueness in discourse. Such models typically construe conversations as involving an ever-developing set of propositions (construed as the conversational “common ground”) that can be presupposed by interlocutors. (Such propositions may, but need not be, understood as sets of possible worlds.) Other parameters characterizing a conversation at a given point include the domain of discourse, a set of salient perceptible objects, standards of precision, time, world or situation, speaker, addressee, and so forth. The set of all values for these items at a given conversational moment is often referred to as “conversational score”.

“Scorekeeping” approaches to language use typically construe a contribution to a conversation as a proposition: If that “assertion” is accepted, then the score is updated accordingly. Little attention is paid to the question whether that proposition is put forth as a conjecture, guess, assertion, or supposition for the sake of argument. An enrichment of the scorekeeping model would do just this. Accordingly Green 1999 attempts a synthesis of some aspects of this scorekeeping model, Gricean pragmatics, and concepts pertaining to speech acts.

Frege's Begriffschrift constitutes history's first thoroughgoing attempt to formulate a rigorous formal system. However, Frege did not see his Begriffschrift as merely a tool for assessing the validity of arguments. Rather, he appears to have seen it as an organon for the acquisition of knowledge from unquestionable first principles; in addition he wanted to use it in order to help make clear the epistemic foundations on which our knowledge rests. To this end his formal system contains not only symbols indicating the content of propositions (including logical constants), but also symbols indicating the force with which they are put forth. In particular, Frege insists that when using his formal system to acquire new knowledge from proposition already known, we use an assertion sign to indicate our acknowledgment of the truth of the proposition used as axioms or inferred therefrom. Frege thus employs what would now be called a force indicator : an expression whose use indicates the force with which an associated proposition is being put forth. (Green 2002).

Reichenbach expands upon Frege's idea in his 1947. In addition to using an assertion sign, Reichenbach also uses indicators of interrogative and imperatival force. Hare similarly introduces force indicators to lay bare the way in which ethical and cognate utterances are made (Hare 1970). Davidson, however, challenges the value of this entire enterprise, arguing that since natural language already contains many devices for indicating the force of one's speech act, the only interest in a force indicator would be if it could guarantee the force of one's speech act. But nothing could: Any device purporting to be, say, an infallible indicator of assertoric force is liable to being used by a joker or actor to heighten the realism of her performance:

It is easy to see that merely speaking the sentence in the strengthened mood cannot be counted on to result in an assertion; every joker, storyteller, and actor will immediately take advantage of the strengthened mood to simulate assertion. There is no point, then, in the strengthened mood; the available indicative does as well as language can do in the service of assertion (Davidson 1979, p. 311).

Dummett 1993 and Hare 1989 reply to Davidson. Hare in particular remarks that there could be a society with a convention that utterance of a certain expression constituted performance of a certain illocutionary act. Green 1997 questions the relevance of this observation to the issue of illocutionary acts, which, as we have seen, seem to require intentions for their performance. Just as no convention could make it the case that I believe that P (though perhaps a convention could make it the case that people say I believe that P ), so too no convention could make it the case that I intend to put forth a certain sentence as an assertion.

On the other hand, Green 1997 and Green 2000 also observe that even if there can be no force indicator in the sense Davidson criticizes, nothing prevents natural language from containing devices that indicate force conditional upon one's performing a speech act: Such a force indicator would not show whether one is performing a speech act, but, given that one is doing so, which speech act one is performing. For instance, parenthetical expressions such as, ‘as is the case’ can occur in the antecedent of conditionals, as in: ‘If, as is the case, the globe is warming, then Greenland will melt.’ Use of the parenthetical cannot guarantee that the sentence or any part of it is being asserted, but if the entire sentence is being asserted, then, Green claims, use of the parenthetical guarantees that the speaker is committed to the content of the antecedent. If that claim is correct, natural language already contains force indicators in this qualified sense. Whether it is worth introducing such force indicators into a logical notation remains an open question.

Students of speech acts contend, as we have seen, that the unit of communicative significance is the speech act rather than the proposition. This attitude prompts the question whether logic itself might be enriched by incorporating inferential relations among speech acts rather than just inferential relations among propositions. Since particulars cannot stand in inferential relations to one another, no such relations could obtain between individual speech acts. However, just as two events E 1 and E 2 (such as running quickly and running) could be logically related to one another in that it is not possible for one to occur without the other; so too speech act types S 1 and S 2 could be inferentially related to one another if it is not possible to perform one without performing the other. A warning that the bull is about to charge is also an assertion that the bull is about to charge but the converse is not true. This is in spite of the fact that these two speech acts have the same propositional content: That the bull is about to charge. If, therefore, warning implies asserting but not vice versa, then that inferential relation is not to be caught within the net of inferential relations among propositions.

In their Foundations of Illocutionary Logic (1985), Searle and Vanderveken attempt a general treatment of logical relations among speech acts. They describe their central question in terms of commitment:

A theory of illocutionary logic of the sort we are describing is essentially a theory of illocutionary commitment as determined by illocutionary force. The single most important question it must answer is this: Given that a speaker in a certain context of utterance performs a successful illocutionary act of a certain form, what other illocutions does the performance of that act commit him to? (1985, p. 6)

To explicate their notion of illocutionary commitment, these authors invoke their definition of illocutionary force in terms of the seven values mentioned in Section 2.3 above. On the basis of this definition, they define two notions pertinent to entailment relations among speech acts, namely strong illocutionary commitment and weak illocutionary commitment . According to the former definition, an illocutionary act S 1 commits a speaker to another illocutionary act S 2 iff it is not possible to perform S 1 without performing S 2 . Whether that relation holds between a pair of illocutionary acts depends on the particular septuples with which they are identified. Thus suppose that S 1 is identical with <IP 1 , Str " , Mode 1 , Cont 1 , Prep 1 , Sinc 1 , Stresinc 1 > (corresponding to illocutionary point, strength, mode of achievement, propositional content, preparatory condition, sincerity condition, and strength of sincerity condition, respectively); and suppose that S 2 is identical with <IP 1 , Str $ , Mode 1 , Cont 1 , Prep 1 , Sinc 1 , Stresinc 1 >. Suppose further that Str " and Str $ differ only in that " is stronger than $. Then it will not be possible to perform S 1 without performing S 2 ; whence the former strongly illocutionarily implies the latter. (This definition of strong illocutionary commitment generalizes in a straightforward way to the case in which a set of speech acts S 1 , …, S n -1 implies a speech act S n .)

Performance of a speech act or set of speech acts can also commit an agent to a distinct content, and do so relative to some force. If P and Q jointly imply R , then my asserting both P and Q commits me to R . That is not to say that I have also asserted R : If assertion were closed under deduction I would assert infinitely many things just by virtue of asserting one. By contrast, if I conjecture P and Q , then I am once again committed to R but not in the way that I would have been had I asserted P and Q . For instance, in the assertion case, once my further commitment to R is made clear, it is within the rights of my addressee to ask how I know that R holds; this would not have been an acceptable reply to my merely conjecturing P and Q .

To explicate this relation, Searle and Vanderveken define weak illocutionary commitment: S 1 weakly illocutionarily implies S 2 iff every performance of S 1 commits an agent to meeting the conditions laid down in the septuple identical to S 2 (1985, p. 24). Searle and Vanderveken infer that this implies that if P logically entails Q , and an agent asserts P , then she is committed to believing that Q . These authors stress, however, that this does not mean that the agent who asserts P is committed to cultivating the belief Q when P implies Q . In lieu of that explication, however, it is unclear just what notion of commitment is at issue. It is unclear, for instance, what it could mean to be committed to believing Q (rather than just being committed to Q ) if this is not to be explicated as being committed to cultivating the belief that Q .

Other approaches attempt to circumvent such problems by reductively defining the notion of commitment in terms of obligations to action and liability to error and/or vindication. Let S be an arbitrary speaker, < ⊢ l A l , …, ⊢ n A n , ⊢ B > a sequence of force/content pairs; then:

<⊢ l A l , …, ⊢ n A n , ⊢ B > is illocutionarily valid iff if speaker S is committed to each A i under mode ⊢ i , then S is committed to B under mode ⊢. [ 12 ]

Because it concerns what force/content pairs commit an agent to what others, illocutionary validity is an essentially deontic notion: It will be cashed out in terms either of obligation to use a content in a certain way conversationally, or liability to error or vindication depending upon how the world is.

Our discussion of the possibility of an illocutionary logic answers one question posed at the end of Section 6.3, namely whether it is possible to perform a speech act without intending to do so. This seems likely given Searle and Vanderveken's definition of strong illocutionary commitment: We need only imagine an agent performing some large number of speech acts, S 1 , …, S n -1 , which, unbeknownst to her, jointly guarantee that she fulfills the seven conditions defining another speech act S n . Evidently such a “strict liability” conception still requires that one performs S n only by virtue of intentionally performing some other set of speech acts S 1 , …, S n -1 ; it is difficult to see how one can perform S n while having no intention of performing a speech act at all.

We have also made progress on a question raised in Section 1, namely whether “speech act theory” deserves its name. An appropriate definition of illocutions would enable us to explain, rather than merely describe, some features of speech acts. Vanderveken 1990 offers a set of tableaux depicting inferential relations among speech acts. For instance, the following is a fragment of his tableaux for assertives–speech acts whose illocutionary point is to describe how things are:

castigate reprimand accuse blame criticize assert suggest

where strong illocutionary validity moves from left to right. This is because all these speech acts have the illocutionary point of describing how things are, but the propositional content conditions and degree of strength of illocutionary point conditions become increasingly less stringent as we move from left to right. Accounts of this sort offer hope of our being able informatively answer such questions whether someone who castigates an addressee for some state of affairs is also assertorically committed to the obtaining of that state of affairs. Might we discover “illocutionary tautologies”, “illocutionary absurdities” and other phenomena that could shed light on such utterances as “This very utterance is an assertion”, “I doubt this very claim”? Affirmative answers to such questions will be needed if we are to justify our use of “speech act theory”.

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Campus protests over the Gaza war

House passes bill aimed to combat antisemitism amid college unrest.

Barbara Sprunt

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson visited Columbia University on April 24 to meet with Jewish students and make remarks about concerns that the ongoing demonstrations have become antisemitic. Alex Kent/Getty Images hide caption

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson visited Columbia University on April 24 to meet with Jewish students and make remarks about concerns that the ongoing demonstrations have become antisemitic.

The House of Representatives passed a bill on Wednesday aimed at addressing reports of rising antisemitism on college campuses, where activists angered by Israel's war against Hamas have been protesting for months and more recently set up encampments on campus grounds .

The Antisemitism Awareness Act would see the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition of antisemitism for the enforcement of federal anti-discrimination laws regarding education programs.

The bill passed with a 320-91 vote. Seventy Democrats and 21 Republicans voted against the measure.

The international group defines antisemitism as "a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews" and gives examples of the definition's application, which includes "accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagine wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group" and making " dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective."

Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., introduced the legislation.

"Right now, without a clear definition of antisemitism, the Department of Education and college administrators are having trouble discerning whether conduct is antisemitic or not, whether the activity we're seeing crosses the line into antisemitic harassment," he said on the House floor before passage.

The bill goes further than an executive order former President Donald Trump signed in 2019 . Opponents argue the measure could restrict free speech.

"This definition adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance includes 'contemporary examples of antisemitism'," said Rep. Jerry Nadler in a speech on the House floor ahead of the vote. "The problem is that these examples may include protected speech in some context, particularly with respect to criticism of the state of Israel."

Fellow New York Democrat Rep. Ritchie Torres , one of the 15 Democratic cosponsors of the bill, told NPR he finds that argument unconvincing.

"There's a false narrative that the definition censors criticism of the Israeli government. I consider it complete nonsense," Torres said in an interview with NPR.

"If you can figure out how to critique the policies and practices of the Israeli government without calling for the destruction of Israel itself, then no reasonable person would ever accuse you of antisemitism," he added.

Issue should 'transcend partisan politics'

While members of both parties have criticized reports of antisemitism at the protests, Republicans have made the issue a central political focus.

House Speaker Mike Johnson made a rare visit last week to Columbia University, where demonstrators were demanding the school divest from companies that operate in Israel. Johnson and a handful of GOP lawmakers met with a group of Jewish students.

"They are really concerned that their voices are not being heard when they may complain about being assaulted, being spit on, being told that all Jews should die — and they are not getting any response from the individuals who are literally being paid to protect them," Rep. Anthony D'Esposito, R-N.Y., told NPR of the meeting.

On Tuesday, Johnson held a press conference focused on antisemitism with a group of House Republicans at the U.S. Capitol.

"Antisemitism is a virus and it will spread if it's not stamped out," Johnson said. "We have to act, and House Republicans will speak to this fateful moment with moral clarity."

Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., who chairs the House progressive caucus, says Republicans are playing politics.

"Many of these Republicans didn't say a word when Trump and others in Charlottesville and other places were saying truly antisemitic things. But all of a sudden now they want to bring forward bills that divide Democrats and weaponize this," she said.

Torres said he wished Johnson had done a bipartisan event with House Democrats to "present a united front."

"You know, it's impossible to take the politics out of politics, but the fight against all forms of hate, including antisemitism, should transcend partisan politics," he said.

Student protestors chant near an entrance to Columbia University on April 30. Columbia University has restricted access to the school's campus to students residing in residential buildings on campus and employees who provide essential services to campus buildings after protestors took over Hamilton Hall overnight. Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images hide caption

Jewish students speak about feeling harassed

Hear from students who met with speaker johnson.

There was increased urgency to move legislation to the floor after lawmakers started hearing stories of Jewish students feeling unwelcome on campuses.

Eliana Goldin, a junior at Columbia and the Jewish Theological Seminary, said the escalation of protests on and around her campus have made her feel unsafe.

"I know many, many people who have been harassed because they wear a Jewish star necklace," Goldin told NPR. Goldin was one student who received a message from Rabbi Elie Buechler of Columbia a week ago.

"The events of the last few days...have made it clear that Columbia University's Public Safety and the NYPD cannot guarantee Jewish students' safety in the face of extreme antisemitism and anarchy," the message read. "It deeply pains me to say that I would strongly recommend you return home as soon as possible and remain home until the reality in and around campus has dramatically improved."

Demonstrators say their protest is peaceful and that some of the antisemitic events that have garnered national attention have come from people outside of the university.

Goldin said she was part of an interaction that got a lot of online attention of someone yelling at her and others to "go back to Poland." She said she was disappointed in the reaction from the broader Columbia community, even though the person was likely not a student.

"I do think if someone were to say, 'go back to Africa' to a Black student, it would one, be abhorrent," Goldin said. "And correctly, the entire Columbia student body would feel outraged at that, and we would all be able to rally around it. But of course, when someone says 'go back to Poland' to a Jew, we don't feel the same outrage and the same unity against that."

Torres said lawmakers should listen to students like Goldin.

"If there are Black students, who claim to experience racism, we rightly respect their experiences. The same would be true of Latino students, the same would be true of Asian students," he said. "If there are Jewish students who are telling us that they do not feel safe, why are we questioning the validity of their experiences? Why are we not affording them the sensitivity that we would have for every other group?"

Columbia University did not respond to NPR about questions about their handling of the protests.

A demonstrator breaks the windows of the front door of the building in order to secure a chain around it to prevent authorities from entering as demonstrators from the pro-Palestine encampment barricade themselves inside Hamilton Hall, an academic building at Columbia University, on April 30. Alex Kent/Getty Images hide caption

'It just really kind of erodes the soul'

Xavier Westergaard, a Ph.D. student at Columbia, attended the meeting between the House GOP delegation and Jewish students.

"The mood in the room was relief that someone so high up in the government made this a priority," he said, referring to Johnson.

"Jewish students, including myself, have been the victims of physical violence and intimidation. This goes from shoving, spitting, being told to go back to Europe," he said. "It just really kind of erodes the soul if you hear it too many times."

He added: "And this is not just happening outside the gates, on the sidewalk where anyone from anywhere can come and demonstrate. We do have the First Amendment in this country. This was actually on campus. The university has responsibilities to protect their students from harassment on the basis of religion or creed or national origin."

A consistent refrain among protesters is that criticizing the policies of the Israeli government doesn't equate to antisemitism.

Westergaard agrees, but says that's not what he's experiencing.

"I've heard, 'We want all Zionists off campus.' I've heard 'death to the Zionist state, death to Zionists.' And as a Jew, I feel that Zionism and Judaism can be teased apart with a tremendous amount of care and compassion and knowledge," he said. "But it's also just a dog whistle that people use when they're talking about the Jews."

Juliana Castillo, an undergraduate, was also at the meeting with Johnson. She said calls for the safety of students doesn't just include physical well-being.

"There are things like intimidation, like feeling uncomfortable being openly Jewish or taking a direct route across campus," she said. "It doesn't always manifest as a lack of physical safety. Sometimes it manifests as being unwelcome in a class or feeling like people's viewpoints or perspectives are not respected."

She said even isolated incidents of antisemitism that get circulated widely online have a "creeping impact on people."

"Just knowing that something has happened to your friends, or to people you know in a place you're familiar with, makes it difficult to have a sense that this is your campus," she said. "These things do build up."

Bipartisan push on more bills to counter antisemitism

Lawmakers say this bill is just one step — and that there's more action the chamber should take to combat antisemitism.

Torres and Lawler have introduced another bill that would place a monitor on a campus to report back to the federal government on whether the university is complying with Title VI , which prohibits discrimination based on race, color or national origin in places like colleges that receive federal funding.

"A law is only as effective as its enforcement, and the purpose here is to provide an enforcement mechanism where none exist," Torres said. "And I want to be clear: the legislation would empower the federal Department of Education not to impose a monitor on every college or university, only when there's reason to suspect a violation of Title VI."

Meanwhile, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is urging Johnson to bring the bipartisan Countering Antisemitism Act to the floor.

"The effort to crush antisemitism and hatred in any form is not a Democratic or Republican issue" said Jeffries in a statement.

Letter to Speaker Mike Johnson on the Bipartisan Countering Antisemitism Act. pic.twitter.com/z3weUD54zm — Hakeem Jeffries (@RepJeffries) April 29, 2024

The bill would establish a senior official in the Department of Education to monitor for antisemitism on college campuses and create a national coordinator in the White House to oversee a new interagency task force to counter antisemitism.

"We have negotiated that bill for nine months. It is bipartisan. It's bicameral," said North Carolina Democrat Kathy Manning, who co-chairs the House Bipartisan Task Force for Combating Antisemitism.

Manning was part of a trio of House Democrats who visited Columbia University last week to hear from Jewish students.

Manning points to a study from the American Jewish Committee that found that 46% of American Jews since October 7 say they have altered their behavior out of fear of antisemitism .

"I find that deeply disturbing, that in the United States of America, people are now afraid to be recognized in public as being Jewish," Manning said.

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House passes bill to expand definition of antisemitism amid growing campus protests over Gaza war

Pro-Palestinian protesters camp out in tents at Columbia University on Saturday, April 27, 2024 in New York. With the death toll mounting in the war in Gaza, protesters nationwide are demanding that schools cut financial ties to Israel and divest from companies they say are enabling the conflict. Some Jewish students say the protests have veered into antisemitism and made them afraid to set foot on campus. (AP Photo)

FILE -President of Columbia University Nemat Shafik testifies before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce hearing on “Columbia in Crisis: Columbia University’s Response to Antisemitism” on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, April 17, 2024. Columbia University president Nemat (Minouche) Shafik is no stranger to navigating complex international issues, having worked at some of the world’s most prominent global financial institutions.(AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib, File)

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The House passed legislation Wednesday that would establish a broader definition of antisemitism for the Department of Education to enforce anti-discrimination laws, the latest response from lawmakers to a nationwide student protest movement over the Israel-Hamas war.

The proposal, which passed 320-91 with some bipartisan support, would codify the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a federal anti-discrimination law that bars discrimination based on shared ancestry, ethnic characteristics or national origin. It now goes to the Senate where its fate is uncertain.

Action on the bill was just the latest reverberation in Congress from the protest movement that has swept university campuses. Republicans in Congress have denounced the protests and demanded action to stop them, thrusting university officials into the center of the charged political debate over Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza. More than 33,000 Palestinians have been killed since the war was launched in October, after Hamas staged a deadly terrorist attack against Israeli civilians.

If passed by the Senate and signed into law, the bill would broaden the legal definition of antisemitism to include the “targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity.” Critics say the move would have a chilling effect on free speech throughout college campuses.

FILE - Greece's Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, left, welcomes the Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan before their meeting at Maximos Mansion in Athens, Greece, Thursday, Dec. 7, 2023. Old foes Turkey and Greece will test a five-month-old friendship initiative on Monday, May 13, 2024 when Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis visits Ankara. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis, File)

“Speech that is critical of Israel alone does not constitute unlawful discrimination,” Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., said during a hearing Tuesday. “By encompassing purely political speech about Israel into Title VI’s ambit, the bill sweeps too broadly.”

Advocates of the proposal say it would provide a much-needed, consistent framework for the Department of Education to police and investigate the rising cases of discrimination and harassment targeted toward Jewish students.

“It is long past time that Congress act to protect Jewish Americans from the scourge of antisemitism on campuses around the country,” Rep. Russell Fry, R-S.C., said Tuesday.

The expanded definition of antisemitism was first adopted in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, an intergovernmental group that includes the United States and European Union states, and has been embraced by the State Department under the past three presidential administrations, including Joe Biden’s

Previous bipartisan efforts to codify it into law have failed. But the Oct. 7 terrorist attack by Hamas militants in Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza have reignited efforts to target incidents of antisemitism on college campuses.

Separately, Speaker Mike Johnson announced Tuesday that several House committees will be tasked with a wide probe that ultimately threatens to withhold federal research grants and other government support for universities, placing another pressure point on campus administrators who are struggling to manage pro-Palestinian encampments, allegations of discrimination against Jewish students and questions of how they are integrating free speech and campus safety.

The House investigation follows several high-profile hearings that helped precipitate the resignations of presidents at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. And House Republicans promised more scrutiny, saying they were calling on the administrators of Yale, UCLA and the University of Michigan to testify next month.

The House Oversight Committee took it one step further Wednesday, sending a small delegation of Republican members to an encampment at nearby George Washington University in the District of Columbia. GOP lawmakers spent the short visit criticizing the protests and Mayor Muriel Bowser’s refusal to send in the Metropolitan Police Department to disperse the demonstrators.

Bowser on Monday confirmed that the city and the district’s police department had declined the university’s request to intervene. “We did not have any violence to interrupt on the GW campus,” Bowser said, adding that police chief Pamela Smith made the ultimate decision. “This is Washington, D.C., and we are, by design, a place where people come to address the government and their grievances with the government.”

It all comes at a time when college campuses and the federal government are struggling to define exactly where political speech crosses into antisemitism. Dozens of U.S. universities and schools face civil rights investigations by the Education Department over allegations of antisemitism and Islamophobia.

Among the questions campus leaders have struggled to answer is whether phrases like “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” should be considered under the definition of antisemitism.

The proposed definition faced strong opposition from several Democratic lawmakers, Jewish organizations as well as free speech advocates.

In a letter sent to lawmakers Friday, the American Civil Liberties Union urged members to vote against the legislation, saying federal law already prohibits antisemitic discrimination and harassment.

“H.R. 6090 is therefore not needed to protect against antisemitic discrimination; instead, it would likely chill free speech of students on college campuses by incorrectly equating criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism,” the letter stated.

Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of the centrist pro-Israel group J Street, said his organization opposes the bipartisan proposal because he sees it as an “unserious” effort led by Republicans “to continually force votes that divide the Democratic caucus on an issue that shouldn’t be turned into a political football.”

Associated Press writers Ashraf Khalil, Collin Binkley and Stephen Groves contributed to this report.

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Michelle Goldberg

Senators Need to Stop the Antisemitism Awareness Act

Representative Elise Stefanik looks to the side.

By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist

An unfortunate symbiosis has developed between pro-Israel culture warriors like Republican Representative Elise Stefanik and the most self-indulgent fringe of pro-Palestinian campus protesters. Together they are, wittingly or unwittingly, shifting attention from the urgent emergency in Gaza, where Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is poised to defy the United States and invade the southern city of Rafah, to the much smaller problem of campus antisemitism.

Some pro-Palestinian demonstrators seem to believe, given the moral enormity of mass death, displacement and starvation in Gaza, that deferring to mainstream Jewish sensitivities means buckling to so-called respectability politics , which whitewash horror in the name of civility. “To the Jewish students, faculty and trustees blocking divestment and urging the violent crackdowns on campus: You threaten everyone’s safety,” said a recent communiqué from the Columbia Law chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, a left-wing group that’s been providing legal support to the protesters.

The statement disdains the ethos of nonviolence, quoting Black Panther leader Kwame Ture, formerly Stokely Carmichael: “In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.” Within the movement, I imagine such rhetoric functions as a sign of total commitment, a no-going-back rejection of hollow liberal pieties. Outside of it, to the extent that anyone takes this language seriously, it serves to stoke a raging panic about the protests that both distracts from the war and feeds a growing backlash that threatens academic freedom.

That panic is the backdrop for a dangerous piece of legislation that passed the House overwhelmingly last week and could soon be taken up by the Senate. Since 2016 , pro-Israel politicians have pushed versions of a bill called the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would codify, for the purpose of enforcing federal civil rights law in higher education, a definition of antisemitism that includes rejection of Israel as a Jewish state. In the past, civil libertarians were able to head such legislation off, but that’s become harder in the current fevered climate.

Jamie Raskin, a House Democrat and former constitutional law professor, wrote a statement explaining the problems with the bill at length, before justifying his “yes” vote with a kind of defeated shrug: “At this moment of anguish and confusion over the dangerous surge of antisemitism, authoritarianism and racism all over the country and the world, it seems unlikely that this meaningless ‘gotcha’ legislation can help much — but neither can it hurt much, and it may now bring some people despairing over manifestations of antisemitism a sense of consolation.” There are few people in Congress I admire more than Raskin, but I don’t agree that the bill is harmless, and I hope someone in the Senate will stop it.

The bill relies on a definition of antisemitism adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in 2016, which lists several examples that could, accounting for “overall context,” constitute antisemitism. Among them are “applying double standards to Israel,” claiming that the country’s existence “is a racist endeavor” or using “the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.”

Even if you agree that all these things are signs of anti-Jewish animus, there are serious First Amendment problems with trying to classify them that way legally. That’s why, as I’ve written before , one of the lead drafters behind the IHRA definition of antisemitism, Ken Stern, has consistently opposed the Antisemitism Awareness Act.

Stern, who directs the Center for the Study of Hate at Bard College, spent 25 years as the in-house expert on antisemitism at the American Jewish Committee, where he worked on what would become the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism. As he explained it, the document was meant as a research tool, not a basis for legislation. He offered an analogy: Someone studying racism in America, he said, might want to look at opposition to affirmative action, Black Lives Matter and the removal of Confederate statues. That’s very different, however, from enacting a law declaring those attitudes racist. The law is supposed to address conduct, not ideas, which is why federal civil rights law doesn’t define racism, sexism or homophobia.

“Once you start defining what speech is OK for teaching, for funding, for all sorts of things, how does that differ from what we were doing in the McCarthy era?” Stern asked. It’s true, as Raskin pointed out, that Donald Trump already issued an executive order, never rescinded, directing the government to use the IHRA definition when enforcing civil rights law on college campuses. But Stern argues that writing the definition into law, with broad liberal assent, serves to cement it.

So far, a lot of the opposition to the Antisemitism Awareness Act has come from the Christian right, which wants to be able to continue saying that Jews killed Jesus, as well as from those who want to abolish diversity, equity and inclusion programs, rather than expand their protections to Jews. The bill, said Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, “could convict Christians of antisemitism for believing the Gospel that says Jesus was handed over to Herod to be crucified by the Jews.” That’s not quite right; the legislation is civil, not criminal, and couldn’t be used to “convict” anyone. But she’s not wrong that the law could, theoretically, be used against those promoting the classically antisemitic idea of deicide, a belief at once hateful and constitutionally protected.

Of course, the Antisemitism Awareness Act isn’t intended to target conservative Christians. It’s meant, rather, to quash anti-Israel activism. “There are not two legitimate sides to this issue,” Representative Marc Molinaro, a Republican from New York, said in arguing for the bill. “The erection of encampments on college campuses isn’t an expression of speech; it is a direct threat to Jewish students.”

We’ve already seen administrators like Columbia’s Minouche Shafik crack down on protesters in response to congressional coercion, which only inflamed the movement, leading to the spread of encampments nationwide. As disturbed as I am by mounting left-wing illiberalism, it’s hard to demand that pro-Palestinian activists submit to the rigors of open dialogue while the government is decreeing their views verboten.

Should the Antisemitism Awareness Act become law, there’s no reason to believe that only those views that liberals find most objectionable will be targeted. Stefanik and her allies, after all, are currently attacking Harvard for having the heroic Filipina journalist Maria Ressa, winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, as a commencement speaker, because Ressa’s publication called for a cease-fire in Gaza and because she signed an open letter about the killing of Gazan journalists. As Israel’s war moves into a brutal new phase, so do efforts to stifle those speaking out against it.

The Republican Party and the radical edge of the pro-Palestinian left both share an interest in discrediting the modern liberal university by making it look at once hypocritical and ineffectual. Liberals shouldn’t help them.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.

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The antisemitism awareness act: what to know.

Legal Issues
Race and Ethnicity

Columbia University officials testify before the House Education and Workforce Committee on the university's response to antisemitism on April 17, 2024. (AP)

By 320-91 vote, the House on May 1 passed the Antisemitism Awareness Act .

The bill came to a vote amid pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses against the Israel-Hamas war that some Jewish students said they found threatening. It produced an unusual lineup of supporters and detractors.

Although the legislation passed easily and with bipartisan support, the votes against it were also bipartisan: 21 Republicans and 70 Democrats voted no. Some Republicans who voted no cited possible threats to Christian beliefs; some Democrats said the measure would chill political speech critical of Israel’s government, rather than Jews as a group.

Here are some questions and answers about the legislation.

The bill requires the federal Education Department to use the definition of antisemitism outlined by the Stockholm-based International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance when addressing allegations of discrimination in higher education. If discrimination is determined to have occurred, schools would be at risk of losing federal funding. Currently, there is no standard definition for antisemitism in such discrimination cases.

Portions of the alliance’s definition of antisemitism are not especially controversial, including "calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews," "making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews," or denying the Holocaust.

Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., a leading sponsor of the bill, said the recent campus protests made passing the measure urgent.

In a statement following passage, Lawler said the bill "is a key step in calling out antisemitism where it is and ensuring antisemitic hate crimes on college campuses are properly investigated and prosecuted." He added, "When people engage in harassment or bullying of Jewish individuals where they justify the killing of Jews or use blood libel or hold Jews collectively responsible for the actions of the Israeli government — that is antisemitic. It’s unfortunate that needs to be clarified, but that's why this bill is necessary."

But the bill’s critics said parts of the definition could bleed into more legitimate types of criticism of Israel’s government. Those portions of the definition include "denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor," "applying double standards by requiring of (Israel) a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation," and "drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis."

In recommending a no vote, the American Civil Liberties Union wrote that the bill is "not needed to protect against antisemitic discrimination; instead, it would likely chill free speech of students on college campuses by incorrectly equating criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism."

This view won backing from some figures from across the ideological spectrum.

Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., told a congressional hearing that "speech that is critical of Israel alone does not constitute unlawful discrimination." Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said it was wrong to say that "if you are protesting, or disagree with what (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu and his extremist government are doing in Gaza, you are an antisemite."

Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., said, "I’m deeply concerned about the rise of antisemitism in San Diego and across the country. But I do not believe that anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitism. … "I support Israel’s right to exist, but I also know many people who question whether Israel should exist as a Jewish state who are deeply connected to their Judaism."

Nadler, Sanders and Jacobs are all Jewish.

Some legal scholars echoed these criticisms.

Eugene Volokh, a UCLA law professor who leans libertarian, wrote that the bill "really does risk suppressing not just discriminatory conduct but speech — speech that I generally disagree with, but speech that is fully constitutionally protected."

Florida International University law professor Howard M. Wasserman concurred with Volokh.

Wasserman told PolitiFact that "the law raises genuine First Amendment concerns to the extent it can or will be used to impose or threaten (Civil Rights Act) Title VI liability on schools for failing to restrict antisemitic but otherwise constitutionally protected speech."

Meanwhile, Kenneth Stern, an attorney who helped write the definition in question, has expressed caution about relying on it for the purpose the bill intends. In 2016, when Congress was considering an earlier version of the bill, Stern testified that the definition was designed to help governments collect antisemitism data and "was not drafted, and was never intended, as a tool to target or chill speech on a college campus."

Timothy Zick, a William & Mary Law School professor, said he’s skeptical that the definition would chill Christian beliefs or criticism of Israel. But he added that it "does not mean it is a good idea to adopt the definition, which was intended to be educational rather than legal."

Some conservatives focused on whether the antisemitism definition could cover elements of the Bible.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., posted on X that the bill’s passage "could convict Christians of antisemitism for believing the Gospel that says Jesus was handed over to Herod to be crucified by the Jews."

When conservative commentator Charlie Kirk asked in an X post whether the bill made "parts of the Bible illegal," former Fox News host Tucker Carlson replied , "Yes. The New Testament."

The Anti-Defamation League considers blaming the Jews for killing Jesus a "myth" and said it "has been used to justify violence against Jews for centuries. Historians as well as Christian leaders have agreed that the claim is baseless." After centuries of teaching it, the Catholic Church rejected the belief in 1965, a stance then-Pope Benedict XVI reiterated in 2011 .

Lawler dismissed the concerns of Greene and others, telling CNN they were "inflammatory and it's irrational."

"If you're calling all Jews Christ-killers, then yes, that is antisemitic and everybody understands that," Lawler said. "But if you're referring to the Bible in context, then no, nobody is saying that that is antisemitic."

Gregory P. Magarian, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, said he sees the concern over the Bible as a stretch.

"My best sense is that the Bible is sufficiently normatively ingrained in Western cultures, especially in the U.S., that no government actor would be at all likely to invoke the (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition against any common usage of the Bible," Magarian told PolitiFact.

The bill has moved to the Senate, where its fate is uncertain. "There are objections on both sides," said Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

It’s unclear how binding the bill would be. It is phrased as a "sense of Congress" legislation, which is language typically used for nonbinding, advisory legislation. However, it also says that the Department of Education "shall" take into consideration the definition of antisemitism, which seems to leave no wiggle room.

"I would call it ‘strongly advisory’ — a warning shot across the bow with possible funding cuts to follow if not heeded," said Donald Wolfensberger, a congressional procedure specialist with the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars.

"The bill could have directly amended the Civil Rights Act to cement this advisory language into law, but (lawmakers) didn’t dare to, given likely opposition by the Senate, the president and even the courts over First Amendment free speech violation concerns."

Ilya Somin, George Mason University law professor, said the bill’s ultimate impact may be less sweeping than some of its critics suggest, because former then-President Donald Trump incorporated the definition into Title VI by executive order and Biden kept that policy in place.

Somin added that antisemitic discrimination "is already illegal under Title VI, under longstanding legal precedent. However, the bill does clarify and codify that, and ends any residual uncertainty," including whether being Jewish falls under the category of national origin, race, or a religious group.

PolitiFact Copy Chief Matthew Crowley contributed to this report.

RELATED : " Fact-checking claims about college protests over Gaza war "

RELATED : " What we know about the ‘outside agitators’ being blamed for campus protests "

RELATED : " Student protesters are calling for divestment from Israel. Here’s what that means "

Our Sources

Congress.gov, H.R. 6090: Antisemitism Awareness Act of 2023 , accessed May 9, 2024

House roll call vote on H.R. 6090, May 1, 2024

International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, " Working definition of antisemitism ," accessed March 9, 2024

American Civil Liberties Union, " ACLU Urges House of Representatives to Oppose Anti-semitism Awareness Act ," April 26, 2024

Anti-Defamation League, " Myth: Jews Killed Jesus ," accessed May 9, 2024

Marjorie Taylor Greene, post on X , May 1, 2024

Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk, posts on X , May 2, 2024

New Yorker, " The Problem with Defining Antisemitism ," March 13, 2024

Associated Press, " House passes bill to expand definition of antisemitism amid growing campus protests over Gaza war ," May 1, 2024

New York Times, " Bill to Combat Antisemitism on Campuses Prompts Backlash From the Right ," May 2, 2024

Agence France-Presse, " US politicians, influencers misrepresent anti-Semitism bill ," May 7, 2024

NBC News, " House passes antisemitism bill with broad bipartisan support amid campus arrests ," May 1, 2024

Eugene Volokh, "Antisemitism Awareness Act of 2023" (Which Just Passed the House) Could Suppress First-Amendment-Protected Criticism of Israel ," May 3, 2024

The Nation, " The House antisemitism bill is an amalgam of "pointless gestures and posturing" , May 3, 2024

Email interview with Donald Wolfensberger, specialist in congressional procedure with the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, May 8, 2024

Email interview with Eugene Volokh, UCLA law professor, May 9, 2025

Email interview with Gregory P. Magarian, law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, May 9, 2025

Email interview with Howard M. Wasserman, Florida International University law professor, May 9, 2024

Email interview with Ilya Somin, George Mason University law professor, May 10, 2024

Email interview with Timothy Zick, William & Mary Law School professor, May 10, 2024

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NC House easily passes “Shalom Act” to enshrine antisemitism definition in state law

Critics deride the measure as a politically motivated attack on free speech, by: ahmed jallow - may 9, 2024 5:00 am.

House Speaker Tim Moore flanked by other lawmakers

House Speaker Tim Moore discusses the Shalom Act before a House vote. (Photo: Ahmed Jallow)

By a vote of 105-4 , the North Carolina House on Wednesday passed a bill, dubbed the “Shalom Act,” that would establish a definition of antisemitism in state law.

If the bill becomes law, North Carolina would, by reference, make the “Working Definition of Antisemitism Adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance on May 26, 2016” the state’s official definition of antisemitism.

Under the definition, several types of criticism directed against Israel, such as “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” would be deemed antisemitism.

House Speaker Tim Moore, who is serving as one of the bill’s chief sponsors, said the measure is a response to a rise in hate speech and attacks on Jewish people.

“North Carolina already has hate crime statutes in place, but there really is not a working definition of what truly constitutes antisemitism,” Moore said Wednesday at a press conference before the House vote. “This is very timely because of what we have seen across this country, and even right here in North Carolina.”

Though the bill passed by an overwhelming margin, it drew spirited opposition from members of a coalition of civil liberties and faith groups who convened a press conference on the Legislative Building’s front lawn and addressed the House Judiciary I Committee prior to the House floor vote.

Some of what the definition targets isn’t antisemitism, said Reighlah Collins, Policy Counsel for the ACLU of North Carolina. Rather, she said, it’s “political speech.”

“Any definition of antisemitism that conflates criticism of Israel chills constitutionally protected political speech. This bill would sweep up not just hate speech, but also for political speech, criticism of another government,” Collins said during the Judiciary committee hearing.

Democratic Rep. Marcia Morey voted against the bill, citing constitutional issues. Morey’s fellow Democrats, Representatives Pricey Harrison, Nasif Majeed and Renée Price also voted against it. Majeed (D-Mecklenburg) said he’s been working on an anti-hate crime bill for six years, yet House leadership has failed to act on more comprehensive protections for other faiths and other groups that experience hate.

While the bill provides for no particular enforcement mechanism, it specifies that the definition will be used as “a guide for training, education, recognizing, and combating antisemitic hate crimes or discrimination and for tracking and reporting antisemitic incidents.”

Moore said the bill does not create any new criminal penalties related to antisemitism, as state laws against “ethnic intimidation” already exist. But it provides a clear definition of antisemitism for prosecutors and law enforcement

“A prosecutor would look at that and look at the statutes that are already in place and make a determination if that conduct rose to that level.”

At the morning press conference, critics said the bill is an attack on free speech and conflates criticism of Israel and the actions of its government with antisemitism.

Abby Lublin, executive director of Carolina Jews for Justice, said that while her organization and others like it are alarmed by recent spikes in antisemitism and support ways to confront it productively, Moore’s bill “is not it.” She derided the legislation as “not a serious bill” and a measure that “exploits Jews for political gain,” threatens civil liberties, and distracts from serious efforts to confront antisemitism. Rather than making a real and productive impact, she said the measure was “a messaging bill” and a “gag bill” that’s part of a “broader anti-democratic agenda.”

She noted that by including criticism of the Israeli government in its definition, the bill would wrongfully and absurdly label many Jews – herself included – as antisemitic.

If Moore and other lawmakers were serious about attacking antisemitism, she said, they would promote better funding for federal Office of Civil Rights’ Title VI investigations, which Republicans in the U.S House have failed to adequately support.

Lela Ali of the group Muslim Women For, a grassroots organization, said that her group strongly endorses better protections for the Jewish community, but that HB 942 constitutes “a threat to democracy and free speech” and “a green light to censorship.”

Liz Stern of the group Jewish Voice for Peace also derided the bill as an effort to provide political cover for Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, the Republican nominees for governor, who she said has made repeated genuinely antisemitic statements, including denying the reality of the Nazi-perpetrated Holocaust.

The bill now goes to the Senate.

Rob Schofield contributed to this report.

Our stories may be republished online or in print under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. We ask that you edit only for style or to shorten, provide proper attribution and link to our website. AP and Getty images may not be republished. Please see our republishing guidelines for use of any other photos and graphics.

Ahmed Jallow

Reporter Ahmed Jallow covers education as well as politics and elections

NC Newsline is part of States Newsroom , the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.

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COMMENTS

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Updated on July 03, 2019. In linguistics, a speech act is an utterance defined in terms of a speaker's intention and the effect it has on a listener. Essentially, it is the action that the speaker hopes to provoke in his or her audience. Speech acts might be requests, warnings, promises, apologies, greetings, or any number of declarations.
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The contemporary use of the term "speech act" goes back to J. L. Austin 's development of performative utterances and his theory of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts. Speech acts serve their function once they are said or communicated. These are commonly taken to include acts such as apologizing, promising, ordering, answering ...
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This definition leaves open the possibility of speech acts being performed wordlessly, as well as speech acts being performed without saying that you are doing so. Our characterization of speech acts captures this fact in emphasizing speaker meaning rather than the uttering of any words. ... Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts, Cambridge ...
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The essential insight of speech act theory was that when we use language, we perform actions—in a more modern parlance, core language use in interaction is a form of joint action. Over the last thirty years, speech acts have been relatively neglected in linguistic pragmatics, although important work has been done especially in conversation ...
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A speech act is an utterance that serves a function in communication. We perform speech acts when we offer an apology, greeting, request, complaint, invitation, compliment, or refusal. A speech act might contain just one word, as in "Sorry!" to perform an apology, or several words or sentences: "I'm sorry I forgot your birthday.
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Quick Reference. (pragmatics) Goal-directed actions performed with words in interpersonal communication, defined primarily with reference to the speaker's intentions and the effects on the listener (s). The term was introduced by Austin and is also associated with Searle in an analytical approach called speech act theory.
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Abstract. This article aims to connect Austin's seminal notion of a speech act with developments in philosophy of language over the last forty odd years. It starts by considering how speech acts might be conceived in Austin's general theory. Then it turns to the illocutionary acts with which much philosophical writing on speech acts has been ...
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Speech act theory was first developed by J. L. Austin whose seminal Oxford Lectures in 1952-4 marked an important development in the philosophy of language and linguistics. Austin's proposal can be viewed as a reaction to the extreme claims of logical positivists, who argued that the meaning of a sentence is reducible to its verifiability ...
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House Speaker Tim Moore discusses the Shalom Act before a House vote. (Photo: Ahmed Jallow) By a vote of 105-4, the North Carolina House on Wednesday passed a bill, dubbed the "Shalom Act," that would establish a definition of antisemitism in state law. If the bill becomes law, North Carolina would, by reference, make the "Working ...
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