Spór o podstawy teorii czynności mowy

Data udostępnienia wersji elektronicznej na licencji CC-BY-SA: wrzesień 2024

THE DISPUTE OVER THE FOUNDATIONS OF SPEECH ACT THEORY

The book develops a theory of complete linguistic signs, which, according to the author, offers a novel solution to two different though closely related issues in the area of speech act theory: the nature of speech acts and the semantics/ pragmatics interface.

Chapter One discusses two competing approaches to the issue of the nature of speech acts: Austinian and Gricean. Underlying the Austinian tradition is the idea of illocutionary acts as conventional actions brining about changes in the world of normative facts. According to the Gricean paradigm, in turn, most illocutionary acts are communicative rather than conventional and, as such, consist in the speaker’s expressing and the hearer’s recognizing complex propositional attitudes. The controversy over the nature of speech acts, therefore, comes down to the question of whether the illocutionary force of an act depends on its conventionally determined normative effect or, rather, on the propositional attitude expressed by the speaker. The author offers a critical analysis of four infl uential accounts of illocutionary acts developed, respectively, by Austin, Strawson, Searle, and Bach and Harnish. Discussing Austin’s theory, he defi nes the category of conventionally determined interactional effects of illocutionary acts. He argues that the interactional effect of an act – which, using Austin’s own words, can be defi ned as a conventionally invited response or sequel – is to be distinguished both from its normative effect and its merely perlocutionary consequences. With these distinctions in hand, the author distinguishes between two readings of Austin’s conception of illocutionary interaction: the traditional one, which underlines the normative import of illocutionary acts, and the alternative one, which puts stress on their interactional effects. In the paragraph devoted to Strawson’s conception, the author draws a contrast between two accounts of communicative intentions: iterative and refl exive. He observes that the iterative account – which is adopted by Strawson – invites an infi nite regress problem. The author argues that what Strawson calls the intended response to or effect of an act can be interpreted as its interactional rather than merely perlocutionary effect. Consistently, contrary to Searle’s criticism of Strawson’s view, the central intention underlying an illocutionary act can be called interactional rather than merely perlocutionary. Considering Searle’s conception, the author notes that it results from the traditional reading of Austin’s views; as the corollary of this, the conception fails to offer an adequate account of illocutionary interaction. In the paragraph devoted to Bach and Harnish’s theory, the author notes that they assume the refl exive account of communicative intentions. With this account in hand, the author argues that communicative intentions can be regarded as thinkable and psychologically real mental states. The author observes, however, that the view offered by Bach and Harnish – the central part of which is the so-called speech act schema – neglects the interactional dimension of illocutionary communication.

Chapter Two is devoted to the issue of the semantics/pragmatics interface which is one of the main topics in post-Gricean pragmatics. The issue is closely connected with the problem of linguistic underdeterminacy. According to the linguistic underdeterminacy view, there is a gap between the primary meaning of a communicative act and the conventional meaning of the sentence employed. Therefore, contrary to the Gricean model of communicative competence, the hearer’s ability to determine what the speaker primarily means involves not only the hearer’s semantic knowledge of linguistic conventions, but also his or her pragmatic beliefs about context. The author offers a comprehensive survey of the many forms of linguistically underdetermined utterances and distinguishes four basic types of linguistic underdeterminacy: lexically caused, syntactically caused, semantically caused and pragmatically caused. Next, he observes that the discovery of the phenomenon under discussion gives rise to the dispute between literalism and contextualism. According to the former, the idea of semantically determined truth conditions of utterances plays an indispensable role in our theorizing about interpretative process. From the contextualist point of view, in turn, this idea is to be rejected as either useless (weak or quasi contextualism) or unintelligible (strong or radical contextualism). The author offers a critical analysis of two contextualist and two literalist models of communicative competence generated, respectively, by the relevance theory (weak contextualism), Recanati’s conception of local pragmatic processes (strong contextualism), Bach’s conception of impliciture, and the refl exive truth-conditions theory. He argues that the relevance theory, which draws a distinction between implicated conclusions and implicated premises, blurs the distinction between what the speaker means and what he or she presupposes or, in other words, between the communicated content of an utterance and the cognitive context of its production. Considering Recanati’s conception, the author develops its radically contextualist interpretation that involves the view called meaning elimanativism. He also observes that the rejection of the idea of stable conceptual meanings can be traced back to Austin’s conception of semantic conventions. Next, the author extends Bach and Harnish’s original conception of the speech act schema to allow for the phenomenon of linguistic underdeterminacy. He argues that the resulting model is literalist in spirit rather than in letter. Finally, combining the ideas put forth by Garcia-Carpintero, Perry and Korta, the author constructs a version of the refl exive truth-conditions theory. Adopting this theory, one can demonstrate that all the forms of linguistic underdeterminacy have lexical causes and as such can be accounted for along the literalist lines. In the author’s opinion, the refl exive truth-conditions theory provides an attractive alternative to the dominant contextualist view.

The main aim of Chapter Three is to develop the theory of complete linguistic signs and use it to solve the issues and problems discussed in the previous chapters. The author starts with an observation that underlying the dispute between the Austinian and Gricean traditions is the homogeneity assumption, according to which acts equivalent in respect of their illocutionary force make up homogenous classes. Both the parties in the dispute tacitly assume, for example, that all the acts classifi ed as requests owe their force either to conventional or mental factors. The author claims that this assumption is false and has to be replaced with the heterogeneity assumption, according to which acts equivalent in respect of their illocutionary force fail to form homogenous classes; for example, some acts are evaluated as requests by conventional criteria, whereas others are so classifi ed because of the mental states of the speakers. Contrary to the received view, therefore, the convention/intention distinction cuts across the taxonomy of illocutionary acts. Next, the author observes that underlying the dispute over the semantics/pragmatics interface is the internalist assumption, according to which linguistic underdeterminacy is a structural property of interpretative processes; that is to say, it is assumed that linguistic underdeterminacy consists in there being a gap between the decoded linguistic meaning of the phrase uttered by the speaker and what the hearer assumes to be the speaker’s communicated content. According to an alternative view, linguistic underdeterminacy is best understood as a structural property of speech acts conceived as complex semiotic entities to be found in the external world. Adopting such an externalist assumption, the author defi nes a distinction between externalist literalism and externalist contextualism. An example of the latter view is the theory of complete linguistic signs, which results from a contextualist interpretation of Ruth Millikan’s biological model of language. According to the author, within every complete linguistic sign one can distinguish two components: purely verbal and contextual. The contextual component of a complete linguistic sign is to be analysed in terms of local natural signs that both the speaker and the hearer can read. To produce a complete linguistic sign – and thereby to perform an illocutionary act – is to supplement the natural information carried by the environment with a linguistically coded piece of information. The author’s hypothesis – which is called the interactional effect hypothesis – is that illocutionary acts can be typed by their interactional effects; in agreement with the heterogeneity assumption, he adds that the interactional effect of an act can be determined either by the relevant conventional procedure followed by the speaker or by the speaker’s interactional intention. Finally, the author observes that all the examples of linguistically underdetermined utterances discussed in the literature can be accounted for along the externalist lines, that is, as supporting externalist rather than internalist contextualism. He puts forth the hypothesis, according to which the theory of complete linguistic signs opens the possibility of reconciling externalist contextualism and internalist literalism or, more precisely, the externalist version of the linguistic underdeterminacy view and the literalist model of communicative competence offered by the refl exive truth-conditions theory.

Translated by Maciej Witek