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to commit the speaker (in varying degrees) to something's being the case, to the ... difficulties: they make Searle's taxonomy non-disjunct or do not go well with.
What is an Illocutionary Point? Mark Siebel

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Searle’s Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts

There are many different things a person can do in making an utterance. By uttering ”Come on, let’s take part in the twist contest!”, Mia might ask Vincent to dance with her, frighten him because he does not like to dance in public, call his attention to the contest, and so on. One of the tasks of speech act theory is to sort these things out in a satisfactory way. John Searle’s taxonomy is the most famous attempt at classifying an important class of speech acts, namely, illocutionary acts. In ”A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts”, Searle (1975, 2-8) presents twelve different criteria of classification, among them illocutionary point or purpose, direction of fit, expressed psychological state, propositional content, the role of authority and discourse relations. Of these criteria, he adopts illocutionary point as the basis of his taxonomy. Direction of fit and expressed psychological state are supposed to be corollaries of illocutionary point, i.e., they are meant to be implied by it. Illocutionary points correspond to what Searle has called ”essential conditions” in Speech Acts; expressed psychological states correspond to ”sincerity conditions”. 1 According to Searle, there are five basic categories of illocutionary acts: assertives (asserting, conjecturing, …), directives (ordering, requesting, …), commissives (promising, vowing, …), expressives (apologizing, thanking, …) and declarations (adjourning a meeting, christening, …). The illocutionary point of assertives ”is to commit the speaker (in varying degrees) to something’s being the case, to the truth of the expressed proposition”. The point of directives ”consists in the fact that they are attempts (in varying degrees) by the speaker to get the hearer to do something”. The illocutionary purpose of commissives ”is to commit the speaker (again in varying degrees) to some future course of action”. The purpose of expressives ”is to express the psychological state specified in the sincerity condition about a state of affairs specified in the propositional content”. Finally, the point of declarations ”is to bring about some new state of affairs solely in virtue of the utterance”. 2 Surprisingly, Searle does not elucidate further what he means by ”illocutionary point or purpose” although it is the central notion within his classification. 3 Searle seems to hold that he can use it as a basic term which is either self1

Cf. Searle 1975, 2f., 5, 12, 29; 1991, 81; and Searle & Vanderveken 1985, 14, 87. Searle 1975, 12-15; 1983, 171; and 1986, 219, 222. 3 I skip the explanation that illocutionary points are ”ways in which [propositional contents] are related to the world” (Searle 1986, 219; cf. Vanderveken 1985, 181) because I think that it is too vague to be helpful. Moreover, I do not take into consideration ”intentions to represent” or ”meaning intentions” (cf. Searle 1983, ch. 6; 1986). As Plunze (in his contribution to the volume 2

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explanatory or acquires a distinct meaning from the context. Probably, he would reply to a request for explaining it in the same way as in the case of ”conditions of satisfaction”: ”It seems to me that [this] notion […] is so general, so powerful, and so useful that the question of elucidating it further is one of achieving pedagogical success rather than philosophical justification.” (Searle 1991, 82f.) It is far from obvious, however, whether a technical term, such as ”illocutionary point”, can be powerful and useful if its application is not sufficiently explained. In my contribution, I try to show that Searle’s remarks on illocutionary point lack the clarity and consistency which is required for a notion on which to rest a taxonomy of illocutionary acts or something else. More exactly, I will present different analyses of this concept which are suggested by Searle, and I will try to make it clear why I think they do not work. Some of them are subject to internal difficulties: they make Searle’s taxonomy non-disjunct or do not go well with his further claims about illocutionary acts. Others are subject to external criticism: for example, they do not pay attention to the distinction between declaring something and really bringing it about. And still some are problematic because of both reasons. 2

Illocutionary Point: Intended and/or Achieved?

It is clear that every illocutionary act type is meant to have an illocutionary purpose, and vice versa. An act is an illocutionary act if and only if it has an illocutionary point. Moreover, the illocutionary point of an act is to be something which it has in common with other acts. Both orders and requests are directives precisely because they have the same point. Having a particular illocutionary purpose, such as the purpose of assertives, is not only necessary and sufficient for being an illocutionary act, but also for being an act of one of Searle’s five basic types. An act type belongs to the assertive class, e.g., if and only if it has the assertive point. Let us take ”T” as a variable for special illocutionary act types such as asserting, ordering, promising, apologizing and declaring a meeting to be adjourned. ”C” is a variable for Searle’s five basic types of illocutionary acts, and ”I” is a variable for the corresponding illocutionary points. If we rule that Ii is the illocutionary point which Searle assigns to the basic type Ci, we can state in a semiformal way: The illocutionary act type T belongs to the basic class Ci ↔ T has the illocutionary point Ii. The crucial question now is: What does it mean to ”have” an illocutionary point? Under what conditions, e.g., does an illocutionary act type have the illocutionary purpose of assertives? Or, more concretely, in what sense do assertions have the point of committing the speaker to the truth of their content? Do in hand) and I (in Siebel 2000) try to demonstrate, there are too many difficulties connected with them.

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they have that point because the commitment is a necessary and sufficient condition of making an assertion? And/or do they have it because the intention to be committed is necessary and sufficient for asserting something? In other words, is the illocutionary purpose of an act type something which an utterer always intends to achieve when he performs such an act? Is it something which is always realized, whether the utterer intended to realize it or not? Or is it required that he not only intends to achieve it but also achieves it? Some of these questions can be answered very quickly. Neither the intention to achieve the illocutionary point nor realizing it is a sufficient condition of performing an act of one of the more special types T because T’s illocutionary point is only part of its whole illocutionary force (cf. Searle 1975, 3). For example, neither the fact that S intends to commit himself to the truth of what he says nor the fact that S really is committed determines whether S makes an assertion or a conjecture. There are further constraints which have to be met in order for the utterance to be of one of these types. For example, in the case of assertions, Searle (1991, 93) says that they also commit the speaker to being able to provide reasons for his claim. Hence, an act type T’s having the illocutionary purpose I is not a matter of the intention to achieve I being sufficient for doing an act of type T. Neither does it consist in the fact that realizing I suffices for performing a T-act. These conditions are, at most, necessary conditions. Thus, the questions remaining are: Does an act type T have the illocutionary point I if and only if intending to achieve I is necessary for performing an act of type T? Does it have that purpose if and only if realizing I is necessary for performing a T-act? Or does it have that point if and only if both things are necessary? In their book Foundations of Illocutionary Logic, Searle & Vanderveken answer these questions as follows: ”Each type of illocution has a point or purpose which is internal to its being an act of that type. […] By saying that the illocutionary point is internal to the type of illocutionary act, we mean simply that a successful performance of an act of that type necessarily achieves that purpose and achieves it in virtue of being an act of that type. […] In real life a person may have all sorts of other purposes and aims; e.g., in making a promise, he may want to reassure his hearer, keep the conversation going, or try to appear clever […]. But when he makes a promise he necessarily commits himself to doing something […] because that is the illocutionary point of the illocutionary act of promising.” (Searle & Vanderveken 1985, 13f.) I quote that paragraph at length because it nicely reveals two important difficulties of interpretion connected with the term ”illocutionary point”. Firstly, there is the irritating addition of ”successful” in the second sentence. It might lead one to the view that it is just the successful performance which requires the illocutionary purpose to be achieved, where success is something which goes beyond merely performing the act. That reading, however, is not compatible with the

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last sentence which explicitly states that the mere making of a promise already requires that its point is realized. 4 Secondly, the paragraph vacillates between the claim that the intention to achieve the illocutionary purpose is necessary for doing an act with that purpose and the claim that it is not. On the one hand, Searle & Vanderveken say (in the second sentence) that it is the performance of the act which achieves the purpose. This sounds as if it is irrelevant whether the speaker wants to realize it or not. On the other hand, their reference (in the third sentence) to other purposes and aims which the speaker may have suggests that his intention to achieve the illocutionary point is required. In his article ”What is an Illocutionary Force?”, Vanderveken is more explicit on these issues. There he says that (i) ”[t]he illocutionary point of an illocutionary force is what the speaker necessarily intends to do when he or she performs an act with that force” and (ii) ”[i]n the performance of an illocutionary act […] the illocutionary point […] is always achieved”. 5 These remarks make it clear that he takes both the intention to achieve the illocutionary purpose and its actual realization as necessary conditions of performing an act with that point. Mia asserts that Jackrabbit Slim’s is a good restaurant only if she does not merely intend to be, but also is, committed to its being the case that it is a good restaurant. This account fits well with Vanderveken’s definition of success in the same article. 6 The success conditions of an illocutionary act are not meant to be conditions which go beyond its performance conditions. Rather, they are nothing else than the conditions under which an utterance is an act of that type. Thus, the irritation which arose by Searle & Vanderveken’s claim that the successful performance of an act necessarily achieves its purpose is removed. An act is successfully performed if and only if it is performed. Hence, one might criticize that it is misleading to add ”successful” here. But it is clear, at least, that it is already the mere performance of an act which is supposed to require that its illocutionary point is realized. In the light of these remarks, an act type’s having an illocutionary point consists in its intentional achievement being a necessary condition of doing an act of that type. An illocutionary act type has a certain illocutionary purpose if and only if performing an act of that type requires possessing the fulfilled intention to achieve that purpose: 7 Definition 1 of having an illocutionary point (D1) The illocutionary act type T has the illocutionary point I ↔ (∀S)(∀x)(By uttering x, S performs an act of type T → S intends to achieve, and achieves, I by his utterance of x). 4

The same kind of irritation arises by reading Searle 1991, 100 (concerning commissives); and 1975, 16-18; 1983, 171-173; 1995, 34 (concerning declarations). 5 Vanderveken 1985, 183f. Cf. also Vanderveken 1990, 26, 104, 129; and 1991, 32. 6 Cf. Vanderveken 1985, 188. Cf. also 1990, 26, 129; 1991, 32; and 1994, 108. 7 Cf. Vanderveken’s definition of having an illocutionary point in 1991, 32; 1994, 114; and Rolf 1997, 48f. For the sake of simplicity, I leave out the necessity operator which should preface the definiens.

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Thus, promises, e.g., have the commissive point because a speaker promises to do something only if he intends to be, and in fact is, committed to doing it. Mia’s utterance of ”I show you a good restaurant” would not be a promise if she did not achieve by it her aim to be committed to a future action, namely, in that case, showing Vincent a good restaurant. Can we assign the same position to Searle? His use of the alternative expression ”illocutionary purpose” strongly suggests that an act type’s having an illocutionary point is determined by the intentions of the utterer. 8 After all, the purposes, or goals, of an action are usually conceived of as states of affairs which the agent intends to achieve by the action. Furthermore, Searle says in Speech Acts that ”having [the] intention [that the utterance will place one under an obligation to do something] is a necessary condition of making a promise” (Searle 1969, 60). Since we seem to be allowed to generalize that assumption, we can suppose that, in Searle’s view, at least one of the conditions of an act type’s having an illocutionary point is that an utterance belongs to that type only if, by it, the utterer intends to bring about that point. But, unfortunately, things are not as straightforward as they seem to be at first sight. For this position hardly tallies with Searle’s claim that there are insincere directives and declarations. The illocutionary purpose of directives consists in making an attempt at getting an addressee to do something. Hence, if the proposal above were correct, then requesting an action from someone would necessarily involve the intention to make an attempt at getting him to perform it. Mia would ask the waiter for a milkshake only if she intends her utterance to be an attempt at bringing it about that he serves her a milkshake. It is hard to see, however, how Mia can have such an intention without wanting the waiter to serve her a milkshake. I can conceive of no situation where I intend to make an attempt at bringing about something without desiring it to be achieved. Of course, I might have conflicting desires. Just imagine that there are two people in the next room; one of them I want to hear what I have to say, the other I do not. On the one hand I want the door to be closed because the latter should not hear what I will say, while on the other hand I want it not to be closed because the former is to listen to my utterances. If I order someone to close the door in such a situation, then, presumably, I do that because the corresponding desire is stronger than its antagonist. But such situations do not show that one can intend to make an attempt at getting someone to do something without wanting him to do it. Therefore, the account of illocutionary point at issue results in the claim that one performs a directive only if one wants the hearer to act in the way in question. In a word, there are no insincere directives. In my view, this is as it should be. I think that, on closer inspection, cases of directives where the utterer apparently does not have that desire are cases of conflicting desires. But Searle cannot agree with that because he holds that wanting the addressee to do the action is not necessary:

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Besides, Searle’s introductory remarks in ”Meaning, Communication, and Representation” (1986, 209f.) make it rather clear that he is still an intentionalist with respect to illocutionary acts, even if he no longer thinks that the crucial intentions have to be audience-directed, such as the intention to be understood.

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”[A]ny directive counts as an attempt by the speaker to get the hearer to do something; and this point holds even in cases in which the speaker does not, in fact, want the hearer to do it.” (Searle 1991, 100) So, in Searle’s opinion, there are insincere directives because one can perform a directive without wanting the hearer to act in the way requested. In such a case, however, the speaker does not intend to achieve the illocutionary point of directives. He does not intend to make an attempt at getting the addressee to do something because, as I said, that would imply the desire that the addressee will do it. Consequently, Searle’s claim that directives can be insincere is in conflict with the claim, also suggested by Searle, that a person performs a directive only if he intends to achieve the directive point. The same difficulty arises with respect to declarations. In ”A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts”, Searle (1975, 19) said that declarations have no sincerity conditions. That fits perfectly with his remark in Speech Acts that one cannot christen insincerely (cf. Searle 1969, 65). But, apparently, he has changed his view in the meantime because, in Intentionality, we read: ”[A] declaration expresses both a belief and a desire. A man who sincerely declares the meeting adjourned must want to adjourn the meeting and must believe that the meeting is thereby adjourned.” (Searle 1983, 172) So, according to Searle’s current view, there are declarations, namely, insincere declarations, where the speaker does not want to bring about the state of affairs specified in their propositional content. Marsellus can declare the meeting with Butch to be terminated without wanting it to be terminated. But that is a bit strange because the illocutionary purpose of declarations is to bring about the state of affairs solely in virtue of the utterance. Hence, if the illocutionary point is something which the utterer necessarily intends to achieve when performing an act with that point, then declaring something implies intending to bring it about. Thus, Marsellus declares the meeting to be terminated only if he intends it to be terminated. Since the intention that p implies the desire that p 9 , this entails that a speaker makes a declaration that p only if he wants that p. Therefore, there would be no possibility of insincere declarations, at least with respect to the corresponding desire. Again, Searle’s account seems to be incoherent. One cannot have insincere declarations, or insincere directives, whilst simultaneously defining having an illocutionary point via (D1). If there are insincere declarations or directives, then an act type’s having a certain illocutionary purpose must not imply that the intention to achieve that purpose is a necessary condition of doing such an act. A possible way out of this dilemma is to modify the explication of illocutionary point. Let us assume that the intention to realize the illocutionary point of an act is not necessary for performing it because there are insincere directives and declarations. Nevertheless, so Searle might say, it is required that the utterance brings about the illocutionary purpose, whether that is intended by the utterer or not. Marsellus declares the meeting with Butch to be terminated only 9

Cf. Searle 1983, 34, 104; and Davis 1997, 135.

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if his utterance causes the meeting to be terminated. That is the reason for such acts having the declarative point even if they are sometimes made without the intention to achieve it. For directives, it is not as easy to modify the account in that way. Searle (1991, 100) himself introduces the notion of an ”‘official’ attempt” to capture directives where the speaker does not want the hearer to do the action. But such official attempts are as counterfeit money insofar as they are just as little attempts at getting a person to perform an action as counterfeit money is money. For ”S makes an attempt at getting H to ϕ”, or ”S tries to get H to ϕ”, does not seem to allow for a reading in which S does not intend to perform the act described. If a person tries something, then he intends to try it. The very meaning of ”make an attempt” and ”try” seems to exclude the possibility of unintentional attempts. Hence, if someone tries to get a hearer to do something, then he intends to make such an attempt; and since intending to make such an attempt implies wanting the hearer to do the action in question, making the attempt entails that desire as well. Searle’s already quoted formulation, ”any directive counts as an attempt by the speaker to get the hearer to do something”, does not help here either. As Searle (1995, 27f., 46f.) introduces that expression, it describes a constitutive rule, i.e., a rule which creates an institutional fact. But this means that ”x counts as F” implies ”x is F”. For example, if there is a constitutive rule ”Such and such pieces of paper count as money”, then a piece of paper with the given features is in fact money. Hence, we are into the same trouble as before. According to Searle’s conception of ”counts as”, if an utterance counts as an attempt at getting an addressee to do something, then it is such an attempt. Since this entails that the speaker wants the addressee to perform the action, there would be no insincere directives, contrary to what Searle holds. For the sake of the argument, however, I will assume that there are utterances which realize the illocutionary point of directives, although the speaker does not have the intention to make the corresponding attempt. Mia asks the waiter for a milkshake only if her utterance is an attempt at getting him to serve her a milkshake. But let us admit that being such an attempt does not imply that Mia intends to make it. Modified in this fashion, the definition of having an illocutionary point reads as follows: Definition 2 of having an illocutionary point (D2) The illocutionary act type T has the illocutionary point I ↔ (∀S)(∀x)(By uttering x, S performs an act of type T → S’s utterance of x achieves I). It is, then, just the necessity of realizing the illocutionary purpose which constitutes an act type’s having that purpose. Speakers’ intentions would be irrelevant. 3

Difficulties with both Definitions

There are, now, two definitions of having an illocutionary point. (D1) says that an illocutionary act type T has a point I if and only if doing an act of type T re7

quires the speaker’s fulfilled intention to achieve I by his utterance. (D2) refrains from involving intentions. It merely lays down that T has the point I if and only if a necessary condition of performing an act of type T is that the utterance brings about I. Moreover, (D1), although it is strongly suggested by Searle, is not compatible with his claim that there are insincere directives and declarations, whereas (D2) does not have that problem. Nonetheless, (D2) is not much better than (D1) because there are at least four reasons for rejecting both accounts. Firstly, the commitment, or even the intention to commit oneself, to the truth of the propositional content is not always necessary for performing an act of the assertive class. Searle counts hypothesizing among the assertives. But hypothesizing includes cases where the utterer merely wants to present a proposition in order to consider its consequences. In such a case, he is in no way committed to its truth, and he surely does not intend to be so committed. Searle (1975, 13) tries to capture these examples by claiming that the degree in which an assertive commits the utterer to something’s being the case ”may approach or even reach zero”. But if it is zero, as in the case of a mere hypothesis, then no commitment is left. An assertive which commits the utterer in degree zero to the truth of the expressed proposition is nothing else than an assertive which commits him in no degree to it. In a nutshell, it is an assertive which does not commit him. Therefore, I do not see how this notion should be able to solve the problem. Secondly, a similar difficulty arises with respect to declarations. Is it really necessary for declarations to realize what Searle takes as their illocutionary point? If it were, then declaring something would imply bringing it about by the utterance. Marsellus would not declare the meeting with Βutch to be terminated if it were not terminated. But there is an important difference between terminating a meeting and declaring a meeting terminated. ”Terminate” is clearly a success verb: if someone has terminated a meeting, then the meeting is terminated. But ”declare” is not a success verb. It is in the same line as ”purport” or ”try”. One of the participants can declare the meeting to be terminated without thereby terminating it because he does not have the required authority. Just imagine that, unknown to Marsellus, the members of his gang do not accept him anymore as their boss. An hour ago, they made Butch their leader. So, Butch replies to Marsellus’s utterance of ”That’s it. Let’s meet again next week” by saying ”Time was when our meetings were terminated just because you declared them terminated. Ask Jules who is the one who now determines what’s got to be done.” Here, Marsellus declares the meeting terminated without terminating it. Therefore, what Searle offers as the illocutionary point of declarations is far from being a necessary condition of doing such acts. Declarations might be attempts at bringing about a state of affairs solely in virtue of the utterance. But they are not necessarily successful attempts because sometimes they do not bring about the state of affairs (cf. Alston 2000, 90-93). Thirdly, both definitions are too permissive because they make expressing a proposition an illocutionary point of any illocutionary act with a propositional content. If someone asserts or promises or orders something, he necessarily intends to express, and in fact expresses, a proposition by his utterance. When Mia 8

asserts that Jackrabbit Slim’s is a good restaurant, e.g., she intentionally expresses the proposition that it is a good restaurant. But Searle would surely not count expressing a proposition as part of the illocutionary point of assertions because it belongs to the realm of what Searle (1969, 24) calls ”propositional acts”. The illocutionary purpose of a speech act might be among the things the speaker intentionally achieves when he performs such an act. But it is not the case that everything which he intentionally realizes is included in the act’s illocutionary purpose. Fourthly, (D1) and (D2) lead to a taxonomy which does not satisfy one of the main criteria for an adequate pattern of classification, namely, disjunctness. Within an adequate taxonomy, there must be a sharp borderline between its categories insofar as no element in the range of classification should belong to more than one category. In other words, if a relevant entity is a member of one of the classes, then it is not a member of another class. 10 A taxonomy of fruit, for example, whose basic categories include pomaceous fruit and red fruit, or, even worse, pomaceous fruit and apple, is not tolerable. Applied to Searle’s taxonomy, that means, among other things, that an illocutionary act type is an element of the commissive class only if it is not an element of the assertive, the directive, the expressive or the declarative class. Since Searle’s sole criterion of classification is illocutionary point, we can say more specifically that his taxonomy is adequate only if the following condition is satisfied: Disjunctness: If the illocutionary act type T has the illocutionary point I, then T does not have the illocutionary point I’, where I ≠ I’. Promises, for example, should not have the illocutionary point of assertives, directives, expressives or declarations because they already have the illocutionary point of commissives. A closer look at definitions (D1) and (D2) reveals, however, that they assign to many acts the purpose of different classes. Let us begin with (D2) which rules that an act type has an illocutionary point if and only if performing such an act requires the point to be realized. If that were correct, then nearly every illocutionary act would have the expressive point, which is to express the psychological state specified in its sincerity condition about the state of affairs represented by its propositional content. In asserting that p, the speaker expresses the belief that p; in ordering H to ϕ, he expresses the desire that H ϕ-s; in promising to ϕ, he expresses the intention to ϕ; and in declaring that p, he expresses the belief and the desire that p. These attitudes are the states specified in the acts’s sincerity conditions, and the attitudes’s contents are the contents of the acts. 11 Hence, for all of these acts, the illocutionary purpose of expressives is realized. Consequently, assertions would not only be assertives but also expressives, orders would not only be directives but also expressives, and so on. There is a way in which one might try to solve that problem. It is suggested by Searle’s remark that ”[t]hanking is just expressing gratitude in a way that, e.g., promising is not just expressing an intention” (1969, 67; my emph.). When Mia 10 11

Cf. Stegmüller 1970, 19; Ballmer 1979, 253f.; and Ulkan 1992, 121. Cf., e.g., Searle 1969, 65; 1975, 12, 14; and 1983, 9, 172.

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promises to show Vincent a good restaurant, she does more than expressing the intention to show him a good restaurant. If expressing an intention to do something were sufficient for promising to do it, there would be no difference between promises and vows. In contrast, it seems as if expressing the attitude which is specified in the sincerity condition about the state of affairs represented in its propositional content is not only necessary but also sufficient for performing an expressive act. So, one might be inclined to think that expressives are mere expressions of psychological states, such that promises, e.g., do not count as expressives because they are more than expressions of an intention. But that proposal is problematic for two reasons. In the case of congratulations on a state of affairs A, Searle (1969, 67) says that their sincerity condition is to be pleased at A. But I think Searle cannot take expression of pleasure at A to be sufficient for congratulating on A because he counts among its preparatory conditions that the speaker S believes A to be in the hearer H’s interest. In Searle’s (1969, 65) own view, this means that, by congratulating H on A, S implies that A is in H’s interest. But expressing pleasure at A does not necessarily involve implying that A is in H’s interest. S can express pleasure at something without implying anything about another person’s interests. Therefore, there are expressives where expressing the state specified in their sincerity condition is not sufficient for performing them. Furthermore, that proposal leads to a non-uniform account of having an illocutionary point. Illocutionary acts of the assertive, directive, commissive and declarative class would have their illocutionary point because achieving it is just a necessary condition of performing them, whereas acts of the expressive class would have it because realizing it is necessary and sufficient for performing them. There would be, then, two distinct concepts of having an illocutionary purpose, one for expressives, another for the other basic types. This is not acceptable because it makes having an illocutionary point an ambiguous affair. (D1) leads to the same non-disjunctness of Searle’s taxonomy. That definition states that an act type T has the illocutionary point I if and only if intending to achieve, plus achieving, I is necessary for performing an act of type T. Hence, according to (D1), assertions would have the expressive point if intentionally expressing a belief in their content were a necessary condition of making them. We know already that, by asserting that p, the speaker automatically expresses the belief that p. So, the only question remaining is whether an assertion requires the intentional expression of the corresponding belief. There are four assumptions which, taken together, show that this is in fact the case. (1) Definition (D1) rules that a person asserts something only if he intends to be committed to the truth of what he puts forward. (2) As I understand Searle (1991, 93), an essential condition of an utterance’s committing the speaker to its being true that p is that the speaker thereby expresses the belief that p. If he does not express the belief, then he is not committed. (3) In order to have the intention that the utterance commit him to its being true that p, the speaker must possess the concept of such a commitment. That means, among other things, he must know that he can bring about the commitment only by expressing the belief. (4) If a person intends to achieve a goal by his action, then he also intends the action to cause the conditions of which he knows that they are not already realized but have to be brought about by the action in order to 10

achieve the goal. 12 When Vincent intends his firing the gun to kill Brett, and when he knows that it will kill him only if the bullet hits him, then he also intends the firing to bring about that the bullet hits Brett. Together, these assumptions entail that a person asserts that p only if he intends to express the belief that p. When Mia asserts that Jackrabbit Slim’s is a good restaurant, she intends to be committed to its being a good restaurant (by (1)). If she intends to be committed to its being a good restaurant, then she knows that she has to express the belief that it is (by (2) and (3)). Therefore, she intends to express that belief (by (4)). In a word, (D1) makes Searle’s taxonomy non-disjunct. It has the consequence that assertions have the illocutionary point of expressives because their performance implies that the speaker intends to express, and in fact expresses, the psychological state specified in their sincerity condition about the state of affairs which is represented by their content. If Searle’s taxonomy were based on that notion of illocutionary point, then it would be like a classification of fruit which begins with the division pomaceous fruit, apple, … 4

Illocutionary Point: The Goal of a Primary Intention?

Maria Ulkan (1992, 141-144) has made a proposal by which she tries to get rid of the problem of non-disjunctness. It amounts to incorporating the distinction between primary and secondary intentions. The difficulty was that an illocutionary act can be performed to achieve a huge number of aims. Vincent might promise Marsellus to go out with his wife not only because he intends to commit himself to going out with her, but also because he wants to express the proposition that he will go out with her, because he intends to make Marsellus happy, because he wants to get more money for the next job … Usually, there is more than one goal with which an act is done. Among these intentions, however, there is often one which can be distinguished as the primary intention. Roughly, it is the intention on which the other intentions depend insofar as their realization is conceived as a means to achieve the primary intention’s goal. Vincent’s intention to express the proposition that he will go out with Marsellus’s wife, for example, is not his primary intention in promising to go out with her because he takes expressing the proposition in question merely as a step in fulfilling the intention to be committed to going out with her. 13 Ulkan’s idea is that Searle’s taxonomy is based on primary intentions. An act type’s having an illocutionary point is not just a matter of necessarily intending to achieve that point when one performs an act of that type. Its illocutionary purpose is rather determined by the fact that the utterer must possess that intention as his primary intention. When Mia asserts that Jackrabbit Slim’s is a good restaurant, e.g., she intends to express the proposition that it is a good restaurant. But, as Searle could point out, she intends to express that proposition just 12

This principle should not be confused with another principle argued against by Searle (1983, 103): If a person intends to do something, then he intends any consequence of his action which is known to him. I am not talking about consequences, but rather about circumstances of which the agent knows that bringing them about is a precondition of achieving his goal. 13 Cf. Meggle (1997, 252) for a similar account of primary purposes.

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because she intends to be committed to Jackrabbit Slim’s being a good restaurant and because she thinks that she can achieve that goal only by expressing the proposition. Hence, the latter intention is irrelevant for the question of which illocutionary point assertions have. Only primary intentions count. Assertions have the illocutionary purpose of committing the speaker to the truth of the expressed proposition because, in making an assertion, the speaker necessarily has the intention to achieve that purpose as his primary intention. More generally, we thus get the following definition of having an illocutionary point: 14 Definition 3 of having an illocutionary point (D3) The illocutionary act type T has the illocutionary point I ↔ (∀S)(∀x)(By uttering x, S performs an act of type T → S primarily intends to achieve I by his utterance of x). The main advantage of (D3) is that it circumvents the problem of nondisjunctness I pointed out in the last section. For example, it does not make assertions expressives because the primary intention in asserting that p is not to express the belief that p. The utterer might necessarily have that intention, but it is not his primary intention. He intends to express the belief that p, so one can argue, just because he intends to be committed to its being true that p. Therefore, assertions do not have the illocutionary point of expressives because their performance does not require that the speaker primarily intends to express a belief. But, in spite of that advantage, there are other things to be said against (D3). In the first place, we meet again with the problem that Searle does not take the intention that the hearer do the thing in question as a necessary condition of directives. According to the proposal above, this is a necessary condition because a person who performs a directive must (primarily) intend to make an attempt at getting the hearer to do something, which implies that he intends him to do it. Since Searle, in addition, grants insincere declarations, there are two reasons for him not to accept (D3). Furthermore, it is clearly not the case that the intention to be committed to the truth of the utterance is always the primary intention in performing an assertive. Mia might intend to be committed to Jackrabbit Slim’s being a good restaurant just because she intends to convince Vincent of that fact. In such a case, the intention to be committed is not the primary intention. Mia has that intention just because there is another goal she wants to achieve by her utterance, namely, inducing a belief in Vincent. Nevertheless, her utterance is an assertion. Therefore, there are cases of an assertive where the intention to commit oneself to the utterance’s content being true is not the primary intention. The same holds for the other basic types. It is always possible that the primary intention is not to bring about the illocutionary point. To take just one further example, Vincent’s primary intention in apologizing for stepping on Mia’s shoes might be that she does not stop dancing with him. He intends to 14

I pass over variants of this and the next definition which additionally require that achieving I is a necessary condition of performing an act of type T. They are subject to the same objections.

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achieve the illocutionary purpose of expressives, namely, in that situation, expressing sorrow for stepping on her shoes, just because he intends her to continue dancing with him. However, there is a relatively obvious refinement which leads to Ulkan’s actual proposal. Arguably, the aims of the primary intentions in my counterexamples are not illocutionary but perlocutionary. When Mia intends to convince Vincent of the fact that Jackrabbit Slim’s is a good restaurant, or when Vincent intends Mia to continue dancing with him, they want to achieve a perlocutionary effect on the hearer. Since the concept we are interested in is the concept of an illocutionary point, we can discount such perlocutionary effects. The fact that an act type has a certain illocutionary purpose depends on nothing else than the necessity of possessing the intention to achieve that purpose as the primary illocutionary intention: Definition 4 of having an illocutionary point (D4) The illocutionary act type T has the illocutionary point I ↔ (∀S)(∀x)(By uttering x, S performs an act of type T → S has the primary illocutionary intention to achieve I by his utterance of x). Thus, although it is not required that assertions are made with the primary intention to commit oneself to the truth of their content, because the primary intention can be to achieve the perlocutionary effect of convincing a hearer of its truth, they are necessarily made with the primary illocutionary intention to be committed to its truth. (D4) surely amounts to a big step forward, but finally it fails as well. Let us leave aside the worry that Searle cannot accept it because of insincere directives and declarations. There is also an independent objection: once again, it results in a non-disjunct taxonomy. To be sure, it does not make all illocutionary acts expressives, for the same reason as (D3). There is, however, another problem which goes much deeper because it also concerns the other characterizations of having an illocutionary purpose. The problem is that what Searle offers as the point of commissives is identical with the point of assertives whose propositional content represents a future action of the speaker. Remember that the illocutionary purpose of commissives is to commit the utterer to a future action, namely, the action which is represented by its content. S’s promise to ϕ (i) has the propositional content that S will ϕ, and (ii) its illocutionary point is to commit S to ϕ-ing. In contrast, when S asserts that he will ϕ, Searle would say (i) that the content is the same, namely, that S will ϕ, but (ii) that the point is different because it is to commit S to the truth of the expressed proposition, i.e., to its being true that S will ϕ. But where is the difference between being committed to its being true that one will do something and being committed to doing it? Since ”S will ϕ” is equivalent to ”It is true that S will ϕ”, ”S is committed to ϕ-ing” is equivalent to ”S is committed to its being true that S will ϕ”. Butch is committed to pretending a knockout in the fifth round if and only if he is committed to its being true that he will pretend a knockout in the fifth round. The latter is merely a more complicated façon de parler of the former. Therefore, what Searle presents as the

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illocutionary point of commissives is nothing else than the point of assertives where the speaker puts forward that he will do something. But this causes a big problem. It does not matter, here, whether one takes the illocutionary point of an act type to be something which is necessarily realized by an act of that type, or something which the utterer necessarily intends to achieve, or as the goal of his primary illocutionary intention. In any case, since there is no difference between the purposes involved, an act would have the purpose of commissives if and only if it has the point of assertives with the content that the speaker will do something. That is, commissives would turn out to be a subclass of assertives, namely, those whose propositional content represents a future action of the utterer. I am not sure whether that is really an intolerable consequence, but it is clear that Searle cannot agree with it because it makes his taxonomy as non-disjunct as a classification of fruit among whose basic classes are pomaceous fruit and apples (corresponding to assertives and commissives respectively). Searle might try to avoid that consequence by claiming that commissives, in contrast to assertives, cannot be assessed as true or false. But notice that, in general, an utterance – conceived as what is done, not as what is uttered – does not belong to the class of entities which are true or false. Telling about an action that it is true or false is a category mistake. When we say about an utterance that it is true, what we mean is that its content – i.e., what is uttered – is true. In that sense, however, it is also allowed to call commissives true or false because they have contents which are assessable on that dimension. My argumentation also shows, pace Searle (1975, 12), that direction of fit is not always implied by illocutionary point. The commissive point of committing oneself to an action is the same as the assertive point of committing oneself to its being true that one will perform the action. But commissives are supposed to have another direction of fit than assertives. Hence, in that case, direction of fit is not a corollary of illocutionary purpose because the latter leaves open the former. A tempting idea here is to take direction of fit as a part of illocutionary point. Thus, with respect to illocutionary purpose, one can maintain that promises differ from assertions with the same propositional content as follows. For promising, it is necessary to intend to be committed to the content going to be realized in the world-to-word way. For asserting, in contrast, it is necessary to have the intention to be committed to the content going to be realized in the word-toworld way. That solution, however, rests heavily on a viable distinction between directions of fit. Examining this conception in more detail would require a paper on its own. But let me mention that having read Lloyd Humberstone’s ”Direction of Fit” (1992) makes me a bit suspicuous of the outcome. On the one hand, Humberstone presents good arguments against the usual characterizations of that distinction. On the other hand, his own suggestion, which is designed for mental states, fails in the case of speech acts. According to Humberstone (1992, 75), beliefs have the mind-to-world direction of fit because people intend not to believe that p if it turns out that ¬p. To put it a bit differently, of the worlds in which ¬p, they prefer those in which they do not believe that p. But this explanation does not apply to assertions be14

cause they can be made with the full knowledge that their content is false. If the assertion is a lie, worlds in which ¬p and where he does not assert that p are not ranked higher by the speaker than worlds in which ¬p and where he asserts that p. On the contrary, his utterance makes it clear that he prefers those worlds in which he asserts that p although it is the case that ¬p. (The underlying difference here is that believing, but not asserting, something implies considering it to be true.) Hence, I would rather wait for a plausible conception of directions of fit until I hold to the characterization of illocutionary point above. Moreover, even if there were such a conception, Searle would still come into conflict with his concession to insincere directives and declarations. So, to sum up, my attempts at getting at a concept of illocutionary point which can do the work it is designed to do all failed. None of the proposed definitions are tenable, either because they are not compatible with other things claimed by Searle or because of external reasons. In a nutshell, it is hard to grasp the point of illocutionary point. 15 References Alston, W.P. 2000: Illocutionary Acts and Sentence Meaning, Ithaca & London. Ballmer, T. 1979: Probleme der Klassifikation von Sprechakten, in: Sprechakttheorie und Semantik, ed. by G. Grewendorf, Frankfurt/M., 247-274. Davis, W.A. 1997: A Causal Theory of Intending, in: The Philosophy of Action, ed. by A.R. Mele, Oxford, 131-148. Grice, H.P. 1957: Meaning, in: Studies in the Way of Words, Cambridge/M. & London 1989, 213-223. Or. publ. in: The Philosophical Review 66, 377-388. Humberstone, I.L. 1992: Direction of Fit, in: Mind 101, 59-83. Meggle, G. 1997: Grundbegriffe der Kommunikation, 2nd, updated ed., Berlin & New York. Rolf, E. 1997: Illokutionäre Kräfte, Opladen. Searle, J.R. 1969: Speech Acts, Cambridge. Searle, J.R. 1975: A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts, in: Expression and Meaning, Cambridge 1979, 1-29. Or. publ. in: Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 9: Language, Mind and Knowledge, ed. by K. Gunderson, Minneapolis, 344-369. Searle, J.R. 1983: Intentionality, Cambridge. Searle, J.R. 1986: Meaning, Communication, and Representation, in: Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends, ed. by R. Grandy & R. Warner, Oxford, 209-226. Searle, J.R. 1991: Response: Meaning, Intentionality, and Speech Acts, in: John Searle and His Critics, ed. by E. Lepore & R. van Gulick, Cambridge/M., 81102. Searle, J.R. 1995: The Construction of Social Reality, London. Searle, J.R. & Vanderveken, D. 1985: Foundations of Illocutionary Logic, Cambridge. 15

This contribution grew out of the Research Group Kommunikatives Verstehen (University of Leipzig) which is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. I thank Wayne Davis, Christoph Dörge, Georg Meggle, Christian Plunze and Mark Textor for their helpful comments.

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Siebel, M. 2000: Searle’s Representing Account of Illocutionary Acts and Its Weak Spots, to appear in: Acta Philosophica Fennica. Stegmüller, W. 1970: Theorie und Erfahrung, Berlin. Ulkan, M. 1992: Zur Klassifikation von Sprechakten, Tübingen. Vanderveken, D. 1985: What is an Illocutionary Force?, in: Dialogue: An Interdisciplinary Approach, ed. by M. Dascal, Amsterdam, 181-204. Vanderveken, D. 1990: Meaning and Speech Acts I: Principles of Language Use, Cambridge. Vanderveken, D. 1991: Meaning and Speech Acts II: Formal Semantics of Success and Satisfaction, Cambridge. Vanderveken, D. 1994: A Complete Formulation of a Simple Logic of Elementary Illocutionary Acts, in: Foundations of Speech Act Theory, ed. by S.L. Tsohatzidis, London & New York, 99-131.

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