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The Speech Act Fallacy Fallacy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Thomas Hurka
Thomas Hurka*
Affiliation:
University of Calgary
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Extract

John Searle has charged R.M. Hare's prescriptivist analysis of the meaning of ‘good,’ ‘ought’ and the other evaluative words with committing what he calls the ‘speech act fallacy.’ This is a fallacy which Searle thinks is committed not only by Hare's analysis, but by any analysis which attributes to a word the function of indicating that a particular speech act is being performed, or that an utterance has a particular illocutionary force. ‘There is a condition of adequacy which any analysis of the meaning of a word must meet,’ Searle writes, ‘and which the speech act analysis fails to meet. Any analysis of the meaning of a word must be consistent with the fact that the same word (or morpheme) can mean the same thing in all the different kinds of sentences in which it can occur.' Hare maintains that the word ‘good’ is used to indicate the speech act of prescribing. He maintains that one of the principal functions of this word is to indicate that utterances of sentences containing it have prescriptive illocutionary force, and that an analysis of its meaning must make explicit and ineliminable reference to this force-indicating function. But ‘good’ regularly occurs in sentences utterances of which appear to have no prescriptive illocutionary force.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 12 , Issue 3 , September 1982 , pp. 509 - 526
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1982

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Footnotes

*

The central idea of this paper was suggested to me by, though it was not contained in, a paper by Lloyd Humberstone entitled ‘Ingredient Sense and Assertive Content,’ which was read to the Semantics Discussion Group in Oxford in Hilary Term of 1976. Although this paper has not been published its main idea, which is a defence of subjective naturalism similar to my defence of prescriptivism, is discussed in the final section of Martin Davies and Lloyd Humberstone, ‘Two Notions of Necessity,’ Philosophical Studies, 38 (1980) 1-30. In developing my own thoughts I have benefitted from correspondence with Lloyd Humberstone and R.M. Hare, and conversation with John Searle and John A. Baker. I have also benefitted from the suggestions of two referees for The Canadian Journal of Philosophy.

References

1 Searle, John R. ‘Meaning and Speech Acts,’ Philosophical Review, 71 (1962) 423-32,Google Scholar and Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1969) 136-41. The same objection is put by Geach, P.T. ‘Ascriptivism,’ Philosophical Review, 69 (1960) 221-5,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and ‘Assertion,’ Philosophical Review, 74 (1965) 449-65. Hare's theory is stated in The Language of Morals (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1952), and freedom and Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1963).

2 Searle, Speech Acts, 137Google Scholar

3 Hare, R.M. ‘Meaning and Speech Acts,’ Philosophical Review, 79 (1970) 3–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 See e.g., Warnock, G.J. ‘Hare on Meaning and Speech Acts,’ Philosophical Review, 80 (1971) 80-4;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Zimmerman, David ‘Force and Sense,’ Mind, 89 (1980) 214·33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 This condition of adequacy was suggested to me by John Searle.

6 I think an illuminating account of illocutionary forces can be developed using the materials first employed by Grice, H.P. in ‘Meaning,’ Philosophical Review, 66 (1957) 377-88.Google Scholar A Gricean account of illocutionary forces will hold (roughly) that a speaker performs an utterance with a given illocutionary force if and only if he performs it (i) intending to bring about a certain response in his audience; (ii) intending to bring about this response by getting his audience to recognize a certain reason for producing it; and (iii) intending his audience to recognize his intentions (i) and (ii) (in some few cases a speaker will intend his audience to take as its reason for producing the response the fact that he has manifested the intentions [i] and [ii]; but I think, contra Grice, that these cases are fairly infrequent). The illocutionary forces so analyzed will fall into two classes, according as the response intended in (i) is a belief (in which case the illocutionary force is broadly speaking assertive) or an action (in which case it is prescriptive). If we then say that a hearer assents to a speaker's utterance whenever he produces the response the speaker intends for the reason the speaker intends, we can explain why a hearer's assent to an utterance with prescriptive illocutionary force always consists (at least in part) in his performing a certain action. And if we say that some illocutionary forces are such that a speaker who performs an utterance with one of these forces commits himself to producing (or having produced) the intended response himself - something that is certainly true of assertions - then we can explain why a speaker who utters a sentence containing ‘good' commits himself to performing certain actions. For a sophisticated account of illocutionary forces along the lines I have suggested see Schiffer, Stephen Meaning (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1972).Google Scholar

7 Searle, Speech Acts, 139Google Scholar

8 It may, however, still be of some importance. If the prescriptivist analysis is combined with the account of hypothetical imperatives which I defend below it can allow that a person who responds to the hypothetical imperative ‘If you desire that p do x,’ by abandoning his desire that p is assenting to the hypothetical imperative, but I do not see how any other analysis can allow this. I think that there are in fact good reasons (too complex to go into here) for allowing that abandoning a desire is (one way of) assenting to a non-moral evaluation; and these are therefore also reasons for preferring the prescriptivist analysis of even non-moral uses of ‘good’ to any other analysis.

9 My account of hypothetical imperatives is drawn from Greenspan, P.S. ‘Conditional Oughts and Hypothetical Imperatives,’ Journal of Philosophy, 72 (1975) 259-76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 See Hare, The Language of Morals, 34f.Google Scholar; and Wanting: Some Pitfalls,’ reprinted in his Practical Inferences (London: Macmillan 1971) 44-58.

11 For a general discussion of these issues, see Robert C. Stalnaker, ‘Pragmatics,’ in Davidson, Donald and Harman, Gilbert eds., Semantics of Natural Language (Dordrecht: Reidel 1972) 380-97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 Hare, The Language of Morals, 184Google Scholar