« Woolley Logic | Main | The Real Thing »
May 12, 2005
Performatives and Embedded Sentences
Suppose someone sincerely and reflectively utters the following sentence:
I declare that the Earth is flat.
Have they said something false? Is that very utterance false?
Had they sincerely and reflectively uttered:
The Earth is flat.
then, of course, the answer to both questions would be 'yes,' but that's not what they utter, they utter:
I declare that the Earth is flat.
Lewis, touching on this briefly in "General Semantics," says that the sentence is true, though "one might be tempted to say he [the utterer] has spoken falsely, because the sentence embedded in his performative - the content of his declaration, the belief he avows, is false."
The sentence seems to be one of Austin's performatives. Just like with these:
I promise to pay you five pounds.
I hereby declare you man and wife.
I name this ship "Pride of Bridlington."
uttering "I declare that the Earth is flat" is a way of doing something, in this case, a way of declaring that the Earth is flat. Similarly, uttering the sentences above are (if conditions are right) ways of promising to pay someone 5 pounds, declaring someone man and wife, and naming a ship. (In Austin's memorable phrase, they allow us to "do things with words.")
What's interesting about the flat earth sentence, is that what uttering that sentence allows us to do is say something false, and even odder, we do it by uttering a sentence which says something true.
So I think it is natural to answer the two questions above as follows:
The sentence token is true (since the speaker really does declare that.) The speaker thus says something true by uttering it, but, as it is a performative, he also, by uttering that very sentence, does something: he says something false (by which I mean that he also asserts a second, false, proposition, not that he asserts a proposition that is both true and false!) The sentence-token, however, does not say the false thing (the false proposition is not its content.) Only the speaker achieves that.
(Similarly, when I say "I name this ship "Pride of Bridlington," " my sentence token is not the baptiser - only I am the baptiser.)
Posted by logican at May 12, 2005 04:53 PM
Trackback Pings
The trackback address for this entry is:
http://www.logicandlanguage.net/trakbak.cgi/60
Comments
Very interesting.
As you may know, Austin's and Searle's speech act theory has been very influential in computer science, for the task of designing languages through which machines may communicate with one another.
Posted by: peter at May 13, 2005 03:47 AM
Actually, I didn't know that - thanks.
Posted by: Gillian Russell at May 13, 2005 01:40 PM
The main standard for high-level machine-to-machine communication is the Agent Communications Language ACL of the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA), a computing standards body. FIPA's ACL has been given a speech act semantics in terms of the beliefs, uncertain beliefs, desires and intentions of the participating agents, formalized (to an extent) using modal logic.
Full details are on FIPA's pages:
http://www.fipa.org/
The definition of the ACL syntax and semantics can be found here (see the most recent file):
http://www.fipa.org/specs/fipa00037/
However, although this is the main standard, many people, myself included, believe that FIPA ACL is inherently flawed, for many reasons.
Posted by: peter at May 14, 2005 03:01 AM
Austin himself replaced his original performative/constative distinction by a more general distinction between locutionary and illocutionary acts. In the more general account, stating something is a kind of illocutionary act, along with promising, naming, etc. As Austin writes, "Surely to state something is every bit as much to perform an illocutionary act as, say, to warn or to pronounce" (How to Do Things with Words, Lecture XI, p. 134). And in Lecture XII we get the label "expositives" for verbs "used in acts of exposition involving the expounding of views, the conducting of arguments, and the clarifying of usages and of references" (p. 161). "Most central are such examples as 'state', 'affirm', 'deny', 'emphasize', 'illustrate', 'answer'" (p. 162).
I think I agree with you that in "I state that the earth is flat," the sentence token is true while what is stated is false. But I'm skeptical about the two-assertion view of your last paragraph. Austin himself certainly would have denied that the speaker asserts that he states that the earth is flat, just as he would have denied that the speaker of "I promise to pay you five pounds" asserts that he or she promises etc.
Posted by: Curtis Brown at May 17, 2005 04:45 PM