Concept
Speech act
Overview
In the philosophy of language and linguistics, a speech act is an utterance considered as an instance of action in a social context rather than as the mere expression of a proposition. To say "I resign", "I apologise" or "You're fired" is, in suitable circumstances, to perform the very act of resigning, apologising or dismissing, not simply to describe it. Speech-act theory therefore treats speaking a language as a kind of rule-governed social behaviour in which people make claims, issue orders, ask questions, make promises and so on by means of utterances.
Following J. L. Austin and John R. Searle, many accounts distinguish at least three levels of act in ordinary utterances: the locutionary act of producing a meaningful expression, the illocutionary act performed in saying something (such as asserting, warning, requesting or promising), and the perlocutionary act consisting in its further effects on an audience, such as persuading, amusing or alarming them. Later work has added notions such as metalocutionary acts, which organise or comment on the discourse itself, and has analysed performative utterances and indirect speech acts, in which one kind of act is performed by way of another.
As a systematic theory, the contemporary notion of speech acts originates in Austin's 1955 Harvard lectures published as How to Do Things with Words, and in Searle's subsequent development of explicit rules and taxonomies for illocutionary acts. Historical research has identified important predecessors and parallels, including the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the accounts of "social acts" in the work of Thomas Reid and Adolf Reinach, and early-20th-century linguistic theories of Sprechhandlung ("speech action"), as well as earlier reflections in Hegel on speaking as a form of acting.
Speech-act theory now plays a central role in pragmatics, discourse analysis and communication studies, and has been taken up in a wide range of other fields. In language acquisition, it is used to describe how children learn to perform basic communicative acts such as requesting, greeting and protesting; in computer science and information systems, it underpins models of human–computer interaction, workflow and multi-agent system communication that treat messages as illocutionary moves creating and discharging commitments; in political science and international relations, it informs theories of securitization and the construction of security; and in law, economic sociology and finance, it has been applied to the performative role of legal norms and mathematical models in shaping social and economic practices.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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On the other hand, as no society is ever in complete equilibrium, this harmony will never be perfect and may often be widely departed from. In what is called a single community, if it reach a considerable bulk, there are (in other words) often a number of minor societies, more or less thwarting and modifying each other; and different observers, who belong in the main to one or other of these subordinate groups, may…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
States what Speech act is; the author is tied to Speech act in the knowledge graph.
And, since we are concerned with what is called "thought," we must pay more attention than we otherwise should do to the private as opposed to the social use of language. Language profoundly affects our thoughts, and it is this aspect of language that is of most importance to us in our present inquiry. We are almost more concerned with the internal speech that is never uttered than we are with the things said out…
Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind
States what Speech act is.
For Aristotle himself has given many rules for arguing: and those who followed him, and who are called dialecticians, have delivered many very difficult rules. Therefore I think, that the man who is tempted by the glory of eloquence, is not utterly ignorant of those things; but that he has been brought up either in that old school, or in the school of Chrysippus. Let him first acquaint himself with the meaning and…
Marcus Tullius Cicero, The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4
States what Speech act is.
Philosophers who discussed Speech act
- John Searle
- Jürgen Habermas
- J. L. Austin
- G. E. M. Anscombe
- Rae Langton
- Luca Incurvati
- François Recanati
- Nick Fotion
Related ideas
- Pierre Bourdieu
- Artificial intelligence
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
- John Searle
- Intuitionistic logic
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Language acquisition
- Law
- Per Martin-Löf
- Freedom of speech
- Linguistics
- J. L. Austin
- Political science
- Thomas Reid
- Logos
- Intuitionistic type theory
- Pragmatics
- Essentialism
- Bayesian probability
- Computer science
- Classical logic
- Philosophy of language
- International relations
- Quentin Skinner
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Analytic philosophy.