In the abundant literature on speech acts six different kinds of convention can be identified:
1) demonstrative conventions (as in Strawson 1965): these are conventions of reference; 2) descriptive conventions: these are linguistic conventions or conventions of meaning; 3) conventions of use (as in Morgan 1975): usage conventions enable us to utter “Could
you pass the salt” and thereby make a request for the salt;
4) conventions of means: some device that functions as a sign for something else (I contrast Austin’s performative prefix and Searle’s IFID);
5) conventionality of effect: in the ritualistic sense this is the necessary consequence which ensures the realization of the act;
6) social conventions: there is an institution which warrants the existence and impact of the act under scrutiny.
These different kinds of convention illustrate the different meanings of the notion, ranging from “social contract”, “institutional use” and “ritual” to “rule-governed” and many others. In a way, all illocutionary acts can be conventional in one or other sense of the notion. My goal in this section is not the examination of the notion itself, but seeing how this notion is exploited in Searle’s exposition.
Two remarks are in order. First, Austin’s remark on the conventionality of illocutionary acts is usually interpreted in senses 4, 5 and 6 above: illocutionary acts are conventional first, because “at least they can be made explicit by the performative formula”, which is very similar to a magical spell that unleashes a conventional effect (second) and this according to a conventional procedure (third)81. Second, conventionality of means cannot and does not determine the utterance’s having the illocutionary force it has. To take a non- linguistic imaginary example, if a society convenes that a wave of the hand will stand for a warning that a storm is coming, the occurrence of the wave does not determine that a warning is being made, but merely realizes a pre-existing convention, namely that the wave should stand for the warning82.
In his exposition, Searle (1969, 1989) provides us with the following directions as to his notion of conventionality: illocutionary acts are conventional because they are constituted by a set of constitutive rules, they are conventional because we use language to perform them and language is the realization of the underlying constitutive rules, and they are conventional because they create institutional facts (they have conventional effects, constituted by the set of constitutive rules)83. Constitutive rules determine new forms of behavior; they define what it is to assert or to promise. Violating a constitutive rule is destructive of the action itself (Nicoloff 1986:560); that is, opening by moving the foot-soldier (pawn) from e-2 to e-5 is not opening (it is not an opening move in chess): the move is invalid or illegal. In the same way,
81 I will return to these matters in chapter 6, but I must say that I do not believe, with Warnock (1973), that
Austin meant linguistic conventions, quite unlike Searle.
82 See chapter 2. If there were devices for acts, we would use them because we wanted to convey that particular
act. Our audience would grasp the act in a kind of short-circuited fashion because of the device, but our act is not an act of that particular type because of the device used. The consequence of such a mechanism would be a zero margin for communicative failure. Such a conception of act-performing entails that the devices are non- ambiguous and exclusive for the particular acts.
83
Acts also rely on background abilities (first mentioned in Searle 1978), but as far as Searle’s explication goes, these abilities are not conventional.
if we do not follow the rule for asserting, we do not count as asserting84. Constitutive rules in games define and shape the game itself: in chess the pieces involved are defined by the moves they make in the game progression.
The formulation of the rules is extracted85 from the conditions for the performance of a particular illocutionary act. Illocutionary acts are supposed to be defined by a series of sets of constitutive rules (1969:37). By way of formulating these rules, Searle proceeds to formulate conditions that are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for the performance of the act and formulates rules for using illocutionary force indicating devices for the act in question (1969:54). The problem is we cannot equate rules for the use of expressions with constitutive rules of types of behavior, as this program seems to suggest. If we do not use the expression according to the rules, we may be guilty of poor language mastery or we could have another intention in mind: in performing indirect speech acts the speaker does not use the expressions quite according to the rules of use of the IFID for the primary illocutionary act86. It would also seem that performing illocutionary acts is subject to one super-rule – it is constituted of using expressions according to certain rules. For example, asserting would be using expressions according to certain rules. The rules for the use of expressions are certainly not supposed to be constitutive of the meaning of the expressions, nor of their occurrence87, but regulating at the most (with a strong ad hoc flavor).
Let us look at the rules for asserting:
Rule 1: Assert is to be uttered only in the context of a sentence T, the utterance of which is the expression of any propositional content p. (Here and below, Assert is used to stand for any IFID of assertion.)
Rule 2: Assert is to be uttered only if the speaker S has evidence (reasons etc.) for the truth of p.
Rule 3: Assert is to be uttered only if it is not obvious to both S and H that H knows (does not need to be reminded of etc.) p.
84 Questions: what does ‘following the rule’ amount to? Is this the right predicate to use with respect to this kind
of rules? How does one violate the rule? If one knows the rule and one intends to perform the act it describes, then one either does the act or does not the act; there is no possibility for one to be in violation of the rule of F- ing, for one would not be describable as F-ing or as having F-ed in the first place. I return to that in Part II.
85 As Kreckel (1981) observes, it is not clear what Searle means by ‘extracting’ the rules from the conditions and
how it is even possible.
86 It may be objected that the speaker does in fact use the expressions according to the rules for the type of act he
literally performs. But if the literal act comes off successfully, what would be the hearer’s cue to look for another act – the intended act?
87 This was pointed out by Ransdell (1971:394, footnote 8). The rules for the use and the meaning/descriptive
convention can probably be equated, but it is not clear which would be constitutive: whether meaning conventions are constitutive of the way we use the sign or the way we use the sign is constitutive of the meaning of the sign.
Rule 4: Assert is to be uttered only if S believes p.
Rule 5: The utterance of Assert counts as the undertaking to the effect that p represents an actual state of affairs.
In the semiotic reading, we get a complex linguistic sign that counts as the performance of an illocutionary act, and this in virtue of its meaning; or, in other words, we get that performing an illocutionary act is the uttering of a complex linguistic sign according to rules, and, further, that the uttering of this complex linguistic sign is constitutive of the act under scrutiny. Asserting (but also any other illocutionary act) thus has one constitutive feature: it consists in uttering some expression containing an IFID of asserting. I will return to that.
In later developments of the theory, we learn that communication is not necessary for the possibility of illocutionary acts. That is, we do not need to direct our utterance at an audience for it to be an illocutionary act, but in order for the act to be non-defective, it needs to be directed at an audience (Searle 2002:144). In other words, the illocutionary act, being the basic unit of speaker-meaning and the basic unit of communication at the same time, is fully determined, albeit defective, in language. This means that although the description of the act itself does not change, the act is sufficiently determined by the intention to utter/form/think of a representation of the act and communication is necessary for the non- defectiveness but not for the possibility of the illocutionary act altogether. How does that affect the necessary and sufficient conditions of the illocutionary act of assertion? For asserting (although defectively88), then, it is sufficient that we just utter or think Assert (which is the IFID for asserting; illocutionary force indicating devices are conventional realizations of the rules in question, that is, there are expressions or items or structural elements that are part of language, that bear intrinsically a representation of the rules in question) in the context of the sentence T in silent soliloquy (rule 1), T exemplifying a proposition that we reasonably (rule 2) believe (rule 4) to be true and to be unknown or forgotten by an arbitrary/any/every audience (rule 3), and our utterance of T or our thinking of T counts as undertaking to the effect that T represents an actual state of affairs (rule 5).
There are two different claims that are made by the wording of these rules: first, the claim that the act of asserting is thereby intrinsically defined (that is, when confronted with verbal behavior people are able to say that such behavior is asserting), and second, that these rules underlie the semantic representation of language (any language and all languages). The
88 What does it mean to perform a successful but defective illocutionary act? For the speaker, for the hearer and
the entire speech situation – if the act takes effect nonetheless, what is the effect of the defectiveness? These questions are not addressed in Searle’s exposition.
rules are then simultaneously rules defining the kind of behavior that illocutionary acts name and are rules that account for meaning. Such an explication is circular, for it amounts to saying that first, in virtue of its meaning an expression counts as a performance of act A; second, an expression has the meaning it does due to a set of constitutive rules that underlie the semantic representation of language; and third, the performance of act A is defined by a set of constitutive rules which underlie the semantic structure of languages. Thus, Searlean theory seems to define illocutionary acts using meaning and meaning using illocutionary acts89.
Matters get even more complicated by the statement that not all illocutionary acts are constituted by rules:
The test for whether or not a particular type of speech act requires constitutive rules can now be stated generally: Does the content of the meaning intention or of the communicative intention make reference to entities that require the existence of constitutive rules? (Searle 2002:153, my emphasis)
The meaning intention, as was already mentioned, determines the (albeit defective) illocutionary act type. To know the content of the meaning intention is eo ipso to know the description of the illocutionary act type. So we are supposed to decide whether or not an illocutionary act type must be constituted by rules by relying on a conception of the illocutionary act type. But having a conception of that illocutionary act type presupposes that we know whether or not it is constituted by rules. The account gets circular again. Unless we pick on the italicized word and introduce yet another complication in the analysis. It would suggest that the reference to certain entities is what requires constitutive rules. Here constitutive rules seem to refer to an additional institution that provides the framework for analyzing the entities in question. The existence of this institution then is what defines (or underlies) the actions: we only speak of promises because there exists the institution of obligations and we only speak of assertion because of the institution of commitment. Requests and greetings, on the other hand, do not require an extra-linguistic institution, so these acts do not require constitutive rules. I will quote the explanation at length:
89 This circularity is also exposed by Dörge (2004) and generalized by Love (1999:23) in the following terms:
“What is ‘in’ a language is a set or sets of self-identifying entities that can be cited by using the language according to its own ‘rules’. This painful circularity is the root cause of the unsatisfactoriness of Searle’s account of linguistic ‘rules’. Despite his attempt to establish the analogy, linguistic rules ‘constitute’ a language in a sense quite different from that in which the relevant rules constitute, say, chess. It is as if the rules of chess could only be formulated by making the moves that the rules define.”
It may be objected that Searle meant was speaker meaning, not meaning in general, but it is difficult to argue for this objection, bearing in mind the dangerous equation of both kinds of meaning in the exposition of 1969 (see chapter 1).
So, for example, if I make a simple request to someone, then I need to represent the state of affairs that I wish brought about and I need to communicate to the hearer the representation of this state of affairs and that my speech act will be satisfied only if the hearer brings about that state of affairs in virtue of the fact that I have performed the speech act. But I don’t in addition need to make reference to any institutional notions, such as commitment or obligation. (Searle 2002:153)
Interestingly, in Searle 1969, both requests and greetings followed the traditional speech act paradigm: they required constitutive rules, which can be clearly seen in the formulation of their essential conditions (1969:66-67) in the “X counts as Y in context C” form. Speech acts fall into two kinds, then: institutional and simple (whatever that means).
Among the different descriptions of the act of assertion in Searle’s writings, there is no clear indication whether or not the requirement of constitutive rules should be dropped. The 1985 description only points out that asserting consists in the speaker’s adopting of a special stance towards the propositional content: there is no reference to any institutional notion, so there is no demand for constitutive rules.
So performing an illocutionary act is to utter a complex linguistic sign that may or may not be subject to constitutive rules.
Illocutionary acts are essentially linguistic, and thus, conventional.
It is in general possible to have a linguistic convention to the effect that such and such utterance counts as the performance of an illocutionary act. (Searle and Vanderveken 1985:12)
In comparison, perlocutionary acts such as persuading are not conventional, because “there is no way that a conventional performance can guarantee that you are persuaded” (Searle and Vanderveken, ibid.). Informing, ordering and promising are illocutionary acts. The conventions of informing guarantee that you are thereby informed, the conventions of ordering guarantee that you are thereby obliged to do an action, the conventions of promising guarantee that the speaker has thereby undertaken an obligation. The conventions of asserting guarantee that the speaker is thereby committed to the belief that p. So the conventions of illocutionary acts guarantee a special conventional effect on the participants involved. Illocutionary acts bring about changes, these changes being intrinsic to the act in question, because they are brought about conventionally. These changes are referred to in various ways throughout the development of the theory: first, they are mentioned as illocutionary effects (following Austin), then they are mentioned as being illocutionary points realized in the performance of the act. However these may be called, it is important to underline that these
effects (or illocutionary points) are not due to linguistic conventions. Linguistic conventions cannot guarantee that an utterance is the performance of the speech act of assertion.
But these changes, it would transpire, are not a necessary condition of the possibility of illocutionary acts, as we can perform speech acts to people with whom one shares no common language (Searle 2002:152). Assuming that both the meaning intention and the communicative intention are present (though not fulfilled), then the sufficient conditions for the existence of illocutionary acts obtain. In such a case our statements would not commit us to anything, our promises would not put us under any obligations (in other words, the conventional effect that is conventionally associated with the particular illocutionary act is not brought about), but our illocutionary acts come into existence and this is what matters.
These fluctuating requirements make it difficult to see what the common distinctive feature of the class of illocutionary acts is supposed to be. Or else, what is it that illocutionary acts do, seeing that they do not require communication or a target/audience, and they do not change the world in any socially significant way? It seems that various illocutionary acts require different conditions in their description. The class of illocutionary acts turns out to be an extremely heterogeneous class of doings that are difficult to define.