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Austin is well known for pointing out, in How to do Things with Words (1962) and in other places, that there are a great many different speech-acts; part of his complaint against the logical positivists is that, once this fact is understood, truth, as far as the analysis of natural language is concerned, is not as central as it is cracked up to be. He argues that a great many speech-acts are not in the business of being true or false, and that, if they are not in that business, it seems wrong to call them nonsense because they are not in principle provable. The speech-acts could justly say in their own defense that they were not in the least trying to be provable.

Austin is less well known for pointing out, in ‘How to Talk—some simple ways’ (1953), that the one speech-act that arguably is in the business of being provable—the assertion—is, if examined closely, not one speech-act, but four. So in addition to arguing that truth and provability are not criterial to the speech- act, he also argues that truth is too coarse-grained a notion to distinguish among the speech-acts in which it does figure. He arrives at this second conclusion by concocting an artificial, minimal language that contains only sentences of the form ‘I is-a T’, where ‘I’ may be replaced by individual-referring expressions and ‘T’ by predicates, and imagining the use of such sentences in an austerely minimal speech-situation. He finds that even in such reduced circumstances, four distinct assertive speech-acts can be discerned. We are left to infer that any language that properly contains Austin’s minimal language, used in any speech-situation that properly contains his austere speech-situation, will perforce give rise to the

¹ Austin’s quartet is pervasive. To see its application in the analysis of a quite different phenomenon—the behavior of the Japanese particle ‘-wa’— see Fiengo and McClure 2002.

Things-in-the-world and Bits of Language 149 distinctions he uncovered. We are also left to infer that the differences in assertive speech-acts that he uncovered in English arise neither because of the structural complexities of English nor because of the complexities of the settings in which it is used. They arise with the possibility of predication, as he understands it.² Given the nature of his brief, Austin looks only at the very simplest sentence-types; I will be examining some more complicated cases here.

In Section 4.6, I suggested that, corresponding to Austin’s quartet of assertive speech-acts, there are four questioning speech-acts, and I organized the wh- expressions of English with respect to the four questioning speech-acts they may be standardly used to perform. I now wish to examine the relationship between the questioning speech-acts and the assertive speech-acts further. Austin’s quartet of assertive speech-acts, reproduced in Table 6.1, results from the cross-cutting of ‘direction of fit’ with ‘onus of match’—in a Calling, for example, the item is given and the predicate produced, with the onus of match on the predicate.

Table 6.1. Austin’s quartet

Onus of match

On sense of predicate On type of item

Direction of fit

Item given, predicate produced Calling Describing Predicate given, item produced Exemplifying Classing

In questioning, a speaker asks that something be produced. In answering, the respondent produces something. If the answer is responsive to the question, the thing produced is the thing asked for. So it makes sense that, if the assertive speech-acts are individuated, in part, with respect to the kinds of things that are produced, and if the questioning speech-acts are individuated, in part, with respect to the kinds of things that are to be produced, and if, lastly, there really are responsive answers to questions, as seems clear, the speciation of the questioning speech-acts will, in part, complement the speciation of the assertive speech-acts. It is reasonable to expect that the two dimensions, direction of fit and onus of match, that distinguish Austin’s assertive four speech-acts, are echoed in the questioning speech-acts—one can, for example, ask a Calling question, a question specifically designed to elicit a Calling in response.

Often, responses are assertions. An assertion is true if the item referred to by the subject is of a type that matches the sense of the predicate. The matching of type to sense, or sense to type, is Austin’s glue. Like most other conceptions of predication, it is asymmetrical, designed in such a way that it allows him to distinguish the four ways in which it might arise. A question, on the other hand,

² In his system, the distinct assertive speech-acts are defined in terms of the matching of type of item and sense of predicate. Without matching, they cannot arise.

asks that something be produced which is such that, if it is added to the mix, a matching between type of item and sense of predicate is achieved. There is no matching in the question. Rather, different kinds of things may be given, and different things asked for, to yield match.³

When asserting, we take one thing as given and produce the other. The speaker either takes an item as given and produces a predicate to fit to it, or takes a predicate as given, and produces an item to fit to that predicate. At least that is how it works in the simplest cases. In correspondingly simple questions, there is also one thing given and one thing to be produced. When questioning, we may lack either an item or a bit of language, a predicate perhaps. If we have an item, we may ask that a predicate be produced, or, if we have predicate, we may ask that an item be produced. Responsive answers take the form of assertions, in which the predicate or the item is produced. Of course, when we ask our interlocutors to produce items, we know they do not carry those items around with them, as Jonathan Swift imagined, ready to place them on the table should they be asked for; rather we expect that those items will be produced by name or by description, or by one of a number of other linguistic or non-linguistic devices. Sometimes, what we primarily want produced are the relevant items; the verbiage is just the means by which the items are produced. But at other times, the verbiage is exactly what is in question.⁴

We can, of course, talk about bits of language. When we do, we treat them as we would any other things-in-the-world. When we say that ‘mouse’ is ambiguous, we say something about an item that happens to be a bit of language. We can ask that items that happen to be bits of language be produced, and we can take them as given. We can ask that a predicate be produced, or we can ask that the property that it refers to be produced. We can ask that a name be produced, or the item that it refers to. And we can take any of these as given. But Austin noticed a distinction between using a name or a description to refer to an item, and using a name or a description to Call the item by its name or description. If you ask me to identify a bird—if you ask, for example, What bird is that? —and I respond That is a nuthatch, the term ‘nuthatch’ is used to call the bird a nuthatch, and in such an act of Calling, the identity of the expression used is precisely what is important. But, in the sentence That is a nuthatch the expression ‘nuthatch’ is not mentioned. The traditional use/mention distinction does not comfortably accommodate the Calling use of expressions, although that use is very common.⁵

³ Austin (1953) barely mentions questions. Here I am assuming that he would agree with me as against Frege that yes-no questions are glueless, not expressing complete thoughts.

⁴ Here we make contact with the distinction between referential and attributive use, introduced in Donnellan 1966 and discussed in Kripke 1979. If, in the referential use, the words are incidental, merely a means to an end, the question would be whether the referential use is only appropriate when the item is given. And if, in the attributive use, the words are not incidental, the question would be whether the attributive use is only appropriate when the item is produced. There is fertile ground here.

Properties and Predicates 151 The example just given is perhaps the simplest and most overt kind of Calling, and Calling is only used here to exemplify the complexities of the quartet. We will see that many more complex kinds of sentence-types may also be used to perform the questioning speech-acts.

To what extent is the choice between asking for a thing-in-the-world and asking for a bit of language reflected in the structures of the sentence-types that are used in each case? May a sentence-type that in one circumstance is used to ask for a thing-in-the-world be used in another circumstance to ask for a name or description that refers to it? I will offer at least the beginnings of an investigation of this largely unexplored area.

6.3 Asking for properties and asking for predicates;