THE PERFORMATIVE MEANING OF SPEECH
Anyone who has been presented with the proverbial question of "Have you stopped beating your wife?" will immediately appreciate that speech communicates more than just a literal meaning. For whether he answers "No, I have not stopped beating my wife," because in fact does not engage in such beastly acts, or he answers "Yes, I have stopped beating my wife" because he does not wish to engage in wife-beating, his answers, without the necessary qualifications, will communicate guilt.
The argument of those who respond to "Black Lives Matter" with "All Lives Matter" is often that those words have a literal meaning, i.e. all lives matter, including Black lives. But like the person who asks the husband about wife beating in this manner, they ignore the meaning of that phrase beyond the literal. In fact, the same "All Lives Matter" will offer similar, perhaps unintended offence, when used in the context of any life situation such a particular funeral, advocacy for the lives of babies, or even the parallel "Blue Lives Matter" advocacy for law enforcement. And this offence does not come from the literal meaning of the words, but from the extra meanings that language has.
I offer an excerpt from my doctoral dissertation on this subject of the performative meaning of language, hoping to show that we must be concerned not only with the literal meaning of what we say, but also with the other meanings of what we say, meanings, which whether intended or unintended, often carry more weight in certain situations.
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PONTIFICIUM ATHENAEUM S. ANSELMI DE URBE
FACULTAS SACRAE TEOLOGIAE
Thesis ad Lauream n. 212
DEOGRATIAS OPADA EKISA
THE SACRIFICIAL BANQUET AS THE SACRAMENTAL FORM OF THE EUCHARIST, WITH THE MASS OF PAUL VI AS A TYPICAL CASE
2.2.4.1. John Austin – How to do things with words
The thinking of John Langshaw
Austin (1911-1960) was inspired by the desire to unmask what he called the
descriptive fallacy of logical positivism.
According to positivism, the main purpose of sentences was to describe
facts or the state of affairs and thus sentences were true or false based on
their correspondence to reality or the lack of it, respectively.[1] Austin saw another type of
meaning in sentences, other than truth or falsity, the meaning of performance. While formal logic might be helpful in
providing certain truths, for Austin
ordinary language is the guide to useful
truths.[2]
Language is a guide to useful truths because language is performative, as expressed in Austin’s theory of speech acts.[3] The performative dimension of language comes from speech having three levels: "locutionary", "illocutionary" and "perlocutionary.” These are not separate acts, but three distinct levels of the same act of making an utterance. Let us identify these levels in the simple utterance, “The Light is red.” (1) The first act, the locutionary, is simply the ordinary act of saying something; in this case that the light in question is red. At this level the speaker makes a meaningful utterance, which anybody familiar with the grammar and vocabulary of that language can understand. In our example the utterance makes sense and transmits some information, namely, that the colour of the light is red. As a locution, this statement can be judged true or false, depending on whether the light in question is indeed red in colour. (2) But in making this locutionary act, the speaker could also be doing something else, such as warning the listener. Let us take the example of a father, seated in the passenger seat of a car, teaching his daughter how to drive. If he makes the statement “The light is red,” when they are approaching a traffic light, he does more than just inform her about the colour of the light. He is also performing the act of warning, the illocutionary act. It is important also to stress that what the illocutionary act effects is not achieved separately from the locution, but is achieved in the very locution itself. In other words, the father does not first utter the sentence “The light is red,” and then give the warning; but in the very uttering of the sentence he also issues the warning. (3) Besides the locutionary and illocutionary acts, the father in making the utterance may also perform another act, namely, eliciting a response from the daughter, such as having her stop the car. “Saying something will often, or even normally, produce certain consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audience, or of the speaker, or of other persons: and it may be done with the design, intention, or purpose of producing them. . . .”[4] This is the perlocutionary act.
And so, the three distinct acts of the one utterance could be distinguished thus:
a) The locutionary act is the act of saying something, and thus has meaning.
b) The illocutionary act is the act accomplished in saying something and thus has a certain force e.g. warning, promising, affirming, ordering, and questioning.
c) The perlocutionary act is the act accomplished by saying something, and thus achieving certain effects e.g. eliciting a reaction or response, persuading, inducing, convincing, and deceiving.
Since our work is dealing with the efficacy of rituals words (and actions), let us focus briefly on the illocutionary dimension of the speech act.
By virtue of the illocutionary force, the utterance goes beyond merely saying something meaningful and actually does something else such as “asking or answering a question, giving some information or an assurance or a warning, announcing a verdict or an intention, pronouncing sentence, making an appointment or an appeal or a criticism, making an identification or giving a description, and the numerous like.”[5] In doing these things an utterance has the force of impacting its hearer beyond simply passing on its sense and meaning. That is why the same utterance (with the same meaning) can have different illocutionary effects depending on the context. And so our utterance “The light is red,” when referring to a reading light, may have the illocutionary effect of complaining about the inadequacy of the light for reading a book, instead of the warning effect when referring to the traffic light.[6] Besides context, the aspect of convention also affects the illocutionary effect of the utterance; for example if green rather than red was the colour associated with warning, then our utterance would not have the same illocutionary effect of warning. To use another example, the utterance “We find the defendant guilty,” has the illocutionary force of issuing a verdict, not necessarily from the meaning of those words, but from the conventionally agreed conditions, such as their being said in a court proceeding, by a jury, etc.
The perlocutionary act must also be distinguished, and yet not separated from the illocutionary act. In our driving lesson example, the perlocutionary act elicits a response from the young lady, the response of stopping the car. This act operates simultaneously as the locutionary act utters a meaningful sentence and as the illocutionary act issues a warning. This was probably the intended outcome of the utterance. But there could also be an unforeseen perlocutionary act, such as causing the driver to panic and lose control of the car. Thus the relation between utterance and the perlocutionary effect is not necessarily cause-effect. It is the convincing (or dissuading) power of the utterance that achieves it.[7]
[1] See especially: Bertrand Russell, The Principles of Mathematics (London: Cambridge University Press, 1903); and Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, Principia Mathematica (London: Cambridge University Press, 1910). It should be noted that in his later life, as described in his posthumous work Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), Ludwig Wittgeinstein repudiated these views of logical positivism.
[2] Mervyn Duffy, How language, ritual and sacraments work: according to John Austin, Jürgen Habermas and Louis-Marie Chauvet (Roma: Editrice Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 2005), p. 23.
[3] John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955, eds. James O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 94-132; see also Idem, “Performative Utterances,” in Philosophical Papers, eds. James O. Urmson and Geoffrey J. Warnock, pp. 233-252, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 251.
[4] Austin, How to do Things with Words, p. 101.
[5] Ibid., pp. 98-99.
[6] Austin classifies these illocutionary functions into three groups: “securing uptake, taking effect, and inviting a response.” The “securing of uptake” is the assurance that the utterance has been understood in its meaning and its force. The “taking effect,” is the transformation of the context such that, for example, after baptising the ship Queen Elizabeth, it is no longer appropriate to call it Generalissimo Stalin. The effect of “inviting a response” can be seen in a question requiring a response, a promise requiring its maintenance, an order its accomplishment. See Austin, How to Do Things with Words, p. 118.
[7] Ibid., p. 107.
