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Are all Speech-acts Self-involving?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

J. Gordon Campbell
J. Gordon Campbell
Affiliation:
Associate Professor, Hanover College, Indiana
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Extract

Donald Evans, for one, thinks not. J. L. Austin, it could be argued, would have disagreed with him. But regardless of what Austin might have said on the question (someone is bound to suggest that he would have taken it back after he said it) I think that Evans is wrong.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , June 1972 , pp. 161 - 164
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1972

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References

page 161 note 1 Evans, Donald, The Logic of Self-Involvement (London, 1963).Google Scholar

page 161 note 2 Evans, , p. 12.Google Scholar

page 162 note 1 I am not suggesting that we always have ‘reasons’ for speech-acts in the sense that we always ‘speak on the basis of evidence’. See Parsons, Kathryn Pyne, ‘Mistaking Sensations’, Philosophical Review (LXXIX, 1970), p. 206.Google Scholar I think what follows will also make it clear that I am not presupposing that a reason for a speech-act need be a mental episode, or conscious, or that a conscious reason need be the real one or the only one.

page 162 note 2 I am omitting all of the (now traditional) odd situations such as a dramatic performance, testing a microphone, learning to speak a foreign language, etc.

page 162 note 3 Evans does say: ‘All language is performative’ (p. 114). Thus it would seem that to speak is to act and therein to be an agent. But this creates even more confusion, as I hope to show. (Incidently, what he meant, surely, is that all speech is performative.)

page 162 note 4 Evans uses ‘performative’ for ‘illocutionary’ and retains ‘constative’ as one of the five classes of performatives. This may be his original sin, for constatives include stating, reporting, guessing, warning, betting and estimating (p. 38). He wants these to be acts (purely verbal ones!) of a sort that are not self-involving.

page 163 note 1 Austin did not list anything like example (b) under commissives, but I think it could be placed there, providing that we take it as a qualification of commitment and not as a prediction.

page 163 note 2 This point is not in disagreement with Evans.

page 163 note 3 It is to be noted that one of Austin's points which Evans rejects is that the philosophical contrast between “factual” and “evaluative” utterances is abandoned’. Evans, p. 71. It is because of this dicotomy between facts and values, or perhaps better, science and religion, that I employed the term fideism.

page 163 note 4 I do not mean this in a moral sense. It is probably immoral not to acknowledge my commitments, in a way very close to the way it is immoral to play chess without trying to win. I mean ‘sub-human’ in the sense that a purely physiological description of my wife is ‘sub-Ann’.

page 163 note 5 Evans, , p. 160.Google Scholar

page 164 note 1 Evans, , p. 258.Google Scholar