Illocutionary acts : a case for assertion

The main focus of the study is the illocutionary act of assertion. The importance of focusing on assertion stems from the several factors: first, assertion is the heir of the old philosophical statement and it is often talked about in terms of a truth-evaluable logical proposition; second, the truth-evaluable logical proposition has a preferred linguistic form, the declarative sentence, which is by extension often associated with asserting; third, for all the pragmatic-oriented studies of assertion, the accounts of what assertion really is do not succeed at providing an explication of the act of assertion that could be integrated in a coherent theory of illocutionary acts. The abundance of different accounts of assertion, ranging from norm accounts, intention accounts, convention accounts to context-change accounts, shows that neither of these accounts make use of a commonly shared notion of illocutionary (or speech) act, despite the fact that many of the accounts explicitly refer to assertion as an illocutionary (or speech) act. The problem with the various accounts of assertion is that we cannot judge their merits without a common basis in the notions they put to use, but we can rule out any account that equates the act of assertion with either the utterance of a declarative sentence or with expressing a proposition. This investigation is set off by examining Searle’s theory of illocutionary acts and his accounts of the act of assertion because primarily it contains common elements with most kinds of accounts, and secondly, it is the most widespread and complete theory of illocutionary acts, to the point of formalization (Searle and Vanderveken 1985). Incidentally, the theoretical tenets of Searle’s theory exemplify several of the problematic issues posed by the way assertion is accounted for, for example the ties with the declarative form of the utterance and the Searlean paradigm F(p) promoting the ambiguous notion of illocutionary force indicating device, which is of contested reliability as a force-indicating tool. All of the analyses of the speech act of assertion seem at best to give a representation of the generic assertive illocutionary force – that is, the component that we find in every assertive act, such as confiding, confessing, predicting or reporting, a component that no longer does anything. One of the assumptions of the study is that it is the lack of a commonly shared notion of illocutionary act that is at the heart of the variety of different accounts of assertion. The term illocutionary act is used in a self-explaining way, with the presupposition that we all understand the notion in a similar way. The study of Searle’s work is a case to the point that this is not so. Part 2 begins with a search for an explication of the notion of illocutionary act by turning back to Austin’s William James lectures, where the term was first introduced. A reading of Austin’s ideas is proposed that provides the missing definition of illocutionary act, a definition that focuses on two important insights of the original discussion: first, that illocutionary acts are doings that have a particular conventional effect and second, that illocutionary acts require that the hearer’s uptake be secured. The action dimension (which is the illocutionary effect of the act, not to be equated with understanding of the meaning of the utterance), the role of the hearer (who is the target of the act) and a reconsidered notion of context (which fixes illocutionary act performances to specific participants in a specific situation, thus transcending the linguistic content of utterances) provide a neo-Austinian framework to conduct a discussion of particular illocutionary acts. The act of assertion is discussed within this framework, to yield a description of the conventional illocutionary effect of that act and a set of felicity conditions restricting the conventional procedure involved in its performance. A further line of investigation could be focusing on restricting the notion of context, towards which goal the present study only sketches several very general directions