Illocutionary Acts and Sentence Meaning

✍ Scribed by William P. Alston

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2000
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 343
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

What is it for a sentence to have a certain meaning? This is the question that the distinguished analytic philosopher William P. Alston addresses in this major contribution to the philosophy of language. His answer focuses on the given sentence's potential to play the role that its speaker had in mind, what he terms the usability of the sentence to perform the illocutionary act intended by its speaker.Alston defines an illocutionary act as an act of saying something with a certain "content." He develops his account of what it is to perform such acts in terms of taking responsibility, in uttering a sentence, for the existence of certain conditions. In requesting someone to open a window, for example, the speaker takes responsibility for its being the case that the window is closed and that the speaker has an interest in its being opened.In Illocutionary Acts and Sentence Meaning, Alston expands upon this concept, creating a framework of five categories of illocutionary act and going on to argue that sentence meaning is fundamentally a matter of illocutionary act potential; that is, for a sentence to have a particular meaning is for it to be usable to perform illocutionary acts of a certain type. In providing detailed and explicit patterns of analysis for the whole range of illocutionary acts, Alston makes a unique contribution to the field of philosophy of language—one that is likely to generate debate for years to come.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
Preface
Introduction
PART I: THE NATURE OF ILLOCUTIONARY ACTS
1. The Stratification of Linguistic Behavior
i. Types of Speech Acts
ii. Illocutionary Acts
iii. Austin's Classification of Speech Acts
iv. Austin on the Rhetic-Illocutionary Distinction
v. Austin on the Illocutionary-Perlocutionary Distinction
vi. Austin's Characterization of Illocutionary Acts
vii. Interrelations of Sentential and Illocutionary Acts
viii. Perlocutionary Acts and Other Speech Acts
2. Perlocutionary Intention Theories of Illocutionary Acts
i. Explicating Illocutionary Act Concepts
ii. Grice on Speaker Meaning
iii. Schiffer's Account of Illocutionary Acts
iv. Criticism of Schiffer's Account
v. Counterexamples to Schiffer's Account
3. The Nature of Illocutionary Acts
i. Searle's "Non-Defective" Promising
ii. Taking Responsibility
iii. Epistemological Complexities
iv. Blameworthiness and Incorrectness
v. The Crucial Role of Rules
vi. Further Modifications of Searle's Analysis
vii. A New Analysis of Promising
viii. Extension to Other Illocutionary Acts
ix. De Re and De Dicto
x. How to Identify Conditions for Illocutionary Acts
xi. Illocutionary Rules
4. Types of Illocutionary Acts: Commissives, Exercitives, Directives, and Expressives
i. Prelude: Conventional and Normative Facts
ii. Commissives, Exercitives, and Verdictives: Preliminary
iii. The Final Model for Exercitives
iv. The Final Model for Commissives
v. Directives
vi. Expressives
5. Assertion and Other Assertives: Completing the Account
i. The Problem of Assertion
ii. Assertion as Explicitly Presenting a Proposition
iii. How This Account Deals with Problems
iv. Assertive-Nonassertive Overlaps
v. Kinds of Assertives
vi. Analysis Patterns for Illocutionary Act Types
vii. Restrictions on Sentential Vehicles
viii. Unintentional Illocutionary Acts
ix. Comparison with Perlocutionary Intention Accounts
PART II: AN ACCOUNT OF THE MEANING OF SENTENCES
6. The Problem of Linguistic Meaning
i. Meaning: Preliminary
A. The Concept of Meaning
B. What I'm Looking for in a Theory of Meaning
ii. Use as the Key to Meaning
iii. Sentence Meaning as Primary
iv. Sentence Meaning as Illocutionary Act Potential
v. Sentence Meaning and Perlocutionary Intentions
vi. Two Difficulties in the Illocutionary Act Potential Theory
vii. Intensifying the Difficulty
viii. Matching Illocutionary Act Types
ix. Illocutionary Rules
7. Illocutionary Act Potential and Illocutionary Rules
i. IA Potential as Subjection to Illocutionary Rules
ii. Linguistic Meaning as Rule Govemance
iii. Some Versions of Semantic Rules
iv. Progressive Complication of Illocutionary Rules
v. How to Handle Ellipticity and Singular Reference
vi. Reference, Ellipticity, and R'ing as Rule Subjection
vii. IA Analysis in Terms of Rule Subjection and in Terms of R'ing
viii. Some Additional Problems for IA Analysis
ix. IA's, I-Rules, IA Potential, and Sentence Meaning
x. Sample I-Rules and IA Analyses
xi. How I-Rules Make Communication Possible
xii. Speaker Meaning
8. The Status of Illocutionary Rules
i. Summary of the Foregoing
ii. Regulative and Constitutive Rules
iii. Unformulated Rules
iv. Rules and Conventions
v. Do I-Rules Exist?
vi. Drawing Boundaries around I-Act and I-Rule
vii. The Meaning of Subsentential Units
9. The IA Potential Theory of Meaning and Its Alternatives
i. Preview
ii. Initial Plausibility of the Theory
iii. Efficacy of the Theory in Application
iv. Replies to Objections
v. Mapping Alternative Theories
vi. Words or Sentences as Fundamental
vii. Naive Referential Theories
viii. More Sophisticated Referential Theories
ix. Truth Conditional Approaches
x. Attempts to Get Beyond Assertion I
xi. Attempts to Get Beyond Assertion II
xii. Conclusion
Appendix
Bibliography
Index