Austin on Locutionary and Illocutionary Acts

The Philosophical Review, Vol. 77, No. 4 (Oct., 1968), 405-424. 20 pages.Ниже начало статьи.In attempting to explore Austin’s notion of an illocutionary act I have found his corresponding notion of a locutionary act very unhelpful and have been forced to adopt a quite different distinction between illocutionary acts and propositional acts.1 2 I think this difference is more than a matter of taxonomical preference and involves important philosophical issues—issues such as the nature of statements, the way truth and falsehood relate to statements, and the way what sentences mean relates to what speakers mean when they utter sentences. In this paper I want to explain my reasons for rejecting Austin’s distinction and for introducing certain other distinctions, and in so doing to show how these questions bear on some of the larger philosophical issues.The main theme of Austin’s How to Do Things with Words is the replacement of the original distinction between performatives and constatives by a general theory of speech acts. The original distinction (the special theory) was supposed to be a distinction between utterances which are statements or descriptions, and utterances which are acts, such as, for example, promises, apologies, bets, or warnings. It is supposed to be a distinction between utterances which are sayings and utterances which are doings. Austin shows in detail how attempts to make the distinction precise along these lines only show that it collapses.