On the theory of speech acts

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The German version (not just translation, see below) of the book How to do things with Words by the British philosopher John Langshaw Austin is relevant to the theory of speech acts . This work on the philosophy of language is the written record of a twelve-part lecture that Austin gave in 1955 at Harvard University . Austin works with many examples from the English language. They could lose their exemplary character when translated and must therefore be replaced by suitable German examples.

Contents and statements

In the successor of Wittgenstein and as a forerunner of the speech act theories of John Searle and Jacques Derrida , Austin presents linguistic utterances as context-dependent actions, because

philosophers have now long enough assumed that the business of "statements" or "statements" is solely to "describe" a state of affairs or "to state a fact", either true or false.

What is appealing about How to do Things with Words are Austin's subtle wit and his method of refuting philosophical doctrines by not naming the relevant philosophers, but taking up their examples and reducing them to absurdity. In this way he repeatedly attacks the "competition" of the Cambridge School around Bertrand Russell , GE Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein :

  1. Austin refutes Moore by resolving Moore's paradox "It's raining but I don't believe it" to the effect that he accuses Moore of violating the condition of success of the consequence. The consequence of a statement is that one also believes in the statement.
  2. Austin also takes Russell's famous example, "The current King of France is bald". Russell had found that, in a two-valued logic, this sentence is no different from, for example, “The current President of the United States is bald”, although the first sentence is obviously “more wrong” than the second because France has no king. Austin refutes Russell by saying that Russell violates the precondition or entry condition of that utterance by making a statement about something that does not exist.
  3. Wittgenstein has to put up with the reproach from Austin that nothing is gained by replacing “meaning” with “use”. Although Austin shares Wittgenstein's assumption that speaking is first and foremost action, he has a completely different approach. Austin relies on systematic examples where Wittgenstein's paragraphs are linked. For example, he tries to grasp the performative speech act of baptism by playing through all conceivable possibilities. He baptizes children with the wrong name or number, he baptizes ships or even penguins.

The “theory of speech acts” can be divided into three parts. Lectures 1 through 4 are a logical analysis and 5 through 8 are phenomenological. Austin then stages the collapse of his first thesis and moves on to the second, which he works through to the end of the book. Why Austin is orchestrating this collapse is answered by opposing the entire philosophical tradition since Plato. Accordingly, a sentence should be checked to see whether it is true or false. It is classic understatement that he first picks out a subclass of all utterances that obviously have nothing to do with truth. Only after he has adequately proven this does he show the reader with countless examples that the subdivision performativa / constativa does not work, since the truth also plays a role in the performativa and the failure in the constativa. So he can present the actual thesis that every utterance represents an action at the same time and can be true or false.

Austin was among other things the teacher of the American philosopher John Rogers Searle . It is debatable whether Searle's speech act theory represents an advance on Austin. Searle elaborates the theory further, but gets caught up in some contradictions and saves on examples where Austin provides an abundance of these.

Austin says at the beginning and at the end of How to do Things with Words that the aim of the theory is to combat “the true / false fetish and the is / should fetish”. Searle concluded from this that one could resolve the naturalistic fallacy with speech act theory. However, its analysis is strongly questioned in analytic philosophy. He is accused of merely suppressing a normative premise. There is the theory that Austin did not want to resolve the naturalistic fallacy, but wanted to make it clear that with the vast majority of utterances one cannot decide whether they are factual or normative, since both are involved.

Austin's speech act theory is also the basis of Habermas ' “Theory of Communicative Action”.

literature

  • How to Do Things with Words. The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955 . Edited posthumously by James O. Urmson et al. Marina Sbisa. Second, improved edition, Harvard University Press, 1975 [1. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1962].
    • German edition: On the theory of speech acts . German adaptation by Eike von Savigny. Reclam, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-15-009396-1

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Austin's manuscripts in: Bodleian Library, MS. Closely. misc. c. 394/5.