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Promising And Other Social Acts [Swiss Philosophical Preprint Series.No-79]
Mulligan, Kevin
Mulligan, Kevin
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Philosophie.ch_79.pdf
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worry about what all the great figures from the past said, because most of the great philosophers had no theory of speech acts. You can’t go and find Kant’s view on apologising or congratulating, as far as I know . . . (Searle 1984, 251) The discovery of what Reinach called social acts (in 1913) and Austin speech acts (in 1962) was first and foremost the discovery of a type of linguistic action which, Reinach and Austin are convinced, had simply not been noticed hitherto. It is true that both authors present their discovery within a theoretical framework and that they hoped that their accounts of the phenomenon discovered would be taken as representative of new ways of doing philosophy. It is also true that there are great differences between the frameworks and the hopes of the two philosophers. But both are emphatic that their primary objective is to bring into focus, and fully describe, a phenomenon of which promising is their favourite example. Other social acts dealt with in some detail by Reinach are requesting, questioning, ordering, imparting information, accepting a promise and legal enactment, – which except for the last two – are all at least touched on by Austin.2 In all these social acts we have “‘acts of the mind’ which do not have in words and the like their accidental additional expression”. Rather, they “are performed in the very act of speaking” (GS 215; trans. 36 – my emphasis). These cases of doing something by saying something are, and give rise to changes in the world. They are associated with a variety of different effects. Examples of the effectivity (Wirksamkeit) of social acts are both the obligations and claims to which promises and orders give rise and the behaviour, whether a social act or a non-linguistic action, which some social acts are intended to bring about (GS 194-6, 306, 216; PdR 43; trans. 21).
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2009
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With permission of the license/copyright holder