K. Bach, R. Harnish and The Unified Theory

References

Felicity Conditions for Warnings

Felicity Conditions for Requests

Felicity Conditions for Declarations

x Conventionality of procedure: the procedure (e.g. an oath) follows its conventional form.

x Appropriate participants and circumstances: the participants are able to perform a felicitous speech act under the circumstances (e.g. a judge can sentence a criminal in court, but not on the street).

x Complete execution: the speaker completes the speech act without errors or interruptions.

x Sincerity condition: the utterance counts as the speaker's will.

^ Propositional content condition: the requested act is a future act of the hearer.

^ Preparatory precondition: 1) the speaker believes the hearer can perform the requested act; 2) it is not obvious that the hearer would perform the requested act without being asked.

^ Sincerity condition: the speaker genuinely wants the hearer to perform the requested act.

^ Essential condition: the utterance counts as an attempt by the speaker to have the hearer do an act.

X Propositional content condition: it is a future event.

X Preparatory precondition: 1) the speaker believes the event will occur and be detrimental to the hearer; 2) the speaker believes that it is not obvious to the hearer that the event will occur.

X Sincerity condition: the speaker genuinely believes that the event will be detrimental to the hearer.

X Essential condition: the utterance counts as an attempt by the speaker to have the hearer recognize that a future event will be detrimental.

1. Austin J. L. How to Do Things with Words / John Langshaw Austin. – 2^nd ed. – Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 2005.

2. Austin J. L. Performative Utterances / John Langshaw Austin // Philosophical Papers / [J. O. Urmson, G. J. Warnock (eds.)]. – Oxford: Clarendon, 1961.

3. Searle J. R. A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts / John R. Searle // Language, Mind, and Knowledge: Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science / [K. Günderson (ed.)]. – Minnesota: Minnesota University Press, 1975. – vol. 7. – P. 344-369.

4. Searle J. R. Expression and Meaning / John R. Searle. – Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

5. Searle J. R. Foundations of Illocutionary Logic / John R. Searle, Daniel Vanderveken. – Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

6. Searle J. R. How Performatives Work / John R. Searle // Linguistics and Philosophy. – 1989. – vol. 12. – P. 535-558.

7. Searle J. R. Speech Acts: An Essay in The Philosophy of Language / John R. Searle. – Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.

Issues Discussed:

1. K. Bach and R. Harnish on the locutionary acts

2. K. Bach and R. Harnish on the J. R. Searle’s taxonomy of illocutionary acts

3. Communicative acts versus conventional acts

4. The speech act schema

After the founding work made in parallel by Austin-Searle, on the one side, and by H. P. Grice, on the other, Kent Bach and Robert M. Harnish made an important attempt to integrate the founders' insights in a unified theory [3].

On the whole, if choosing the appropriate label for their theory between either ‘neo-Gricean’ or ‘neo-Austinian/ Searlean,’ the first seem the most appropriate: their theory might be taken to lean toward the Gricean conception of inferential understanding of the speaker's communicative intentions rather than to the Austin-Searle view of speech acts as performed according to some conventional or ‘constitutive’ rules. To obtain a unified theory they developed their own conceptual framework, based on the ideas of Grice, Austin and Searle but including many important innovations of their own. Here it is a brief description of some of them:

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