Illocutionary Acts and Attitude Expression

• Published in: Linguistics and philosophy Vol. 26; no. 3; pp. 351 - 366
• Main Author: Siebel, Mark
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Heidelberg Kluwer Academic Publishers 01.06.2003; Springer; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Attitudes; Descriptive studies and applied theories; Disgust; Homosexuality; Illocutionary acts; Illocutionary Force; Jokes; Linguistics; Mental states; Mind; Ordinary language philosophy; Philosophy of Language; Political attitudes; Pragmatics; Psychological attitudes; Semantics and pragmatics; Speech Acts; Theorists; Linguistic theory; Speech act; Expressiveness; Illocutionary act; Philosophy of language; Speaker attitude; Pragmatics
• ISSN: 0165-0157; 1573-0549
• DOI: 10.1023/A:1024110814662

In the classic Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts, Kent Bach and Robert M. Harnish advocated the idea that to perform an illocutionary act often just means to express certain attitudes. The underlying definition of attitude expression, however, gives rise to serious problems because it requires intentions of a peculiar kind. Recently, Wayne Davis has proposed a different analysis of attitude expression which is not subject to these difficulties and thus promises a more plausible account of illocutions. It will be shown, however, that this account is too weak since it does not exclude cases where the utterer merely pretends to perform an illocutionary act. Davis' analysis also calls into question a weaker doctrine widely held among speech act theorists by suggesting that, in order to perform an illocutionary act, it is not even necessary to express mental states.