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Religious Language after J. L. Austin1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
Extract
John L. Austin believed that in the illocution he had discovered a fundamental element of our speech, the understanding of which would disclose the significance of all kinds of linguistic action: not only proposing marriage and finding guilt, but also stating, reporting, conjecturing, and all the rest of the things men can do linguistically.2 We claim that the illocution, the full-fledged speech-act, is central to religious utterances as well, and that it provides a perspicuity in understanding them not elsewhere provided in the work of recent philosophy of religion. In particular we hold that understanding religious talk through the illocution shows the way in which the representative and affective elements are connected to one another and to the utterance as a whole. There may, further, be features in such an analysis which can be extended to other forms of discourse than religious.
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References
page 55 note 2 Austin, John L., ‘Performative Utterances’, in Philosophical Papers, ed. Urmson, J. O. and Warnock, G. J., Oxford, Clarendon, 1961Google Scholar, and How to Do Things with Words, ed. Urmson, J. O., Oxford, Clarendon, 1962.Google Scholar
page 55 note 3 Our term; Austin (op. cit.) and Searle, John R., ‘Austin on Locutionary and Illocutionary Acts’, Philosophical Review, October 1968, distinguish differently than we do the ways in which in speaking we act. Austin speaks of phonetic, phatic and rhetic acts, and of locutions v. illocutions (How to Do Things with Words, pp. 91 ff.)Google Scholar; Searle (op. cit., and Speech Acts, Cambridge University Press, 1969, pp. 24 ff.) of utterance acts (uttering words, morphemes, sentences), propositional acts (referring and predicating), and illocutionary acts (stating, promising, etc.). Our distinction of phonetic acts (issuing sounds), sentential acts (uttering sentences in a language) and illocutionary acts = speech acts (stating, promising, etc.) is for present purposes clearer and more manageable, we believe.Google Scholar
page 56 note 1 Searle, John R., Speech Acts, p. 66. Searle tabulates as follows:Google Scholar
Request: Propositional content Future act A of H.
Preparatory 1. H is able to do A. S believes H is able to do A.
2. It is not obvious to both S and H that H will do A in the normal course of events of his own accord.
Sincerity S wants H to do A.
Essential Counts as an attempt to get H to do A.
page 57 note 1 Searle calls such a condition ‘essential’.
page 57 note 2 Searle, J. R., Speech Acts, p. 66, incurs the latter risk by listing the essential condition of requesting as ‘Counts as an attempt to get H to do A’. That seems to disregard the distinction between requesting and ordering, for one thing; for another it seems to disregard the (really essential) difference between linguistic and non-linguistic ways of getting ‘H to do A’, a difference Searle is in general deeply interested in.Google Scholar
page 58 note 1 Austin, John L., How to Do Things with Words, p. 3et passim.Google Scholar
page 58 note 2 Cf. Exodus, Ch. 14; for ‘Sea of Reeds’ see e.g. The Jerusalem Bible (Garden City, N. J., Double-day, 1966), note in loco.
page 59 note 1 A forthcoming book by James Wm. McClendon, Jr., and James M. Smith, probably to be called Analyzing Convictions, an Essay in the Philosophy of Religion, Ch. 2.
page 61 note 1 Austin, John L., ‘Performative Utterances’, in Philosophical Papers, pp.236 f.Google Scholar
page 62 note 1 That is the task undertaken in McClendon and Smith, op. cit., Chs. 5 and 7.