John Searle: From Speech Acts to Social Reality

Language is man’s unique tool for communication. The practical use of this complex tool is guided by meaning-determining factors, conversation-internally or otherwise. This is natural language. Therefore, a theory which accounts for natural language must: establish the creation of meaning relations; then account for the communicative roles of these relations in various situations on universal, extra-linguistic grounds. Only this is an exhaustive theory of language use. Considering these, I opine that such a theory operates on a context-semantic interface. The theory, while acknowledging that, unlike metalanguages, natural language is both a linguistic and extralinguistic system of communication, is bound to locate utterances in universal situations. What I therefore undertake in this essay is; place Searle’s (1975) taxonomy of illocutionary acts on a semantic scale, where I consider them as effective communicative delivery of speaker intentions. I then place them on a context scale, where I consider them as adequate or otherwise both in universal and contextual instances. I have chosen Searle (1975), because his illocutionary acts are the immediate intentional content of (his proposed) speech acts. I have also largely brought in Dascal (2003) who vividly describes the taxonomy in natural instances. I find that the taxonomy is largely inadequate in a natural, context-based communicative environment. And that a more but not entirely functional alternative would be more qualified in these situations.

2007

ELSYA : Journal of English Language Studies

Before John Searle wrote the book of Speech Acts, he wrote an article about “What is a Speech Act?” (in Philosophy in America, Max Black, ed. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1965), 221–239). He was born in Denver in 1932. He spent some seven years in Oxford, beginning as an undergraduate in the autumn of 1952 with a Rhodes Scholarship, and concluding as a Lecturer in Philosophy at Christ Church. He has spent almost all of his subsequent life as Professor of Philosophy in Berkeley according to Smith (2003). This article aims to review the speech act theories by Searle (1969) to know what the theories of speech acts according to him to aid researchers understand more on how to apply it in real social life. Moreover, this article’s references are accurate (valid) and they well argued. This article is highly recommended for the philosopher, specialists and analysts in the field of pragmatics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics and conversational analysis, communication studie...

Augustinian: A Journal for Humanities, Social Sciences, Business, and Education., Vol. 19, Issue #1, pp. 35-45, 2018

The speech act theory is one of the rigorous attempts to systematically explain the workings of language. It is not only widely influential in the philosophy of language, but in the areas of linguistics and communication as well. This essay traces the development of this theory from J. L. Austin's first formulation of the theory to John Searle's further systematization and grounding of it. The essay first situates the theory in the general approaches to the philosophy of language. After which, it explicates the main features of the theory as initially articulated by Austin and further improved by Searle. Among the innovations introduced by Searle, the essay highlights the following: the distinction between the utterance and propositional acts, the distinction between the effects of illocutionary acts and those of perlocutionary acts, a consistent set of criteria for classifying speech acts, and the grounding of speech acts in terms of rules and facts.

The conception of mind, language and society in the philosophy oh John Searle.

This paper is an integrative appraisal of Searle’s speech act theory. The nature of speech acts makes them worthy of scholarly attention. Most speech acts are focused and directed as they are encoded by the speaker and decoded by the hearer. They are intended to have a certain point, and they are intended to be understood as such. This investigation explores Lawal’s Communicative Model Theory and Acheoah’s Pragma-crafting Theory to contend for a vibrant, all-encompassing speech act theory and establish the strengths and weaknesses of Searle’s speech act theory. This study finds that: the notions “speaker’s intention” and “linguistic convention” mentioned in Searle’s speech act theory are loosely used. Context-phenomenon is not extensively discussed in Searle’s theory in which speakers’ intention is the core. Without a context-sensitive, integrative theoretical framework, the investigation of the contextual nuances which determine the use and interpretation of language remains a futile endeavour. Like Austin’s speech act theory, Searle’s speech act theory strongly recommends “linguistic conventions” for the performance of speech acts at the expense of a wide range of discourse constraints

The Mystery of Capital and the Construction of Social …, 2008

In Chapter 3 of his The Construction of Social Reality (CSR in the following text), John Searle endeavors to explain and justify his claim that language is essentially constitutive of institutional reality. Unlike several other components of his theory of institutions (collective intentionality, deontic power, constitutive rules), this claim of Searle's has not been made a topic of critical discussion yet. However, there are several difficulties connected with this part of Searle's theory, and most of my paper is an attempt to show what they are and how to remove them.

During the last fifty years John R. Searle has developed influential views on fundamental research areas within and beyond philosophy. This entry mainly focuses on Searle’s contributions to three fields of research. In the first section, John Searle’s concept of a speech act is tackled. Topic of the second section is Searle’s theory of mind and of intentionality. Finally, the third part addresses Searle’s “Philosophy of Society” (a discipline which broadly covers what nowadays also falls under the name of “social ontology”).

Dialogue, 2001