Commissives

4 Key excerpts on "Commissives"

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  eBook - ePub

  The Theory of Communicative Action

  Reason and the Rationalization of Society, Volume 1

  • Jürgen Habermas(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  ). In describing illocutionary forces by means of the relations between language and the world, Searle has recourse to the conditions of satisfaction for assertoric and imperative sentences. He finds his theoretical standpoint for classifying speech acts in the dimension of validity. But he restricts himself to the perspective of the speaker and disregards the dynamics of the negotiation and intersubjective recognition of validity claims—that is, the building of consensus. The model of two linguistically mediated relations between a solitary actor and the one objective world has no place for the intersubjective relation between participants in communication who come to an understanding with one another about something in the world. In being worked out, this ontological concept proves to be too narrow.

  The commissive speech acts seem at first to fit easily into the model. With a speech act of this type 5 assumes vis-a-vis H responsibility for bringing the facts into agreement with the intentional sentence ( ):

  Commissive C’

  I (S brings about p )

  In analyzing the use of intentional sentences in announcements, we saw that the illocutionary force of commissive speech acts cannot be explained through the conditions of satisfaction, that is, the conditions for fulfilling the announced intention. But it is only this that is meant by ( ). With commissive speech acts the speaker binds his will in the sense of a normative obligation ; and the conditions for the reliability of a declaration of intention are of quite another sort than the conditions that the speaker satisfies when he lives up to his intention as an actor. Searle would have to distinguish conditions of validity from conditions of satisfaction.

  In a similar way, we distinguished normatively authorized imperatives such as directions, commands, ordinances, and the like from mere imperatives; with the former the speaker raises a normative validity claim, with the latter an externally sanctioned claim to power. For this reason, not even the full modal meaning of simple imperatives can be explained by the conditions for fulfilling the imperative sentences thereby employed. Even if that would do, Searle would have difficulty in reducing the class of directives to the class of simple imperatives, or in delimiting genuine imperatives from directions, orders, or commands, since his model does not allow for conditions of validity other than those for propositional truth and efficiency. This lack is especially noticeable when Searle tries to accommodate declarative and expressive speech acts in his system.

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  The Bounds of Choice

  Unchosen Virtues, Unchosen Commitments

  • Talbot Brewer(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  On this theoretical approach, one could argue that an utterance which reveals an internalist commitment only commits the speaker to another if the utterance is reasonably understood to imply a promise to act in line with the internalist commitment in the future. Since promises are most naturally used to provide assurance to others, one might argue that a promise is implied only when two conditions are met: (1) the speaker's audience has reason to value an assurance that the speaker will act in line with her internalist commitment in the future; and (2) the speaker can reasonably be expected to be aware that (1) obtains. The utterances under investigation, then, would only be commissive when addressed to people who are evidently likely to take the speaker's self-revelatory utterances as the basis for forming expectations about the speaker's future actions, and who might be exposed to harm if these expectations are ill-founded. They establish obligations because it is wrong to manipulate people's expectations for one's own ends, particularly when one thereby exposes these others to significant harm. 31 I believe that this promissory analysis of Group Four and Group Five Commissives is correct in one kind of social setting—the setting provided by a class of social groups that I will call aggregations. However, it seems to me that the analysis fails to illuminate the workings of these forms of commissive speech in a wide range of other social settings—the settings provided by groups and relationships that I will call associations. My views on this matter will be discussed fully in the next section. The main idea is that the curious linguistic devices under investigation—i.e. devices by which we can simultaneously describe and commit ourselves—play a critical role in establishing and maintaining a distinctive and extremely important form of social relationship

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  Dramatic Discourse

  Dialogue as Interaction in Plays

  • Vimala Herman(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Members of the Directive class express attitudes to some prospective action on the part of the hearer, especially the desire or intention that the hearer take the utterance and attitude it expresses as a reason for acting as desired. The description of a member of the Directive class like a requestive (‘ask’, ‘request’, ‘beseech’, ‘implore’, etc.) is the following:

  In uttering e, S requests H to A if S expresses:

  • the desire that H do A
  • the intention that H do A because (al least partly) of S’s desire.

  Commisives are acts in which speakers obligate or commit themselves, or propose to commit themselves (offers) to doing things. A Commissive like a promise can be described thus:

  In uttering e, S promises H to A if S expresses:

  • the belief that his utterance obligates him to A
  • the intention to A, and
  • the intention that H believe that S’s utterance obligates S to A and that S intends to A.

  And finally, Acknowledgements (ibid.: 51–5), which may require only perfunctory expression of feelings in some instances, given that they are socially prescribed on many occasions, and the members of this class are similarly discriminated and defined. They include social acts like ‘thank’, ‘greet’, ‘congratulate’, etc.

  Each class and members of the class are distinguished by differences in attitude —beliefs, wants, desires and intentions. For a speaker to request A of hearer, is for speaker to express a desire for A and an intention that what is requested is undertaken by H at least partly because of the speaker’s desire for it. Thus, although at first glance, it would appear that only the speaker is involved in these acts, their description involves hearers and their rights, too. If a speaker promises, the hearer has a right to believe that a commitment is being undertaken on the part of the speaker to do what is promised; if a speaker requests, the hearer has a right to believe in the desire of the speaker for the thing requested, and that the appeal made to hearer to do it is intended as such by the speaker. Understanding requires not only the grasp of the content of the utterance, of what is said, but of the attitudes—desires, commitments, intentions—that go with them as acts. Recognition of these as intended to be recognized alone is required for communication to take place. Subsequent action is left to the discretion of the hearer.

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  Brümmer on Meaning and the Christian Faith

  Collected Writings of Vincent Brümmer

  • Vincent Brümmer(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  not doing otherwise there would be no sense in promising that I will do it.

  4. Prescriptives

  In Commissives I accept an obligation before my hearer(s). In prescriptives I lay upon my hearer(s) or potential hearer(s) the obligation to adopt a certain attitude or follow a certain line of action.

  The illocutionary load of the following speech acts contains a prescriptive element:

  1. ‘Present arms!’
  2. ‘I order you to stop smoking immediately’ (said by a doctor to a patient).
  3. ‘I advise you to stop smoking immediately’ (said by a doctor to a patient).
  4. ‘Please don’t smoke so much!’ (said by a wife to her husband).
  5. ‘Will you help me?’
  6. ‘O Lord, have mercy upon us miserable offenders.’
  7. ‘I detest all this pollution of the environment!’
  8. ‘I, Elizabeth, appoint the honourable James Murray to be my Ambassador Plenipotentiary at the court of the Prince of Monaco.’
  9. ‘I find this man guilty and sentence him to six months’ imprisonment.’

  In the case of Commissives the obligation accepted by the speaker may be more or less binding. In prescriptives the obligation laid by the speaker upon his hearer(s) may also be more or less binding. Consider examples (1) to (6) above: the command (1) is more binding than the order (2). Advice (3) is less binding and pleas (4) and requests (5) still less so. Supplications (6) are the least binding of all prescriptives.

  The obligatory nature of a prescriptive is often dependent upon the speaker’s authority over the hearer(s) (the greater the authority, the more obligatory the prescriptive). Compare the authority of a military commander over the troops with that of a doctor over the patient, a wife over her husband, someone over his friend, etc. Austin was especially concerned with this aspect in his classification, hence his term ‘exercitives’ (exercises of authority). Since this element of authority varies considerably from one prescriptive to another it is perhaps better to speak of ‘prescriptives’ rather than ‘exercitives.’

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