Phil 148

Chapter 2B

Speech Act Rules• 1. Must the speaker use any special words or formulae to

perform the speech act?• 2. Must the (a) speaker or (b) audience hold any special

position for the speaker to perform the speech act?• 3. Are there any other special circumstances required for the

speech act?• 4. Is any response or uptake needed to complete the speech

act?• 5. What feelings/desires/beliefs is the speaker expected to

have?• 6. What general purpose or purposes are served by this kind

of speech act?

Conversational Acts

• When one uses a speech act to affect another, a conversational act has occurred.

• One can perform the speech act while failing to perform the intended conversational act.

• Conversational acts are largely governed by a set of assumptions we will refer to as “conversational rules” (though strictly speaking they are conventions)

(Herbert) Paul Grice• 1913-1988• Educated at Oxford, taught

there for several years, spent the last two decades of his life at the University of California at Berkeley

• Many of his most influential writings are reprinted in the book Studies in the Way of Words

The Cooperative Principle

• Language is a cooperative enterprise. It doesn’t work if one side doesn’t cooperate.

• Grice’s Cooperative Principle contains 4 rules:– Quantity– Quality– Relevance– Manner

Quantity

• 1. Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange

• 2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDPqB9i1ScY

Quality

• 1. Do not say that which you believe to be false.

• 2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

Relevance

• Make your information germane to the purposes of the exchange. (anyone see a quantity problem with that?)

• Unfortunately, there is no set guideline for relevance. Either one can recognize it or one cannot.

• Make your information germane to the purposes of the exchange. (anyone see a quantity problem with that?)

Manner

• 1. Avoid obscurity of expression• 2. Avoid ambiguity– Giant Police Exercise to Guard Bush– exceptions: when telling a joke for example.

• 3. Be brief• 4. Be orderly• --- in short, don’t be goofy.• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnsYbajTkeQ

Conversational Implication• When we assume others are following conversational rules,

and assume that they assume that we are also, we can convey a great deal of information without saying it.

• In a conversational exchange we expect more than to be taken literally.

• The purpose of language is not precision, but versatility. Consider the case of names for persons. There is a reason that they’re so brief even though this can sometimes lead to ambiguity. Apply that same reasoning to names for everything else and you begin to get the picture.

Violating Conversational Rules

• Damning with faint praise• Irony (sarcasm to us Americans)• Figurative language• Intentional Ambiguity