In this chapter we introduce an operator ○ to represent the deontic concept of obligation. (In order not to beg any important questions, we do not – except for a single exercise – consider a correspondingly dual operator P for the deontic concept of permissibility.) In section 6.1 we present what we call standard deontic logic, and in section 6.2 we examine some further principles that have been suggested. In section 6.3 we discuss the role of time in the determination of obligations, and we introduce temporal concepts into the language and into the models for it. Section 6.4 contains a theorem about past tense obligations. Finally, in section 6.5 we point out some shortcomings with respect to the adequacy and correctness of the analysis of deontic logic in terms of normal systems and standard models.

The purpose of this chapter is illustrative: we wish to show how standard models and normal systems can be employed in the analysis of philosophical questions. The reader must judge the merit of the endeavor, as well as the extent of its success.

Standard deontic logic

Into the language of propositional logic we introduce sentences of the form ○A, meant to express propositions of the form it ought to be the case that A, or it is obligatory that A. Thus the operator ○ represents a concept of deontic necessity.

The truth conditions for modal sentences in minimal models are a generalization of those in chapter 3. Possible worlds continue to figure in the semantic analysis of necessity and possibility, but the meanings of modal sentences are given a much simpler account. A necessitation □A is said to be true at a possible world just in case the proposition expressed by A is in a certain but very general sense necessary with respect to the world; and ◇A is true at a world if and only if the proposition expressed by A is, in a corresponding sense, possible. The resulting notion of validity is such that far fewer principles hold generally on this account than did in chapter 3.

In section 7.1 we set out the definition of a minimal model, state the truth conditions of modal sentences, and prove the basic theorem about validity in classes of minimal models. In section 7.2 we examine M, C, and N from the standpoint of minimal models and define some key concepts for the treatment of certain logics involving these schemas. Section 7.3 contains a theorem to the effect that standard models can be identified with minimal models of a special kind. Section 7.4 briefly describes conditions on minimal models sufficient for the validation of the schemas D, T, B, 4, and 5.

FORMULATING THE PROBLEM

If you hear somebody say, “Sally is a block of ice”, or “Sam is a pig”, you are likely to assume that the speaker does not mean what he says literally, but that he is speaking metaphorically. Furthermore, you are not likely to have very much trouble figuring out what he means. If he says, “Sally is a prime number between 17 and 23”, or “Bill is a barn door”, you might still assume he is speaking metaphorically, but it is much harder to figure out what he means. The existence of such utterances – utterances in which the speaker means metaphorically something different from what the sentence means literally – poses a series of questions for any theory of language and communication: What is metaphor, and how does it differ from both literal and other forms of figurative utterances? Why do we use expressions metaphorically instead of saying exactly and literally what we mean? How do metaphorical utterances work, that is, how is it possible for speakers to communicate to hearers when speaking metaphorically inasmuch as they do not say what they mean? And why do some metaphors work and others not?

In my discussion, I propose to tackle this latter set of questions – those centering around the problem of how metaphors work – both because of its intrinsic interest, and because it does not seem to me that we shall get an answer to the others until this fundamental question has been answered.

Most philosophers and linguists accept a certain conception of the notion of the literal meaning of words and sentences and the relation between literal meaning and other semantic notions such as ambiguity, metaphor, and truth. In this chapter I want to challenge one aspect of this received opinion, the view that for every sentence the literal meaning of the sentence can be construed as the meaning it has independently of any context whatever. I shall argue that in general the notion of the literal meaning of a sentence only has application relative to a set of contextual or background assumptions and finally I shall examine some of the implications of this alternative view. The view I shall be attacking is sometimes expressed by saying that the literal meaning of a sentence is the meaning that it has in the “zero context” or the “null context”. I shall argue that for a large class of sentences there is no such thing as the zero or null context for the interpretation of sentences, and that as far as our semantic competence is concerned we understand the meaning of such sentences only against a set of background assumptions about the contexts in which the sentence could be appropriately uttered.

I begin by stating what I take to be the received opinion as a set of propositions:

I believe that speaking or writing in a language consists in performing speech acts of a quite specific kind called “illocutionary acts”. These include making statements, asking questions, giving orders, making promises, apologizing, thanking, and so on. I also believe that there is a systematic set of relationships between the meanings of the words and sentences we utter and the illocutionary acts we perform in the utterance of those words and sentences.

Now for anybody who holds such a view the existence of fictional discourse poses a difficult problem. We might put the problem in the form of a paradox: how can it be both the case that words and other elements in a fictional story have their ordinary meanings and yet the rules that attach to those words and other elements and determine their meanings are not complied with: how can it be the case in “Little Red Riding Hood” both that “red” means red and yet that the rules correlating “red” with red are not in force? This is only a preliminary formulation of our question and we shall have to attack the question more vigorously before we can even get a careful formulation of it. Before doing that, however, it is necessary to make a few elementary distinctions.

The distinction between fiction and literature: Some works of fiction are literary works, some are not.

Is there a distinction between referential and attributive uses of definite descriptions? I think most philosophers who approach Donnellan's distinction (Donnellan, 1966 and 1968) from the point of view of the theory of speech acts, those who see reference as a type of speech act, would say that there is no such distinction and that the cases he presents can be accounted for as instances of the general distinction between speaker meaning and sentence meaning: both alleged uses are referential in the sense that they are cases of referring to objects, the only difference is in the degree to which the speaker makes his intentions fully explicit in his utterance. Such objections are in fact quite commonly made, both in the literature and in the oral tradition, but I have never seen a version of the objection I was fully satisfied with and the main aim of this chapter is to attempt to provide one.

DONNELLAN'S ACCOUNT OF THE DISTINCTION

Donnellan presents the distinction by means of certain examples, which we are supposed to be able to generalize. Suppose we come across the battered body of Smith, murdered by someone unknown to us. We might say, “Smith's murderer is insane”, meaning by “Smith's murderer” not any particular person but, rather, whoever it was that murdered Smith. This is the attributive use.

INTRODUCTION

The simplest cases of meaning are those in which the speaker utters a sentence and means exactly and literally what he says. In such cases the speaker intends to produce a certain illocutionary effect in the hearer, and he intends to produce this effect by getting the hearer to recognize his intention to produce it, and he intends to get the hearer to recognize this intention in virtue of the hearer's knowledge of the rules that govern the utterance of the sentence. But, notoriously, not all cases of meaning are this simple: In hints, insinuations, irony, and metaphor – to mention a few examples – the speaker's utterance meaning and the sentence meaning come apart in various ways. One important class of such cases is that in which the speaker utters a sentence, means what he says, but also means something more. For example, a speaker may utter the sentence “I want you to do it” by way of requesting the hearer to do something. The utterance is incidentally meant as a statement, but it is also meant primarily as a request, a request made by way of making a statement. In such cases a sentence that contains the illocutionary force indicators for one kind of illocutionary act can be uttered to perform, in addition, another type of illocutionary act.

INTRODUCTION

The primary purpose of this paper is to develop a reasoned classification of illocutionary acts into certain basic categories or types. It is to answer the question: How many kinds of illocutionary acts are there?

Since any such attempt to develop a taxonomy must take into account Austin's classification of illocutionary acts into his five basic categories of verdictive, expositive, exercitive, behabitive, and commissive, a second purpose of this paper is to assess Austin's classification to show in what respects it is adequate and in what respects inadequate. Furthermore, since basic semantic differences are likely to have syntactical consequences, a third purpose of this paper is to show how these different basic illocutionary types are realized in the syntax of a natural language such as English.

In what follows, I shall presuppose a familiarity with the general pattern of analysis of illocutionary acts offered in such works as How to Do Things with Words (Austin, 1962), Speech Acts (Searle, 1969), and ‘Austin on Locutionary and Illocutionary Acts’ (Searle, 1968). In particular, I shall presuppose a distinction between the illocutionary force of an utterance and its propositional content as symbolized

F(p)

The aim of this paper then is to classify the different types of F.

DIFFERENT TYPES OF DIFFERENCES BETWEEN DIFFERENT TYPES OF ILLOCUTIONARY ACTS

Any taxonomical effort of this sort presupposes criteria for distinguishing one (kind of) illocutionary act from another.

Until fairly recently it seemed possible to draw a boundary, however vague, between linguistics and the philosophy of language: linguistics dealt with the empirical facts of natural human languages; the philosophy of language dealt with the conceptual truths that underlie any possible language or system of communication. Within the terms of this distinction, the study of speech acts seemed to lie clearly on the side of the philosophy of language, and until the past few years most of the research on speech acts was done by philosophers and not by linguists. Lately, however, all this has changed. In the current period of expansion, linguists have simply moved into large territories where previously only philosophers worked, and the writings of such philosophers as Austin, Grice, and others have now been assimilated into the working tools of the contemporary linguist. The philosopher of language can only welcome this development, for the linguist brings to bear a knowledge of the facts of natural human languages, together with techniques of syntactical analysis which, at least in the past, have been absent from the purely philosophical writings on language. The collaboration between linguists and philosophers is especially fruitful in studying what to me is one of the most interesting questions in the study of language: how do structure and function interact? This question involves such questions as, for example, what is the relation between the various kinds of illocutionary acts and the syntactical forms in which they are realized in the various natural human languages?

These essays represent a continuation of a line of research begun in Speech Acts (Searle, 1969). Most of them were originally projected as chapters of a larger work in which discussions of some of the outstanding problems of speech act theory – for example, metaphor, fiction, indirect speech acts, and a classification of types of speech acts – were to have been embedded in a general theory of meaning, in which I hoped to show in what ways the philosophy of language was based on the philosophy of mind, and in particular how certain features of speech acts were based on the Intentionality of the mind. The original chapter on Intentionality however has now grown into a book length manuscript of its own, and when the Intentionalistic tail outgrew the linguistic dog it seemed a better idea to publish these studies as a separate volume. This book then is not intended as a collection of unrelated essays, and my main aim in this introduction is to say something about how they are related.

One of the most obvious questions in any philosophy of language is: how many ways of using language are there? Wittgenstein thought the question unanswerable by any finite list of categories. “But how many kinds of sentence are there? … There are countless [unzählige] kinds” (1953, para. 23).

In this paper I argue that mathematics should be interpreted realistically – that is, that mathematics makes assertions that are objectively true or false, independently of the human mind, and that something answers to such mathematical notions as ‘set’ and ‘function’. This is not to say that reality is somehow bifurcated – that there is one reality of material things, and then, over and above it, a second reality of ‘mathematical things’. A set of objects, for example, depends for its existence on those objects: if they are destroyed, then there is no longer such a set. (Of course, we may say that the set exists ‘tenselessly’, but we may also say the objects exist ‘tenselessly’: this is just to say that in pure mathematics we can sometimes ignore the important difference between ‘exists now’ and ‘did exist, exists now, or will exist’.) Not only are the ‘objects’ of pure mathematics conditional upon material objects; they are, in a sense, merely abstract possibilities. Studying how mathematical objects behave might better be described as studying what structures are abstractly possible and what structures are not abstractly possible.

The important thing is that the mathematician is studying something objective, even if he is not studying an unconditional ‘reality’ of nonmaterial things, and that the physicist who states a law of nature with the aid of a mathematical formula is abstracting a real feature of a real material world, even if he has to speak of numbers, vectors, tensors, state-functions, or whatever to make the abstraction.