SPEECH ACT THEORY

Speech act theory developed during the middle of the twentieth century out of a sense of dissatisfaction on the part of writers such as J. L. Austin and John Searle about how language was viewed by the logical positivists and others. It is fair to say that at that time, the positivists (e.g., A. J. Ayer, G. Bergmann, R. Carnap, H. Feigl, V. Kraft, M. Schlick, and F. Waismann) dominated philosophy. Their interest in language, which was great, focused on how language works in scientific settings. It also focused on the meaning that language has on the sentential level. For the positivists, sentences have meaning seemingly in relative isolation from the settings in which they are used. Further, sentences have meaning if and only if their truth conditions can be established. Thus if someone wants to assert the sentence “The cat is on the mat,” he would have to know how to determine its truth or falsity. If, as in the claim “The Spirit of Good is in everyone's heart,” the speaker cannot tell us, even in principle, how she knows that it is true (or false), the sentence is meaningless.

In one sense, Austin and Searle looked at language in the same way. They too focused their attention on the sentential level. But they viewed sentences not as artifacts that carry meaning on their own shoulders, but as issuances by speakers for the benefit of their hearers.