Speech acts and hocus pocus




3 thoughts on “Speech acts and hocus pocus

  1. Many speech acts, in a narrow sense, qualify as such because they constitute a legal or quasi-legal commitment (“I swear”, or the rather unceremonious “deal”).

    Now aren’t _some_ magic spells meant as treaties with spirits or deities?
    The example of an oath is particularly striking:
    We may today consider it a legal act. However, I understand that it originates from a conditioned self-curse (“if this is not true, then …”).
    Insofar this applies, magic words are contracts or offers, directed to spiritual addressees, and therefore speech acts in a narrow sense as comparable deals were with human partners.

    Of course, this says nothing about the case where the spell constitutes a plea, or a command, or is considered as a measure that “mechanically” has an effect on the world.

  2. > Linguists have stretched “speech acts” yet further; to them it is simply a synonym for ”utterance”.

    A major point Austin makes in How to Do Things With Words is precisely that all utterances are performative speech acts. He only sets performatives apart in the early part of the book. As he elaborates, he argues that saying, for example, “There’s a cat by the window” is also performative (you’re “doing something with words”: warning your friend, or trying to get them to close the window, or drawing their attention, or…). So is “The king of France is bald”.

    • It is all true. Nonetheless, the use ‘speech act’ to mean ‘act of speaking’ rather than ‘speaking which constitutes an act’ still shows a discontinuity with Austin. In particular, even if all utterances are speech acts to use ‘speech act participant’ as an equivalent for ‘speaker and hearer’ is inappropriate since third persons can and do participate in speech acts, as I say in the post.

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