Performative Verbs and Performative Acts ∗

Searle (1989) posits a set of adequacy criteria for any account of the meaning and use of performative verbs, such as order or promise. Central among them are: (a) performative utterances are performances of the act named by the performative verb; (b) performative utterances are self-verifying; (c) performative utterances achieve (a) and (b) in virtue of their literal meaning. He then argues that the fundamental problem with assertoric accounts of performatives is that they fail (b), and hence (a), because being committed to having an intention does not guarantee having that intention. Relying on a uniform meaning for verbs on their reportative and performative uses, we propose an assertoric analysis of performative utterances that does not require an actual intention for deriving (b), and hence can meet (a) and (c). Explicit performative utterances are those whose illocutionary force is made explicit by the verbs appearing in them (Austin 1962): (1) I (hereby) promise you to be there at five. (is a promise) (2) I (hereby) order you to be there at five. (is an order) (3) You are (hereby) ordered to report to jury duty. (is an order) (1)–(3) look and behave syntactically like declarative sentences in every way. Hence there is no grammatical basis for the once popular claim that I promise/ order spells out a ‘performative prefix’ that is silent in all other declaratives. Such an analysis, in any case, leaves unanswered the question of how illocutionary force is related to compositional meaning and, consequently, does not explain how the first person and present tense are special, so that first-person present tense forms can spell out performative prefixes, while others cannot. Minimal variations in person or tense remove the ‘performative effect’: (4) I promised you to be there at five. (is not a promise) (5) He promises to be there at five. (is not a promise) An attractive idea is that utterances of sentences like those in (1)–(3) are asser∗ The names of the authors appear in alphabetical order. 150 Condoravdi & Lauer tions, just like utterances of other declaratives, whose truth is somehow guaranteed. In one form or another, this basic strategy has been pursued by a large number of authors ever since Austin (1962) (Lemmon 1962; Hedenius 1963; Bach & Harnish 1979; Ginet 1979; Bierwisch 1980; Leech 1983; among others). One type of account attributes self-verification to meaning proper. Another type, most prominently exemplified by Bach & Harnish (1979), tries to derive the performative effect by means of an implicature-like inference that the hearer may draw based on the utterance of the explicit performative. Searle’s (1989) Challenge Searle (1989) mounts an argument against analyses of explicit performative utterances as self-verifying assertions. He takes the argument to show that an assertoric account is impossible. Instead, we take it to pose a challenge that can be met, provided one supplies the right semantics for the verbs involved. Searle’s argument is based on the following desiderata he posits for any theory of explicit performatives: (a) performative utterances are performances of the act named by the performative verb; (b) performative utterances are self-guaranteeing; (c) performative utterances achieve (a) and (b) in virtue of their literal meaning, which, in turn, ought to be based on a uniform lexical meaning of the verb across performative and reportative uses. According to Searle’s speech act theory, making a promise requires that the promiser intend to do so, and similarly for other performative verbs (the sincerity condition). It follows that no assertoric account can meet (a-c): An assertion cannot ensure that the speaker has the necessary intention. “Such an assertion does indeed commit the speaker to the existence of the intention, but the commitment to having the intention doesn’t guarantee the actual presence of the intention.” Searle (1989: 546) Hence assertoric accounts must fail on (b), and, a forteriori, on (a) and (c).1 Although Searle’s argument is valid, his premise that for truth to be guaranteed the speaker must have a particular intention is questionable. In the following, we give an assertoric account that delivers on (a-c). We aim for an 1 It should be immediately clear that inference-based accounts cannot meet (a-c) above. If the occurrence of the performative effect depends on the hearer drawing an inference, then such sentences could not be self-verifying, for the hearer may well fail to draw the inference. Performative Verbs and Performative Acts 151 account on which the assertion of the explicit performative is the performance of the act named by the performative verb. No hearer inferences are necessary. 1 Reportative and Performative Uses What is the meaning of the word order, then, so that it can have both reportative uses – as in (6) – and performative uses – as in (7)? (6) A ordered B to sign the report. (7) [A to B] I order you to sign the report now. The general strategy in this paper will be to ask what the truth conditions of reportative uses of performative verbs are, and then see what happens if these verbs are put in the first person singular present tense. The reason to start with the reportative uses is that speakers have intuitions about their truth conditions. This is not true for performative uses, because these are always true when uttered, obscuring the truth-conditional content of the declarative sentence.2 An assertion of (6) takes for granted that A presumed to have authority over B and implies that there was a communicative act from A to B. But what kind of communicative act? (7) or, in the right context, (8a-c) would suffice. (8) a. Sign the report now! b. You must sign the report now! c. I want you to sign the report now! What do these sentences have in common? We claim it is this: In the right context they commit A to a particular kind of preference for B signing the report immediately. If B accepts the utterance, he takes on a commitment to act as though he, too, prefers signing the report. If the report is co-present with A and B, he will sign it, if the report is in his office, he will leave to go there immediately, and so on. To comply with an order to p is to act as though one prefers p. One need not actually prefer it, but one has to act as if one did. The authority mentioned above amounts to this acceptance being socially or institutionally mandated. Of course, B has the option to refuse to take on this commitment, in either of two ways: (i) he can deny A’s authority, (ii) while accepting the authority, he can refuse to abide by it, thereby violating the institutional or social mandate. Crucially, in either case, (6) will still be true, as witnessed by the felicity of: 2 Szabolcsi (1982), in one of the earliest proposals for a compositional semantics of performative utterances, already pointed out the importance of reportative uses. 152 Condoravdi & Lauer (9) a. (6), but B refused to do it. b. (6), but B questioned his authority. Not even uptake by the addressee is necessary for order to be appropriate, as seen in (10) and the naturally occurring (11):3 (10) (6), but B did not hear him. (11) He ordered Kornilov to desist but either the message failed to reach the general or he ignored it.4 What is necessary is that the speaker expected uptake to happen, arguably a minimal requirement for an act to count as a communicative event. To sum up, all that is needed for (6) to be true and appropriate is that (i) there is a communicative act from A to B which commits A to a preference for B signing the report immediately and (ii) A presumes to have authority over B. The performative effect arises precisely when the utterance itself is a witness for the existential claim in (i). There are two main ingredients in the meaning of order informally outlined above: the notion of a preference, in particular a special kind of preference that guides action, and the notion of a commitment. The next two sections lay some conceptual groundwork before we spell out our analysis in section 4. 2 Representing Preferences To represent preferences that guide action, we need a way to represent preferences of different strength. Kratzer’s (1981) theory of modality is not suitable for this purpose. Suppose, for instance, that Sven desires to finish his paper and that he also wants to lie around all day, doing nothing. Modeling his preferences in the style of Kratzer, the propositions expressed by (12) and (13) would have to be part of Sven’s bouletic ordering source assigned to the actual world: (12) Sven finishes his paper. (13) Sven lies around all day, doing nothing. But then, Sven should be equally happy if he does nothing as he is if he finishes his paper. We want to be able to explain why, given his knowledge that (12) and (13) are incompatible, he works on his paper. Intuitively, it is because the preference expressed by (12) is more important than that expressed by (13). 3 We owe this observation to Lauri Karttunen. 4 https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/citd/RussianHeritage/12.NR/NR.12.html Performative Verbs and Performative Acts 153 Preference Structures Definition 1. A preference structure relative to an information state W is a pair 〈P,≤〉, where P⊆℘(W ) and ≤ is a (weak) partial order on P. We can now define a notion of consistency that is weaker than requiring that all propositions in the preference structure be compatible: Definition 2. A preference structure 〈P,≤〉 is consistent iff for any p,q ∈ P such that p∩q = / 0, either p < q or q < p. Since preference structures are defined relative to an information state W , consistency will require not only logically but also contextually incompatible propositions to be strictly ranked. For example, if W is Sven’s doxastic state, and he knows that (12) and (13) are incompatible, for a bouletic preference structure of his to be consistent it must strictly rank the two propositions. In general, bouletic preference