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Chapter 8
Speech Acts and Pragmatics
Kent Bach
At the beginning of How to Do Things with Words, J. L. Austin bemoaned the
common philosophical pretense that ‘‘the business of a [sentence] can only be to
‘describe’ some state of affairs, or to ‘state some fact,’ which it must do either truly
or falsely’’(1962: 1). He observed that there are many uses of language which
have the linguistic appearance of fact-stating but are really quite different. Explicit
performatives like ‘‘You’re fired’’ and ‘‘I quit’’ are not used to make mere state-
ments. And the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations, rebelling against
his former self, swapped the picture metaphor for the tool metaphor and came to
think of language not as a system of representation but as a system of devices for
engaging in various sorts of social activity; hence, ‘‘the meaning of a word is its use
in the language’’(1953: sec. 43, p. 20).
Here Wittgenstein went too far, for there is good reason to separate the theory
of linguistic meaning (semantics) from the theory of language use (pragmatics),
not that they are unconnected. We can distinguish sentences, considered in ab-
straction from their use, and the acts that speakers (or writers) perform in using
them. We can distinguish what sentences mean from what speakers mean in using
them. Whereas Wittgenstein adopted a decidedly anti-theoretical stance toward
the whole subject, Austin developed a systematic, though largely taxonomic,
theory of language use. And Paul Grice developed a conception of meaning
which, though tied to use, enforced a distinction between what linguistic expres-
sions mean and what speakers mean in using them.
A early but excellent illustration of the importance of this distinction is provided
by Moore’s paradox (so-called by Wittgenstein 1953: 190). If you say, ‘‘Tomatoes
are fruits but I