This chapter deals with some of the different senses that the term ‘intention’ has in pragmatics, and the way they are related to each other. I shall begin by distinguishing one employment of the term, which belongs to our folk psychological practices of understanding actions in terms of reasons, from a more technical use, related to the aboutness of language. After a brief historical sketch, I describe the intentional approach to pragmatics as an attempt to account for the intentionality of language (its aboutness) in terms of intentional action. I will do so by explaining the basic tenets of two very influential proposals: the Gricean theory of conversation and speech act theory. This chapter finishes with a review of contemporary debates on the foundations of pragmatics where intentions have a predominant role to play.
Download Free PDF View PDF
Lodz Papers in Pragmatics, 6:1, 145-70.
What makes a speech act a speech act? Which are its necessary and sufficient conditions? I claim in this paper that we cannot find an answer to those questions in Austin’s doctrine of the infelicities, since some infelicities take place in fully committing speech acts, whereas others prevent the utterance from being considered as a speech act at all. With this qualification in mind, I argue against the idea that intentions—considered as mental states accomplishing a causal role in the performance of the act— should be considered among the necessary conditions of speech acts. I would thus like to deny a merely ‘symptomatic’ account of intentions, according to which we could never make anything but fallible hypotheses about the effective occurrence of any speech act. I propose an alternative ‘criterial’ account of the role of intentions in speech acts theory, and analyse Austin’s and Searle’s approaches in the light of this Wittgensteinian concept. Whether we consider, with Austin, that speech acts ‘imply’ mental states or, with Searle, that they ‘express’ them, we could only make sense of this idea if we considered utterances as criteria for intentions, and not as alleged behavioural effects of hidden mental causes. Keywords: speech act theory, intention, speech action, Moore’s paradox
Download Free PDF View PDF
Journal of Philosophical Investigations 24
This paper argues that a language can exist and flourish in a community even if none of of the members of the community has any communication intentions; and that reference to the notion of communication intention can therefore be dispensed with in the core account of the nature of linguistic meaning. Certainly one cannot elucidate the notion of linguistic meaning without reference to psychological notions; the communication-intention theorists are right about this. They are, however, wrong about which psychological notions are needed. It is not possession of the ability to (intentionally) mean something that is crucial—the possession and exercise of communication intentions. What is crucial is rather the possession of certain semantic psychological attitudes. To possess such semantic psychological attitudes (semantic attitudes for short) is to be disposed to take certain publicly observable phenomena—such as sights and sounds—as (non-naturally) meaning something. The paper argues that it is possible to describe circumstances in which one can in so doing be said to understand their meaning.
Download Free PDF View PDF
Global Journal of Research in Humanities & Cultural Studies
Language is a tool for communication among humans. A study of speech act is essentially immersed in language use and interpretation. Participants of discourse convey their feelings, ideas and messages by skillfully using language according to contexts and situations. In this regard, speech acts are used to inform, persuade, describe and perform other intentional acts. This paper examines speech acts in terms of critical perspectives in the literature. After the pioneering work of Austin (cf. 1962), the study of “speech acts as actions” became popularized. This development informed classical and contemporary insights in the literature, resulting in speech act theories and taxonomies such as those of Searle (1969), Grice (1975), Bach and Harnish (1979), Adgbija (1982), Mey (2001), among others. This study concludes that speech acts are rule-governed, context-driven, universal and establish the link between pragmatics and semantics.
Download Free PDF View PDF
Dialogue and Universalism, 1, 2013, 129-142.
The paper reconstructs and discusses three different approaches to the study of speech acts: (i) the intentionalist approach, according to which most illocutionary acts are to be analysed as utterances made with the Gricean communicative intentions, (ii) the institutionalist approach, which is based on the idea of illocutions as institutional acts constituted by systems of collectively accepted rules, and (iii) the interactionalist approach, the main tenet of which is that performing illocutionary acts consists in making conventional moves in accordance with patterns of social interaction. It is claimed that, first, each of the discussed approaches presupposes a different account of the nature and structure of illocutionary acts, and, second, all those approaches result from one-sided interpretations of Austin’s conception of verbal action. The first part of the paper reconstructs Austin's views on the functions and effects of felicitous illocutionary acts. The second part reconstructs and considers three different research developments in the post-Austinian speech act theory—the intentionalist approach, the institutionalist approach, and the interactionalist approach.
Download Free PDF View PDF
Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics
