Page 240 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

217 Notes

71. S. Kanngiesser, ““Aspekte zur Semancik und Pragmatik,” in Lin-
guistische Berichte 24 (1973) :1-28, here p. 5.
72. Wunderlich, Grundlagen, pp. 337 ff.
73. Cf. the schema in footnote 2 above.
74. I. Dornbach, Primatenkommunikation (Frankfurt, 1975). On the
relatively early differentiation of different types of speech action in the
linguistic development of the child, see the pioneering dissertation of M.
Miller, “Die Logik der frithen Sprachentwicklung” (Univ. of Frankfurt,
1975).
75. In a letter to me, G. Grewendorf cites the following counterex-
ample: signing a contract, petition, etc. while simultaneously objectifying
the corresponding illocutionary act. But only the following alternative
seems possible: either the contract signing is legally carried out with the
help of a performative utterance—in which case there is no objectifica-
tion—or the nonverbal contract signing is accompanied by a statement:
“S signs contract X”’—in which case it is a question of two independent
illocutionary acts carried out parallelly (where normally there is a division
of roles: the statesman signs, the reporter reports the signing).
76. L. J. Cohen, “Do Illocutionary Forces Exist?,” p. 587.
77. W.P. Alston, “Meaning and Use,” in Rosenberg and Travis, Read-
ings, p. 412: “I can find no cases in which sameness of meaning does not
hang on sameness of illocutionary act.”
78. For ontogenetic studies, a combination of a Piagetian theory of
meaning for the cognitive schemata developed in connection with manip-
ulated objects {cf. H. G. Furth, Piaget and Knowledge (Englewood Cliffs,
N.J., 1969)] and a Meadian theory of meaning for the concepts de-
veloped in connection with interactions [cf. Arbeitsgruppe Bielefelder
Soziologen, eds., Alltagswissen, Interaktion und gesellschaftliche Wirk-
lichkeit, 2 vols. (Hamburg, 1973) } seems promising to me.
79. B. Richards argues against this in “Searle on Meaning and Speech
Acts,” Foundations of Language 7 (1971) :536: “Austin argued that sen-
tences such as Ra (I promise that I shall pay within one year) never
assert anything that is either true or false, i.e., never assert propositions.
Here we agree; but this in no way upsets the claim that Ra nevertheless
expresses a proposition ... viz. the proposition that Ra.” Richards does
not equate the propositional content of the speech action, Ra, with the
propositional content of the dependent sentence: “I shall pay within one
year,” but with the content of the objectified speech action Ra, which
must, however, then be embedded in a further speech action, Rv; for
example, “I tell you, I promised him that I shall pay within one year.”
I regard the confusion of performative sentences with propositionally ob-
jectified sentences as a category mistake (which, incidentally, diminishes
the value of Richards argument against Searle’s principle of expressibility,
in particular against his proposal to analyze the meaning of speech ac-
tions in standard form in terms of the meaning of the sentences used in
the speech acts).