Page 67 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

44 Communication and Evolution of Society

presentations (e.g., deontic logics) represents the illocutionary
component of an utterance, is then no longer interpreted as a
specific mode of reaching understanding about propositional con-
tents but falsely as part of the information transmitted.
As opposed to this, I consider the task of universal pragmatics
to be the rational reconstruction of the double structure of speech.
Taking Austin’s theory of speech acts as my point of departure,
[in the next two sections} I would like now to make this task
more precise in relation to the problems of meaning and validity.

Universal-Pragmatic Categories of Meaning

Austin’s contrasting of locutionary and illocutionary acts set off a
broad discussion that also brought some clarification to the theory
of meaning. Austin reserved the concept meaning for the mean-
ing of sentences with propositional content, while he used the
concept force only for the illocutionary act of uttering sentences
with propositional content. This leads to the following constella-
tions:

meaning: sense and reference, locutionary act
force: attempt to reach an uptake, illocutionary act

Austin could point to the fact that sentences with the same propo-
sitional content could be uttered in speech acts of different types,
that is, with differing illocutionary force. Nevertheless, the pro-
posed distinction is unsatisfactory. If one introduces meaning
only in a linguistic sense, as sentence meaning (in which either
sentence meaning is conceived as a function of word meanings
or, with Frege, word meanings ate conceived as functions of
possible sentence meanings), the restriction to the propositional
components of speech acts is not plausible. Obviously their illo-
cutionary components also have a meaning in a linguistic sense.
In the case of an explicitly performative utterance, the performa-
tive verb employed has a lexical meaning, and the performative
sentence constructed with its help has a meaning similar in a
way to the dependent sentence with propositional content. ‘What
Austin calls the illocutionary force of an utterance is that aspect