Page 75 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

52 Communication and Evolution of Society

fundamental claim that the speaker raises with his illocutionary
act (b). I shall be coming back to both of these classes of con-
ditions that must be fulfilled in order for speech acts to succeed.
At this point I am interested only in the fact that the comparison
between constative and nonconstative speech acts throws light on
the validity basis that manifestly underlies al] speech actions.
To be sure, this does bring out the special position of constative
speech acts. Assertions do not differ from other types of speech
actions in their performative/ propositional double structure, nor
by virtue of conditions of a generalized context, for these vary
in a typical way for all speech actions; but they do differ from
(almost) all other types of speech actions in that they prima facie
imply an unmistakable validity claim, a truth claim. It is unde-
niable that other types of speech actions also imply some validity
claim; but in determining exactly what validity claim they imply,
we seldom encounter so clear and universally recognized a valid-
ity claim as “truth’’ (in the sense of propositional truth). It is
easy to see the reason for this; the validity claim of constative
speech acts is presupposed in a certain way by speech acts of
every type. The meaning of the propositional content mentioned
in nonconstative speech acts can be made explicit through trans-
forming a sentence of propositional content, “‘that p,” into a
propositional sentence “‘p’’; and the truth claim belongs essen-
tially to the meaning of the proposition thereby expressed. Truth
claims are thus a type of validity claim built into the structure of
possible speech in general. Truth is a universal validity claim; its
universality is reflected in the double structure of speech.
Looking back, Austin assures himself of what he originally had
in mind with his contrast of constative and nonconstative speech
actions (constatives versus performatives :
)
With the constative utterances, we abstract from the illocutionary ...
aspects of the speech act, and we concentrate on the locutionary; more-
over, we use an oversimplified notion of correspondence with the
facts... We aim at the ideal of what would be right to say in all cir-
cumstances, for any purpose, to any audience, etc. Perhaps this is
sometimes realized. With the performative we attend as much as pos-
sible to the illocutionary force of the utterance, and abstract from the
dimension of correspondence with facts.8¢