Page 79 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

56 Communication and Evolution of Society

tions, they are part of a cognitive use of speech. Whether those
involved were right to utter certain warnings or pieces of advice
in a given situation, depends in this case on the truth of the
corresponding predictions. As part of an interactive use of speech,
warnings and pieces of advice can also have a normative meaning.
Then the right to issue certain warnings and advice depends on
whether the presupposed norms to which they refer are valid
(that is, are intersubjectively recognized) or not (and, at a next
stage, ought or ought not to be valid). But most types of speech
action can be more clearly attached to a single mode of language
use. Whether an estimate is good or bad clearly depends on the
truth of a corresponding statement; estimates usually appear in
the cognitive use of language. On the other hand, whether the
verdict of a court, the reprimand of a person, or the command
of a superior to a subordinate with regard to certain behavior are
justly pronounced, deservedly issued, or rightfully given depends
just as clearly on whether a recognized norm has been correctly
applied to a given case (or whether the right norm has been
applied to the case). Legal verdicts, reprimands, and orders can
only be part of an interactive use of language. Austin himself
once considered the objection that different validity claims are
at work in these cases:

Allowing that, in declaring the accused guilty, you have reached your
verdict properly and in good faith, it still remains to ask whether the
verdict was just, or fair. Allowing that you had the right to reprimand
him as you did, and that you have acted without malice, one can still
ask whether your reprimand was deserved ... There is one thing that
people will be particularly tempted to bring up as an objection against
any comparison between this second kind of criticism and the kind
appropriate to statements, and that is this: aren’t these questions about
something’s being good, or just, or fair, or deserved entirely distinct
from questions of truth and falsehood? That, surely, is a very simple
black-and-white business: either the utterance corresponds to the facts
or it doesn’t, and that’s that.9°
In comprehending the universal validity claim of truth in the
same class with a host of particular evaluative criteria, Austin
obliterated the distinction between the clear-cut universal validity
claims of propositional truth and normative rightness (and truth-