Page 83 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

60 Communication. and Evolution of Society

ment on the part of the speaker. But before going into this, I
would like to mention additional reasons for the unacceptability
of illocutionary acts.
Austin developed his doctrine of ‘“‘infelicities” primarily with
a view to institutionally bound speech acts; for this reason, the
examples of ‘“‘misfires’’ (that is, of misinvocations, misexecutions,
misapplications) are [viewed as} typical for all possible cases of
rule violation. Thus the unacceptability of speech acts can stem
from transgressions of underlying norms of action. If in a wed-
ding ceremony a priest recites the prescribed marriage formula
incorrectly or not at all, the mistake lies at the same level as, let
us say, the command of a university lecturer in class to one of his
students, who can reply to him (with right, let us assume) : “You
can indeed request a favor of me, but you cannot command me.”
The conditions of acceptability are not fulfilled; but in both cases,
these conditions are defined by a given normative context. We
are looking, by contrast, for conditions of acceptability that lie
within the institutionally unbound speech act itself.
Searle analyzed the conventional presuppositions of different
types of speech actions that must be fulfilled if their illocutionary
force is to be comprehensible and acceptable. Under the title
“preparatory rules,” he specifies generalized or restricted contexts
for possible types of speech actions. A promise, for example, is
not acceptable if the following conditions, among other, are not
fulfilled: (a) H (the hearer) prefers S’s (the speaker's) doing
A (a specific action) to his not doing A, and S moreover believes
this to be the case; (b) it is not obvious to both $ and H that S
will do A in the normal course of events.®? If conventional pre-
suppositions of this kind are not fulfilled, the act of promising
is pointless, that is, the attempt by a speaker to carry out the
illocutionary act anyway makes no sense and is condemned to
failure from the outset.®?
The generalized context conditions for institutionally unbound
speech actions are to be distinguished from the conditions for
applying established norms of action.*? The two sets of conditions
of application, those for types of speech action and those for
norms of action, must vary (largely) independently of one an-
other if (institutionally unbound) speech actions are to represent