Ep. 186: J.L. Austin on Doing Things with Words (Part Two)

0:00 Seth: He's trying to make the point in there that you can't depend on grammatical form to Identify performatives that if I'm an umpire and I yell out in the right context at the right time, indicating that throw, beat the runner to the base or whatever, I don't need to say I declare that you are out. There can be different forms of performative acts that don't necessarily rely on grammar. And that's where he introduces the concept too of like mood and emphasis. You can say out, out, out, you know, like. All of which will can influence or signal that a performative act is or is not being.

0:39 Wes: Yeah, he's looking for some criterion in grammar or vocabulary that will tell us when is someone using a performative and when aren't they. He's discovering that there is no definitive criterion like that.

0:50 Dylan: In fact, the next few chapters are versions of that. He's going to work through different cases of trying to come up with a clear criteria for performatives. The grammatical is one of them. How to, you know, coming up with a list of all possible performatives is another.

1:07 Wes: Yeah. So this chapter, the chapter six, the shift now is to seeing if we can make a list of all verbs in which there is this asymmetry which he discovered in the previous chapter. And the asymmetry is that when I say I bet, I have actually made a bet versus when I say he bets or something like that. I'm using the term descriptively.

1:28 Mark: Save the present historical, like I typically

1:30 Wes: bet for walking or something like that. For in many other cases there's no such asymmetry. It's descriptive in both cases. So I walk could be a historical present. It could be a habitual present, like I habitually take walks or something like that. But it is in any case descriptive.

1:48 Mark: It is not a performative one kind of circumstance. He distinguishes of just matching the words to an action. So you could say I hereby walk across the promenade or something, and then you walk. But that's still not a performative. Like actually saying that is not the doing of the thing.

2:03 Seth: That's actually descriptive. You're describing what you are doing, but it's not doing it.

2:07 Mark: I pompously announce that I walk. That would be performance performative.

2:12 Dylan: This is an interesting distinction. Right? So that say you were walking across the promenade, am I right? That there'd be no speech act you could make that would be performative of that.

2:22 Wes: Unless by walk we mean more than walking. Unless it actually has some ritual component to it. Right. So there could be a quote unquote walk, which is a ceremonial part ceremony for the community, which is not actually performed Unless someone says, I hereby walk and then begins the walk. But other than that, ceremonial. Unless there's a ceremonial component like that. No.

2:44 Dylan: This is a really interesting distinction because he never talks about normal verbs that are names of actions, except for these performative ones, which, in a funny way, they're performative. But there are other verbs that are also performative or feel like they are performative in that I'm doing something right, but they're not doing something. In the way he's talking about where the act is, is it connecting us with people or. It made me wonder, like, want to think about what the difference is between betting and walking. And we've been talking about how that I say I bet that's a performative act, and if I say I walk, that's not performative. But it does sure feel like when I'm walking, I'm performing something.

3:30 Mark: And yet if I make the motion like I'm in the betting pool and I just raise my hand or whatever it is, that's showing that I'm betting, that could actually be the performative I am betting without my saying anything.

3:41 Dylan: Exactly. Exactly.

3:42 Wes: Also, there are circumstances under which any assertion like I walk could be performative. Right. If there are prior circumstances where we've both agreed that you're saying I walk is the initiation of some agreement between us, then that is a performative in that.

3:57 Dylan: I know that the book isn't exactly about this, but I'm wondering, is there a way we can say what is the difference between those two kinds of action, one in which we're classifying as performative in the sense that Austin's talking about and other actions that we do that aren't speech acts.

4:15 Wes: Yeah. I think for it to be performative, this is my own thinking about it, because I don't think he makes this explicit necessarily. But the psychology of it is that we create certain expectations. The action is really an action insofar as it has affected the minds of others and created certain expectations. So when I say I promise or I do, I'm essentially making an agreement. Right. And the fact that my saying it is an action makes it an agreement is because another person hears it and expectations are created by it. So, for instance, I couldn't have committed myself to marriage if I said I do, if no one heard it.

And I couldn't break a promise if you didn't hear me promise it in the first place, because the breaking involves this violation of expectation developed in the psyche of another person. So that's my way of thinking about this. The sense in which it's an act. It's not a usual. Doesn't have a usual effect on the world like a physical effect where if I'm walking, there's a physical correlate necessarily. Although Austin does point to the fact that there's a physical element to words being emitted from your mouth and going through the air and into another person's ear.

But that's not even the sense in which it's an act. It's an act in the sense that it has a psychological effect on another.

5:33 Dylan: And maybe part of that is that psychological effect has to do with. We call them speech acts that they have to do with. With language or communication. So insofar as physical acts are also communicative acts, then they become speech acts in this way.

5:50 Wes: Yep.

5:51 Dylan: So it makes like things like handshakes and sex and why they're complicated.

5:55 Wes: Yeah.

5:56 Dylan: Much more interesting about how they're complicated. They're not merely physical acts.

6:00 Mark: I think he allows that you could say, promise something to yourself. I think that is certainly just parasitic on actual communication. And you could raise private language argument sort of issues about can you really promise to yourself? But I think that it's not obviously nonsensical to say, I promised myself I would do something, or I hereby devote myself to God. Whether you say that out loud or not and have it actually still constitute

6:26 Dylan: a promise, that would be related to integrity. Right.

6:30 Mark: And presumably, I guess in that case it's because God is supposed to be the one that's hearing you. But clearly the efficacy of the promise does not require that God actually hear you. Seth, what should we do Next?

6:44 Seth: If Lecture 5 was about trying to figure out if there's a way we can identify performative acts based on grammatical functions and so forth. Lecture six, I think we can kind of gloss in the same way. I think Wes has already touched on it that he talks about the most obvious being the explicit present indicative, singular, present indicative, active. I do this, I bet. I apologize, I wager. I promise. And then he starts to say, okay, if we focus on those kind of as the explicit ones so that we at least understand and use those as a paradigmatic case.

What are the things that go along with those types of explicit first person singular, indicative, active utterances? And he highlights mood. So these are the conditions of the speech act that are external to the grammar and the content. So there's mood, tone of voice or emphasis, adverbs and adverbial phrases. That one I didn't quite understand. Connecting particles, things that you accompany when you make the utterance, for example hand gestures or other sorts of things and of course then the circumstances of the utterance. And essentially this is if you read the Stanford article, it talks about how that this chapter is really the basis on which Searle and a bunch of these other folks, they come up with a set of criteria, the septuple, the seven conditions of a speech act.

It's based on this particular first enunciation in this chapter in Austin.

8:13 Mark: It's for determining when two speech acts are actually the same speech act even though they're obviously different words. So like I order you to go versus go. Those are the same speech act. If they have all these speeches criterion in common.

8:27 Seth: To refer back to the previous chapter, it's to say if you have an explicit and then maybe a not so explicit or whatever. If you want to say are you telling me to shut the door? Shut the door. Hey, shut the door. Hey, shut the door. It's cold in here. If you want to see if they're identical, these are the seven criteria that you could use. It's not clear that you need all of them in order to be able to establish equivalency, but he just works from the explicit form to allow you to identify than whether a non explicit form would be identical.

9:00 Mark: So I implore you to shut the door. Even though that is still the gist is still shut the door. It's not the same speech act for Searle. At least those both sound like they are in a sense the same. They involve the same command, but because they have different intensity. Different. I forget what Searle's way of categorizing this, but in this verb we have different tone of voice. It's not the same speech act.

9:23 Seth: But if I close the door in

9:26 Mark: either case, I guess that's why maybe this list of things that you just listed in Austin is actually not quite the same as Searle's that Searle is concerned with. What is the total set of criteria that determine when something is the same speech act or not. And he specifically has stuff like intensity. Whereas I think in here Austin is still trying to figure out whether a particular utterance is a performative or not as opposed to a descriptive.

9:53 Seth: Right, but I'm just saying these criteria can be used to accomplish both tasks. You can determine whether or not a non explicit is in fact can be articulated as an explicit and you can also determine whether it's performative or not. That's what this chapter gives you the criteria for those things.

10:08 Mark: Right. So the adverb is one that you mentioned is we've used the example hereby. If you could put hereby in there, then it's performative, I hereby thank you. But you can't say I hereby repent or something. Repent is a description or the parallel, I hereby apologize to you, but you can't say I hereby repent, even though those seem like they're the same thing. To apologize and to repent. Well, repent is actually a description of something you are doing. It is not a performative speech act. Page 79, which is then repeated at the beginning of lecture seven.

I found helpful just that these expressions that are overtly performative, like I apologize versus ones that are definitely just descriptive, like I repent, I feel grateful. And then there are these ones that could be performative, could not be performative. So if I say I'm grateful to you, that blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, that's. In a sense, it sounds like I'm just thanking you. But you'd have to look at the particulars of what I intended and the circumstance in which I'm saying that. Maybe I just am describing that I feel grateful by saying I am grateful.

Or maybe I'm actually doing the performative I thank you. So again, you'd have to use these little tools, like, can I say intentionally I am grateful? Or something like that. Like, no. Whereas you could thank someone intentionally, but could you be grateful intentionally? Well, I guess if you can, that means you're thanking them, but you can't feel grateful intentionally. So it's just a bunch of little tips for perhaps distinguishing in these tough cases what's the performative and what's not.

11:46 Wes: Ultimately, it fails, right? So if you look at page 91, now, we failed to find a grammatical criterion for performatives, but we thought that perhaps we could insist that every performative could be in principle put into the form of an explicit performative, and then we could make a list of performative verbs. So that's the whole point of all this, this idea that, well, maybe our test of performatives is if I can add something like hereby or something like that and make it explicit, then I know I've got a performative. I just do the test. I try and add the explicit little marker, and then it becomes a performative, and then I know it was a performative in the first place, an implicit performative.

Since then. We have found, however, that it is often not easy to be sure that even when it is apparently in explicit form, an utterance is performative or that it is not. And typically, anyway, we still have utterances beginning, I state that, which seem to satisfy the requirements of being performatives, yet which surely are the making of statements and surely are essentially true or false. So it doesn't work. That's the problem. And so it's another one of his many cases in which he's tried to find a criterion by which we can identify performatives, and it hasn't worked.

12:55 Dylan: This is going to lead him then into taking a step back to going to, well, how do we talk about saying things at all? That's going to lead into lecture eight, what we're doing in the act of saying anything.

13:08 Seth: Yes.

13:09 Wes: He says it is time to refine upon, on page 92 on the circumstances of issuing an utterance. Do we want to read any of these a things at the end?

13:18 Dylan: Or there's a summary of it in lecture eight.

13:21 Mark: We have a whole new set of vocabulary.

13:24 Dylan: If you didn't feel like you should have taken Latin by the end of this book, you feel like you should have taken Latin.

13:29 Mark: Should we just clarify the difference between. So every act, every speech act could be. These are not three different types of speech acts. These are three aspects of a particular successful speech act. The phonetic act, the phatic act, phatic act and the rhetic act.

13:45 Wes: These will be the three components ultimately of the locutionary act.

13:49 Mark: Yep.

13:50 Wes: So the phonetic act is merely the act of uttering certain noises. The phatic act is the uttering of certain vocables or words, I.e. noises of certain types belonging to and as belonging to a certain vocabulary, conforming to and as conforming to a certain grammar. The rhetic act is the performance of an act of using those vocables with a certain more or less definite sense and reference. Thus, he said the cat is on the mat in quotes reports a phatic act. Where he said that the cat was on the mat reports a rhetic act.

14:24 Mark: So rhetic, like rhetoric is the way to remember that is that you're actually the whole saying of thing is an act of rhetoric. So it's a rhetic or rhetic act, however we want to pronounce it.

14:33 Dylan: Yeah, well, in the phatic act you remember because it's utterances that are really fat with words.

14:39 Mark: I suppose.

14:40 Wes: So we have. So there's utterance in the sense of making noise. That's the phonetic. Then there's grammar, syntax. The phatic act is, which we associate with syntax, noises of a certain type. The rhetic act is what we associate with semantics having certain meaning, sense and reference, he calls it. So we have utterance syntax. Semantics are really what the three divisions amount to.

15:06 Mark: And since the rhetic act involves both sense in other words, an understandable meaning of the terms and a reference, that they actually refer to something in the real world. And that example, the present king of France is bald, not only doesn't make it to a successful illocution, it's not a performative successfully, but it doesn't even constitute a full rhetic act. Because I'm using words that you understand, I'm using them in a grammatical way. But the present king of France does not actually have a reference, so it is void before it even gets to a performative level.

15:38 Wes: It is a phonetophatic act, it is a sublocutionary.

15:44 Dylan: Anyway, we won't get on whether it has meaning without reference and it says you understand what it means, but it isn't true because there's no reference.

15:53 Mark: Yeah, I was about to joke that. So somebody posts something about the deep state conspiracy. Do I really want to say that that is sublocutionary? Because there is no such thing. Your sentences about it are false or would I probably say that? Well, no. If I look at the individual sentences that are being used here, they do refer to things. It is a rhetic act. It just happens to be a sentence that is false. Like as opposed to a non referring sentence.

16:18 Dylan: Yes. So you wouldn't say that the present king of France is bald. You wouldn't even say that it's absent a reference. You'd say that the sentence is false because the reference doesn't exist.

16:27 Wes: Well, under Russell's approach to it. Right. To say that it is false, we have to put in an existential modifier and say there exists an X such that X is. So we have to try and translated into two different assertions.

16:40 Mark: So we've outlined the locutionary act just to distinguish it then from the illocutionary act. And as I was just saying, like, it's hard to keep those quite straight that the illocution has to do with the performative aspect of it. But like was just saying, with the present king of France, it seemed like he's giving us this great tool to say why the present king of France is bald is a void act. Because I'm stating something and somehow my statement goes wrong, that just like I'm promising something. But as we just said, that's not actually for that particular example, the right

17:11 Wes: way to analyze that, according to Russell I don't know what he thinks about that, actually.

17:15 Dylan: He says, like in 99, I explained the performances of an act in this new and second sense as the performance of an elocutionary act. Performance of an act in saying something as opposed to performance of an act of saying something. I call the act performed in illocution shall refer to the doctrine of the different types of function of languages. Here is the doctrine of elocutionary forces. So I myself am repeatedly confused about the difference between elocutionary and locutionary. And the only way I could get it is that locutionary would be the act of speaking itself.

17:54 Wes: Locutionary is what you mean. It's what you literally mean by the statement. And then the illocutionary, in a way, is how you're using it. So if you go up to page 98, he gives different examples. So to determine what elocutionary act is so performed, we must determine in what way we are using the locution. And he gives a bunch of possibilities, asking or answering a question, giving someone some information or an assurance or a warning, announcing a verdict or an intention, pronouncing sentence, making an appointment or an appeal or a criticism, making identification or giving a description.

18:29 Mark: So there is a train, is a complete locutionary act if it picks out a train. But yet what am I doing with that? And why am I saying that? Am I saying it because I'm warning you that there's a train coming now and we should get out of the

18:43 Wes: way if I'm standing on the tracks and Mark says that to me, probably. And the illocutionary act is to warn

18:49 Mark: me, I promise there is a train.

18:52 Wes: He's not trying to create a scientific awareness in me of the location of that particular locomotive at time T in position X.

19:02 Mark: Eat your pudding, Wes. There's a train. Wes can only properly eat his pudding when he's in mortal danger.

19:12 Wes: I thrive on the.

19:16 Mark: And then this is all to distinguish those two things from the perlocutionary act. That is the thing that we are accomplishing and, in fact, intend to accomplish. It's not just the effect that it happens to have, but the effect that I intend to accomplish with the performative act. That sounds exactly like the performative. Let's give some examples of how those are different. They're definitely different. I'm just saying it's confusing.

19:41 Wes: So if you look on page 101, he has a good way of distinguishing all of this. So the locution, he said to Me shoot her, Meaning by shoot, shoot, and referring by her to her act B, or illocution. He urged or advised, ordered, et cetera, me to shoot her. That's the illocutionary part of that. And then the perlocution is he persuaded me to shoot her. So the perlocution concerns the actual effect. So the illocution is the way you're actually using it and intend to use it. You're trying to persuade, but to be trying to persuade is to actually be urging. Potentially you might persuade, but you might not. So you don't know if the effect will be achieved or not. But the actual effect would be the perlocution. Right.

20:23 Mark: But it is still in the intention. I want to stress that, that you could say that there's a level beyond the perlocution as to just incidental effects of what I said. So if I promise that I will be faithful to you forever, then I have this locution. I will be faithful to you forever. You understand what that means? You understand what you. I'm referring to the illocution is that I am pledging my devotion, I'm making a promise. And the perlocution is like, well, why am I doing this? Well, because I want her to love me back. Something like that. It could vary, but it's not simply to have made this pledge.

That is still the illocution. But there's something that I prolocute. There's something that I intend beyond that. And then if the effect is that she runs away in terror, that is not part of the perlocution. That was not part of the plan. I don't recall a name for that, for just other effects, any number of effects. I think he was at one point.

21:22 Dylan: Well, in the perlocution formulation, you're often referring to the thing that happened to you, the actor, as opposed to you, the actor doing something. So in the examples he gives on 102, he got me to shoot her, or he pulled me up, he checked me, as opposed to he protested against my doing it. That was the example of the illocution. And the perlocution is he pulled me up.

21:46 Mark: Which is confusing because we've now moved to he being the one that is the doer.

21:50 Dylan: Yes, exactly.

21:51 Mark: Whereas all the other examples, it's I just for convenience sake. But yeah, the object of the speech act.

21:57 Dylan: Yes, that's right. That's the way to say it.

21:59 Mark: But it's still confusing because what makes something a successful illocution is that, as we said, somebody Hear me? Or maybe, you know, I say I do in the marriage ceremony, and she has to say I do after that, and then the priest has to say something else. That all these things have to happen together, and those are yet still part of the performative aspect. They are not a perlocution.

22:21 Wes: Those are the conditions of your performative.

22:23 Dylan: So they're not part of the performative act itself. They're just the conditions on which. Whether it's a happy or unhappy performative act.

22:30 Mark: What you call the act is a little arbitrary. Like, is my just saying I do the act, or is the whole wedding ceremony the actual. If we're just considering my saying I do, is that the significant act, then? Well, what somebody says afterwards, you can say, for that act to be successful, a lot of other stuff has to happen. But if we say the whole ceremony is the act, then of course, yes, what everybody says in it is part of the act. Right. It's one long illocution, just not by one person. I guess Austin doesn't actually talk like that. Once he moves to this illocution versus perlocution versus locution. He's talking about one speaker saying one thing. He's no longer talking about the entirety of a ceremony.

23:11 Wes: So in the case of using straightforward performative, she said to me, I do is the locution. In which case I could say the illocution is, she married me. And the perlocution is, well, now I'm married.

23:22 Mark: I'm not sure.

23:25 Wes: I think that's what it would be. So the example he gives is he said to me, you can't do that illocution. He protested against my doing it. Perlocution. He pulled me up. The effect of the illocution of marrying someone is for the other person that's being married, and for everyone else, it's witnessing the marriage act.

23:44 Dylan: Well, the next chapter is all about distinguishing elocutions from prolocutions.

23:48 Mark: And a lot of it depends on what the specifics of the words involved, whether some of these words are achievement words. So that the examples that we have given. When you say here urged versus Persuaded. Well, persuaded is an achievement word, so that can't be the illocution. It's just the urged is the illocution and the perlocution is the persuaded. And there are some words that. Where there's not really a distinction between persuaded and tried to persuade, like there is in the case of persuaded. But like I tried to argue versus I argued like those are the same thing. So if my Elocution could be I argued that blah, blah, blah, blah, and then the perlocution is what the recipient was successfully argued against or something. It's not that they're convinced.

24:32 Wes: I argue that I proved or something like I demonstrated would be more of the prolocutionary.

24:36 Dylan: But let me read from the beginning of lecture nine where he sums it up, and maybe his summing up doesn't clear it up, but I'll try. He says, we distinguished a group of things we do in saying something, which together we summed up by saying we perform a locutionary act, which is roughly equivalent to uttering a certain sentence with a certain sense and reference. Reference, which again is roughly equivalent to meaning in the traditional sense. Second, we said that we also perform illocutionary acts such as informing, ordering, warning, undertaking, etc.

I.e. utterances which have a certain conventional force. Thirdly, we may also perform prolocutionary acts which we bring about or achieve by saying something, such as convincing, persuading, deterring, and even, say, surprising or misleading. Here we have three, if not more different senses or dimensions in the use of a sentence or in the use of language. All these three kinds of actions are simply, of course, as actions subject to the usual troubles and reservations about attempt, as distinct from achievement, being intentional, as distinct from being unintentional and the like.

Because per is a prefix for through or by.

25:51 Wes: When are you through? Yeah, that's.

25:53 Dylan: Yes.

25:54 Mark: Seth, what did you think of this whole? Like, was this distinction between prolocutionary and illocutionary? Did that completely make sense to you?

26:01 Seth: No, and honestly, I had to make some concessions and gloss some of the content in order to try to get enough reading done around my current schedule. And so I kind of sped by this and got towards the end part

26:13 Mark: well, so what's the value of making this distinction? I think it was because even with statements earlier on, he was saying, oh, you know, can't we distinguish constatives from performatives? By this point, he's kind of starting fresh, but with the idea that we'll really know that a constative is basically a type of performative. It's I state that blah, blah, blah, or I claim that blah, blah, blah or whatever. Where stating or claiming is a move in a language game, it's a move in conversation. A person actually says that. You can't just look at the thing that they are stating or claiming in isolation and say that's the proposition.

That's the thing that we have to analyze. No, we have to look at the actual statement of it in a situation. And so in that situation, if I state the cat is on the mat, then, well, there's the locution. The words that I say, including what they refer to, like that it's pointing at a cat. Like, if there just are no cats in the world, then that could fail as a locution. But assuming it succeeds illocution, then there's the fact that we could translate the cat is on the mat to I state the cat is on the mat. Those two things are the same for Austin.

You know, it's just really. It's making clear. Right.

27:25 Wes: An illocution could be any number of things. Right. Depending on context.

27:30 Mark: Right. I could be warning you the cat is on the mat. I could be, uh, oh, the cat

27:35 Wes: is on the mat.

27:35 Mark: Don't step on him.

27:36 Wes: Or isn't that ridiculous? Would that be an illocution?

27:40 Mark: The cat is on the mat trying

27:42 Wes: to make you laugh or I'm not sure. Yeah, I think that would be an illocutionary. If the point of it is to make a joke to make.

27:48 Mark: I don't think that's the performative, though.

27:50 Wes: That would be an illocutionary aspect to that.

27:52 Mark: Yeah, the cat is on the mat. He joked.

27:54 Dylan: Yeah. He really condenses his summary in the very beginning of 10, saying that locutionary act, which is one that has meaning, the elocutionary act has a certain force in saying something, and the prolocutionary act is the achieving of certain effects by saying something. So that aspect of intending a joke by saying the cat is on the mat, that would be the way in which it was an elocutionary act.

28:21 Mark: Well, okay, so like, I made you laugh by telling the joke. That would be a prolocutionary act. But would it also be. I passed the time by saying this. If that was my intention, you know, why am I bothering to say the cat is on the mat? And why am I bothering to make a stupid joke about the ridiculousness of the cat on the mat? It's because I'm just shooting the shit. So that's. My prolocutionary act is shooting the shit. I hereby shoot the shit. You don't say that. So it's not the illocution.

28:48 Wes: So the prolocutionary has to be non conventional. He says too. Right. So the illocutionary is conventional and the prolocutionary is non conventional. So I think we need something like effects in terms of. Oh, so. And so left or something like that.

29:01 Mark: Yeah. So I think the married then saying the prolocutionary act is I'm successfully married. That's wrong. Because that's part of the illocution. That's the convention. Yep.

29:10 Wes: Yeah. You must be right. The perlocutionary effect would be some set of behaviors that follows from that. Right. Living together and all the other stuff.

29:19 Mark: I think that might still be the preconditions for it being a felicitous utterance.

29:24 Seth: Yeah.

29:25 Wes: Well, what are the effects then of saying I do?

29:28 Mark: Because it can't just be that everybody is happy to see the wedding or something like those are not.

29:33 Wes: What are the perlocutionary non conventional effects of marriage.

29:39 Dylan: They're romantic. I can tell already.

29:42 Mark: What if I just marry you for your money? Then I get your money and it was something I intended in that. But that's not the reason people normally get married.

29:50 Dylan: Well, but now you're getting into the question of what's an authentic marriage.

29:54 Wes: Let's just stick with regular authentic marriage. Like what is the prolocutionary effect of that speech act? I do.

30:00 Mark: I just think you have to look at a particular situation. That's the whole point. If you just look at somebody saying I do, then you're only going to figure out the elocutionary stuff. You have to look at what non conventional stuff is intended by the marriage. Let's say in getting married I want to have my taxes go down. Yeah. I want to have my children not be bastards. So does that mean just the fact that I had that intent in marrying one of many numbers of intents. Maybe I don't even know what they all are. And that it is achieved by doing it. Does that mean that's the prolocutionary effect? It seems that there would be many prolocutions involved in any illocution.

30:35 Wes: I'm still confused about what.

30:37 Dylan: Can we get back to why we're making this. Why we're. I need to review why we ended up here.

30:43 Wes: Because we are now getting into the structure of any statement whatsoever, constative or performative, and we find out that they all have the performative element.

30:53 Dylan: Yeah. So this is the lever through which we get to how all statements. The distinction of constative and performative isn't as good as we had started off with. And that's because we began with performative statements and analyzing them, trying to figure out a way to identify them. Found that we failed at identifying them. So we went back to categorizing speech acts Themselves broke them down into these three categories of locution, illocution, and perlocution. And these are characteristics of speaking itself, and then found that performatives are associated with elocutionary acts, even if the distinction between elocutionary and perlocution is not so easy. And these are characters of all kinds of speaking which will get us to even what we would think of as constative speech.

31:53 Seth: Right?

31:54 Mark: Yeah. It's trying to get clear on what is it to say. Meaning is use.

31:57 Seth: Right.

31:58 Mark: That's what came out of Wittgenstein. Meaning is use. Well, use in other words, doing something with words. The title of there are lots of things you could do with words. And so if I could say, I can insult you and that's a performative, or I can put you in your place, and that is an element of the perlocution.

32:15 Seth: Right.

32:16 Mark: The fact that I successfully.

32:17 Wes: I'm not sure how this lines up exactly with meaning is use, because of course, meaning is one component of use in this. The locutionary part of it is just part, and it's distinct from the performative. Illocutionary part is not what sort of undergirds meaning. It doesn't. It's not the foundation of the locutionary. It's just a different aspect. We could have the locutionary without a particular illocutionary anything.

32:42 Mark: So what if I, because we're trying to connect this to Wittgenstein, we take his simple language. So I say slab, because we're building stuff and we have a simple language. And I want you to hand me a slab so I can put it in our construction that we're putting together. And so I say the word slab to you. Well, the locution is slab, referring to that slab. The illocution is, hey, give me that slab. And what is the perlocution again? I think maybe since I haven't defined it enough, that I would have to say, why am I playing this game? Why am I doing this with you? You know, so the perlocution is the other purposes that I have in mind in playing the game and making this move in the first place. Is that right?

33:27 Wes: I don't know. I don't.

33:28 Dylan: Isn't it building? Isn't it the aspect of building?

33:31 Mark: I think that's right. So if you say meaning is use, then what is the meaning of slab? Well, what am I using the word slab for? Well, I'm using it as a move in the building language game. And so the Meaning is just an ambiguous term. It could mean this particular slab, in other words, the reference, the sense and reference. Or it could mean the elocutionary act. Hand me the slab, the command.

Yeah.

Or it could be the meaning of the whole activity, the building.

33:58 Wes: But I think for Wittgenstein, I think it's a little different, because meaning is use in this case is that for Wittgenstein, the locutionary sense that relies on how we're actually using it. So it's the sum of its possible uses. So, for instance, instead of figuring out the meaning of slab by looking at a dictionary or coming up with particular definition or something like that, you think of it as the sum of its possible usages, the sum of its possible appearances in different contexts in a language community, let's say, or something like that.

So I'm not explaining this very clearly, but I think to say that meaning is use is to say that in the sense that philosophers have said it before, Austin, is to say that you can't simply appeal to some internal mental content. You can't appeal to an image, and you can't even appeal to a straightforward rule. You have to appeal to all of its actual possible uses the way it would appear in the language game. It's all of the moves that can be made with it, let's say. And that would be its meanings. It's a nexus of all these different possibilities.

So that would make the locutionary dependent on use. Here Austin is distinguishing the locutionary, which is just the literal meaning, from the illocutionary in the sense of use. So it's not clear to me that we can line these up in the way that we're doing right now. Maybe it's the case, but I just don't see it. I'm just saying that Austin isn't making it seem like the locutionary is dependent on the illocutionary.

35:36 Dylan: Yeah. In fact, he says something specifically like that. Page 114. We must avoid the idea that the elocutionary act is a consequence of the locutionary act, and even the idea that what is imported by the nomenclature elocutions is an additional reference to some of the consequences of the locutions. That is that to say he urged me to, is to say that he said certain words, and in addition, that he's saying them had or perhaps was intended to have some consequences or effect on me. We should not, if we were to insist, for some reason, in some sense, of going back from the illocution to the phonetic act to be going back to a minimum physical action via a chain of its consequences in the way we are supposedly going back from the death of the rabbit to the movement of the trigger finger.

The uttering of noises may be a consequence, physical of the movement of the vocal organs and the breath, etc. But the uttering of a word is not a consequence of the uttering of a noise, whether physical or otherwise. Nor is the uttering of words with a certain meaning a consequence of uttering the words, whether physical or otherwise. For that matter, even phatic and rhetic acts are not consequences, let alone physical consequences, of phonetic acts. Here he really wants to remove a certain kind of causality that we were talking about of linking these three things.

37:04 Wes: Well, this is all internal to the locutionary act though, right?

37:07 Dylan: Yes.

37:08 Wes: So now we're into the deep structure of just the locutionary act, and he's saying that they're not causally related, those three elements of the locutionary act.

37:16 Mark: Well, the aspects are not causally related. Locutionary is not causally related to the illocutionary or to the prolocutionary either. They're all just abstractions from one and the same speech act.

37:26 Wes: Right. I was saying that, but I'm not sure he's saying that here. He's still focused on just this one element. So A, A, AB and ac were all still within the locutionary and the phatic, the rhetic, and the phonetic. It's not like one is a cause of the other.

37:43 Dylan: You're saying he's making the point that while talking about the locutionary, that the other things don't derive from that.

37:50 Wes: The three things within the locutionary. The locutionary consists of these three elements, the phatic, rhetic, and phonetic. And he's saying that this internal structure of the locutionary, it doesn't work, that one thing is a consequence of the other. So it's not by uttering the words that you have a meaning. Right. There's no cause, relation, effect. Oh, I uttered the words and therefore they have that meaning. Meaning requires much more than that. But he's still not getting at the relationship between the three larger elements there, the locutionary, illocutionary.

38:23 Dylan: But that was a parallel version of what he said at the beginning of what I read, that the illocutionary is not a consequence of the locutionary.

38:30 Wes: Okay, so that's what I was.

38:32 Dylan: Similarly, that meaning is Not a consequence of.

38:35 Wes: Where does he say that?

38:36 Dylan: On page 114. We must avoid the idea that the elocutionary act is a consequence of the elocutionary act. So he started with that and ended up with this distinction that. I guess I think you're right that it's. That part is within locutionary. But it was in parallel with the trying to avoid the notion of consequences between the different kind. Well, I wanted to say kinds of locutionary acts, but that's not what it is. Between the kinds of saying that they're not causally related, that illocutionary is not causally related to.

39:08 Wes: So what I was saying. Yeah, so what he's saying here is the illocutionary act is not a consequence of locutionary act. And I'm saying also that the locutionary is not a consequence of the illocutionary.

39:22 Mark: Well, can we say that there is a hierarchy between them? And it seems like it's something like a logical entailment that if you say something that is a successful illocution, it has to also be a successful locution that at least works in a particular sentence that we looked at, that an utterance that fulfills all three of them. Although I. I think that that's just because we're looking at, like I said, an utterance that satisfies all three of them. Like what if we just have I push you down? Well, that's not a speech act at all. I achieved something by a conventional.

Well, by a non conventional way. But there was no speech act at all. What if I perform a performative, but don't use words, I wave my hand that indicates that I'm bidding on this item in an auction. And so I performed the conventional act, but there's no locution involved. Right. So there's really not even a logical entailment back and forth among the various things. Because you could have not only nonsensical sentences, you know, that are phatic acts, but are not rhetic acts, let alone elocutions. But you could have elocutions that are not locutions.

Or would you even want to call it that? Like, if it's an illocution, it has to be a speech act. Right.

40:34 Dylan: These are all categories of speech acts.

40:36 Mark: Right.

40:36 Wes: I think pushing someone down could be a speech act. So if I'm doing it as a warning to the others, there's a crowd of people and they understand that's what I'm doing.

40:46 Dylan: Yeah, we're Saying something. I want to make the distinction between speech act and saying because the speech act sounds too much like vocalizing, whereas it's easier for me to understand that I'm saying something even if I'm not speaking.

41:02 Mark: I guess I was just trying to point back to the idea of illocutionary logic. So when Searle gives these seven criteria for saying that illocution is the same as that illocution, maybe pushing somebody down could be the same illocution as some particular phrase that I utter in this particular circumstance, but that is not going to involve necessarily a locution either way. All right, so we've distinguished them. What is the. Like, he has some fairly pretentious things that he thinks are supposed to come out of this, like getting rid of the descriptive normative distinction. He just kind of throws that in there.

41:38 Wes: Yeah, but it's completely unclear the way that would follow. That's sort of aspirational stuff right at the end.

41:44 Mark: Well, I guess I just related that to his statement at the very beginning in Lecture one. He says, look, this kind of stuff is already being pushed, that not all utterances are just statements. He says, maybe ethical propositions might be meant to evince emotions. And we actually covered this. We had an episode that covered G.E. moore and Charles Leslie Stevenson. So that was in fact his view that when I say murder is bad, really, I'm saying boo murder. I'm not actually making a claim that has. That is here. This is a Austin in Lecture one. Many especially perplexing words embedded in apparently descriptive statements do not serve to indicate some specially odd additional feature in the reality reported, but to indicate, not to report the circumstances in which the statement is made, or reservations to which it is subject, or the way in which it is to be taken, and the like.

So yes, it is a great leap to say that Austin has in any way proven that moral claims are statements about somehow expressing my attitude that I'm engaging in a performative when I say this is bad, that I'm really saying, I declare this is bad. And this is bad is not a descriptive claim about the world in the way even France is a hexagon. But it's a fundamentally different kind of expression. But yeah, he just gives us hints to hear.

43:04 Dylan: Well, he says on139, maybe he's just saying this. Once we realize that what we have to study is not the sentence but the issuing of an utterance in a speech situation, there can hardly be any longer a possibility of not seeing that stating is performing an act that's a version of what we said he was going to get to, right? Is that any kind of stating is performative.

43:28 Wes: So in this idea, this is on 148, where he brings up this. By the same token, the familiar contrast of normative or evaluative as opposed to the factual is a need, like so many dichotomies, of elimination. So I think we could see that to get at that, if we want to take a certain sentence and ask whether it's factual or normative, you can see that it's more complicated than that, right? If I say the cat is on the mat, well, the locutionary part of that is factual, but the illocutionary part of that could be normative, right? I could be saying, why is the cat on the mat?

I told you not to let the cat on the mat. The cat shouldn't be on the mat. We keep the cat off the mat. So to defend them, I think it would be right to say that for any given utterance, it's not simply the case that we can say, oh, that's descriptive, or oh, that's normative. Very often those two things are melded together. And the locutionary part of it might be descriptive, but we could easily be using that utterance of a descriptive in a normative way.

44:29 Dylan: And in fact, he wants to lump in any kind of assessment of truth or falsehood as performative. So I want to link up what he says at the bottom of 142 with what he says just before section C on 149. He says, is the constative then always true or false? When a constative is confronted with the facts, we in fact appraise it in ways involving the employment of a vast array of terms which overlap with those that we use in the appraisal of performatives in real life, as opposed to the simple situations envisaged in logical theory. One cannot always answer in a simple manner whether it is true or false.

And then in C, he says, truth and falsity are not names for relations, qualities, or whatnot, but for a dimension of assessment, how the words stand in respect to satisfactoriness, to the facts, events, situations, et cetera, to which they refer. So he wants to link up our very judgment of truth and falsity with that being performative. That's the way in which, when we state something, it involves a performative act in assent and also performative act in our assessment of that in the sense that it applies. Assessment, top of 149 is where I ended.

45:46 Wes: Let me just read the whole thing over again. Fair enough, because I think you read part of it in particular. They have no unique position over the matter of being related to facts. They, being descriptive statements or constative statements, have no unique position over the matter of being related to facts in a unique way called being true or false. Because truth and falsity are, except by an artificial abstraction, which is always possible and legitimate for certain purposes, not names for relations, qualities or whatnot, but for a dimension of assessment, how the words stand in respect of satisfactoriness to the facts, events, situations, etc.

To which they refer. So, right, he's criticizing this traditional idea, you know, truth and falsity. It's a relation between the proposition and the state of affairs. And if the relation is right, let's say it's a correspondence relation, then it's true. If it's not, that's false. But so in this case, instead of that relation, what we get is truth and falsity stand for a dimension of assessment. How the words stand in respect of satisfactoriness to the facts. Yeah, I'm not entirely clear on that.

46:55 Mark: Satisfactoriness seems to imply a pragmatic element that again, is France a hexagon or not? It depends. Why you want to know when you're assessing that claim with regard to the facts, events and situations to which they refer.

47:11 Wes: Oh, I see. So he's saying that it's a relation not just to the facts, but also to situations and other factors surrounding all of that, surrounding the utterance. That makes sense.

47:21 Dylan: Yeah, because that's the parenthetical. Right, so the parenthetical is sort of the part about the facts, which he is saying is an artificial abstraction in that sort of constrained notion of truth and falsity.

47:33 Wes: Right. So if I say, okay, is it true that the cat's on the mat?

47:37 Mark: Yeah.

47:37 Wes: I could be asking about the literal truth of that locutionary part of it. But, you know, when someone makes that statement, it could mean much more. It could mean you keep letting the cat get on the mat, you have done something wrong. And in that sense, it could be literally true that the cat's on the mat. But as far as the illocutionary aspect of it, it could be false. I could be accusing someone of being careless when in fact they're not.

48:01 Mark: What I really mean is our marriage is in shambles when I say the cat is on the mat.

48:09 Seth: Yeah. So can I just make one comment about your comment, Mark? That this is pragmatic. I feel like using the term pragmatic suggests maybe something that's not entirely present there. It goes back to kind of what I was trying to say at the beginning of part one, which is the satisfactoriness is not simply a function of the internal logic and content of the utterance, in the same way that truth and falsity is for constatives, that there are other things. And it's pragmatic in the sense that it's dependent on the specific circumstances of the utterance, but that makes it not so much pragmatic as particular.

So in other words, you're never going to say of an utterance that it's satisfactory or not without understanding all the particulars of that utterance, whereas you can say of certain kinds of constatives that they are true or false without understanding the context in which they are uttered.

49:02 Mark: So it's page 144 to 145 is where he distinguishes himself from pragmatism. So bottom of 144. The truth or falsity of statements is affected by what they leave out or put in, and by their being misleading, and so on. Thus, for example, descriptions which are said to be true or false, or if you like, are statements, are surely liable to these criticisms, since they are selective and uttered for a purpose. It is essential to realize that true and false, like free and unfree, do not stand for anything simple at all, but only for a general dimension of being a right or proper thing to say, as opposed to a wrong thing.

In these circumstances, to this audience, for these purposes and with these intentions in general, we may say this. With Both statements and for example, descriptions and warnings, etc. The question can arise, granting that you had the right to warn and did warn, did state or did advise, whether you were right to state or warn or advise, not in the sense of whether it was opportune or expedient, but whether on the facts and your knowledge of the facts and the purposes for which you were speaking, and so on, this was the proper thing to say. This doctrine is quite different from much that the pragmatists have said, to the effect that the true is what works, etc.

The truth or falsity of a statement depends not merely on the meanings of words, but on what act you are performing in what circumstances. So that's all he says about pragmatism. It's totally unsatisfactory to me.

50:22 Dylan: I mean, if he's making a distinction, there seems to ride on a particular interpretation of what pragmatism is, which he doesn't enunciate at all. The last sentence. There would be a way I would have of defining pragmatism.

50:38 Mark: Right. I think he has, like, you know, something specific by William James in mind or something that he doesn't want to

50:44 Wes: agree what he's not saying. Okay, so the true is what works, kind of what's associated with James. Maybe that's too simplistic. But even if we make it more sophisticated, the true is what we would agree on at the ideal limit of inquiry. Something like that. Well, he's definitely not saying that. He's not saying either way. He's not addressing that. He's not giving us a theory of truth here. He is telling us that the truth or falsity of a statement depends not just on the locutionary aspect, but on also the illocutionary aspect. And that's not a theory of truth. That's just warning us to be attentive, not simply the literal meaning of utterances. That's all.

51:27 Dylan: I see what you're saying, Wes. So that by bringing in circumstances to make the judgment of truth or falsity a wider ground than what had been previously there doesn't make it the case that the very nature of truth and falsity is any different than it was before. It just means the landscape on which that needs to be decided is more complicated.

51:50 Wes: Yeah. I could still have, like, a correspondence theory of truth for my locutionary. My locutionary part. I could put any theory of truth on that I wanted.

51:58 Dylan: So to the extent that pragmatism includes a theory of truth, which may be up for debate.

52:04 Seth: Yeah.

52:04 Wes: You could have, like a pragmatist theory of truth and buy into Austin's thing and say that I'm going to explain the locutionary aspect of this in terms of the. Of that theory of truth. Yeah. So it's consistent. It's just that that's not what he's arguing here.

52:17 Mark: Let me give one of his examples. This is on page 144, right before the part I just read. Let us consider the question whether it is true that all snow geese migrate to Labrador, given that perhaps one maimed one sometimes fails when migrating to get quite the whole way. Faced with such problems, many have claimed with much justice that utterances such as those beginning all blah, blah, blah, are prescriptive definitions or advice to adopt a rule. But what rule? This idea arises partly through not understanding the reference of such statements, which is limited to the Known.

We cannot quite make the simple statement that the truth of statements depends on facts as distinct from knowledge of facts. Suppose that before Australia is discovered, X says all swans are white. If you later find a black swan in Australia, is X refuted? Is his statement false now? Not necessarily. He will take it back, but he could say, I wasn't talking about swans absolutely everywhere. For example, I was not making a statement about possible swans on Mars. Reference depends on knowledge at the time of utterance. That seems like a big deal.

53:17 Wes: Yeah, but it's not a theory of truth. It's a theory of people's intent when they're talking.

53:22 Dylan: Yeah. Including that in context with judging truth and falsity.

53:26 Seth: Yeah.

53:26 Wes: And I think he's right about that.

53:28 Mark: Yeah. I think it means that it under determines. So the proposition that he made. It wasn't clear just by the locution itself whether he was referring to. When you say all swans, is it all swans, every possible swan, if X is a swan, blah, blah, blah. Or is it just referring to the swans? Not that I have particularly seen. That would be kind of lame. Like, what if he's only seen two swans, but all the swans in the areas that we know about.

53:56 Seth: Yeah.

53:56 Wes: And I would go farther and I would say it's really. When you say all swans are white, you're recognizing a type, and you're recognizing a type as related to a nature, which is to say nature in the Aristotelian sense of something that tends to reproduce itself. And so there's a causal claim there. When we say something like all swans are white, our intent is not to say, you know, at every place, there conceivably is, you know, that all swans actually are white. You know, what if someone's painted one black? What if it turns out that there is a type of black swan in Australia?

The idea is that when I have observed swans here in this particular environment, there's some essence to them, let's say, and that essence tends to make them white. There's at least all things being equal, disposition to be white. That's really what's going on when we use that type of statement. Do you guys get what I'm saying there?

54:51 Dylan: I do, but it also points to the way in which a discovery could be made. Right. And how that leads to a revision of what you thought before. So you find this bird in Australia that's black and it looks so much like a swan, you wonder, well, have I discovered a black swan which could revise what you understood to be true about swans? Or it could be that it's a different kind of bird that happens to look like a swan. And that will be part of what you have to sort of figure out.

55:22 Wes: Well, the other part of it is, you know, so for Kripke, right, this was just a fixing mechanism. Right. This was a stereotype like tigers having stripes or something. And it's not actually important ultimately that that stereotype be right. The stereotype itself is not the essence that we're pointing to. So when I say all swans are white, I'm trying to give you a way to identify something for which there is an essence. I'm giving you a little fixing mechanism and may turn out that doesn't work. And that's fine in the future. We find tigers without you find some swans that are black.

And I have to revise my fixing mechanism. And it may be as simple as saying, look for these white things with long necks if you're over here in this country and do something else if you're in this country or whatever. But still we are trying to point to some singular essence. We want to say there is this type of being swan. Regardless of whether our fixer is accurate or not, there still is that entity with a shared essence.

56:19 Mark: Yeah. So if we want to put that in terms of just illocution versus locution, would it just be that?

56:26 Dylan: Do we have to?

56:27 Mark: Do we have to?

56:27 Wes: Or per locution, will you swan me?

56:30 Mark: Sorry, why are you bothering to sit to say that? It's because maybe you're a naturalist and you're explaining things to people. Or I'm explaining to a little kid, like, how do you tell whether it's a swan? Like, well, it's going to be white. It's going to make a difference what your purpose is, which illocutionary act you are performing in. I am stating or I'm advising you that swans are white. I'm warning you that swans are white. Don't get near those goddamn swans. Like that will make a difference in evaluating the truth claim of the embedded proposition. If I'm really a naturalist, then probably I'm trying to say something about the essence of swans or something like as you're saying. And maybe I could discover that's wrong. But if I'm just trying to warn you, then maybe that works just fine. Just like France is a hexagon.

57:16 Wes: Depending on context, it can work just fine in either case. But yeah, I get what you're saying.

57:21 Mark: All right. Anything last we want to do to relate this to our lives, we're going to do it next time. We're actually going to be able to bring in speech acts a little bit. Let's not anticipate, because next time we are finally going to talk about freedom of speech. So we're going to follow up explicitly on our John Stuart Mill on freedom of speech, freedom of thought episode by reading some other selections on that topic. So maybe I would advise people to look at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on freedom of speech because those are the sort of arguments I think we're trying to follow around the articles. In particular, there's one by John Milton, the classical one even before Mill, but then modern things by Stanley Fish and Joel Feinberg and potentially some other things.

58:03 Wes: So we are going to marry Austin to freedom of speech. To Mill, to get our free speech episode.

58:11 Mark: I pronounce them married. Oh, I don't have the authority to do that. How infelicitous.

58:17 Wes: What was your guys general emotional reaction

58:20 Dylan: to this book and to Austin?

58:22 Wes: How was it to read it?

58:23 Dylan: Yeah, I found it laborious in a kind of typical way. It was just hard work to pay attention to it sufficiently to understand all the distinctions he was making. And I was very, very grateful for his summaries at the beginning of each section. I just got the meat of it more and more. But when I would get into the middle of a lot of the lectures, I found that this is just so nerdy I can hardly stand it. I felt myself sort of appreciating it from afar. Like in that respect I could recognize that he was just going really just going deep on it. And when I felt like he was going to be making distinctions that didn't make any difference at all, I felt like, well, okay, I see where you're going with that.

59:11 Wes: Yeah. On the first go around you feel like you're constantly in the weeds.

59:14 Dylan: Then you get the summary at the beginning of the next lecture.

59:16 Wes: Yeah, yeah, right. And then that helps. And then when I went back through it just to take notes, I'm like, okay, well this is more straightforward than it felt. When you just try and sketch the high level structure of the argument, it's easier than the feeling of constantly being in the weeds when you read it the first time.

59:31 Dylan: So it's definitely in the weeds.

59:33 Seth: It also has most of the times when we read a version of something that's the lecture version of it, like, oh, here's the book. And then here's the kind of lecture version that was given at some university or some popular. The lecture is much easier to understand and. But his rhetorical style is so filled with invented words and asides and tangents and that sort of thing. It is laborious to read and it shouldn't be, considering. I mean, I can only imagine what it was like to sit there and try to listen to this. If you read it out loud, how

1:00:06 Dylan: many people were still there on the 12th lecture? That's what I want to know.

1:00:10 Mark: It is funny. So I read the first lecture and then I was like, you know, guys, this is going to be easy. We can get through the whole book. And then even myself just even getting in the second lecture, I'm like, no, I just ground my speed, went way down. And it just gets worse. The last couple were sheer torture.

1:00:24 Seth: Yeah. I don't recall if I read this or not. I certainly read Sense and Sensibilia and a couple of his other things articles. I don't remember if I read this, but if you read this and the Stanford. The unfortunately, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry is written by somebody who seems to have inherited the rhetorical style from him. It's pretty terribly written of Austin or Speech Acts. Austin. The Speech Acts entry is horrible. But you do get the context of what, in my mind, lots of people wasted their time and energy on in the 20th century in philosophy.

And you'll get a strong sense of what a small subsegment of our peers were worried about back in the 1980s and 1990s when they were studying philosophy of language. You know, I gotta say, in that sense, I feel like I have a better picture of the overall problem statement than I, you know, did way back when. The idea that, like, hey, guess what? There aren't just propositions that assert claims about the world. There's other ways that we use language. Wow, okay. That's a winning discovery to happen finally in the 20th century. I have a feeling that other disciplines may have had a head start on philosophy and going through that.

1:01:37 Mark: So in Frege, he had the idea that you have the same proposition, but it can have different moods. So you could say the cat is on the mat is an indicative, a statement, or put the cat on the mat. So basically, the cat is on the mat is still the propositional content. Or it could be, is the cat on the mat? So, like, there was treatment and he had in his symbolization different ways of treating the same proposition with different moods. So that was the earlier version of this. It's not that, you know, nobody realized things could be done in different ways, but you still have in that treatment by Frege, it's Like, the statement is the primary thing, and then there are different external to that ways of handling it.

It doesn't kind of impinge on the content of the statement at all. There's just the statement and the way it is presented. And I think one of the things that Austin is trying to do here is to break down that division.

1:02:25 Wes: It's not that people didn't understand that you just can't treat everything literally as if it, you know, we understand that the way we're using language is complicated. I think philosophers felt the purposes of thinking about truth and falsity, they felt fine with doing the abstraction thing and saying, okay, I just want to think about the propositional content and the way it corresponds to the world. And I'm sure linguists can think about all that other stuff. But this is what I want to do as a philosopher. So I'm just trying to think about now the importance of dragging that stuff in.

What does it actually do for you? If you're a traditional philosopher still trying to think about semantics and syntax and reference and meaning and all of those things, you could just say, well, I just want to concentrate on the locutionary. Excuse me. And that other stuff is, again, is great for linguists, but that's what I want to do. And I'm not sure what the answer to that kind of rebuttal. For me, it was a pleasure. I mean, it was laborious to get through it, but it was a pleasure to have my attention drawn to the performatives and speech acts.

And I think that, as we'll see when we get to our next free speech discussion, there are important implications that can be used, especially, I think, in political philosophy. It's important to be paying attention to that stuff. But I'm not sure. I still don't know, purely because I haven't had enough time to think about it. But how someone who simply was thinking about reference and meaning and truth conditions, how it would change their. Change what they're doing. Exactly.

1:03:55 Mark: It's a different paradigm. Those old people just have to die off. They won't be convinced. Any last thoughts?

1:04:04 Seth: Happy to be back.

1:04:05 Mark: Yay, Seth.

1:04:06 Wes: Welcome back.

1:04:06 Dylan: It's great to have you on, Seth.

1:04:08 Mark: All right, folks should go and tell us what they think of this episode on our blog, partiallyexaminedlife.com or join our Facebook group. Like our Facebook page. Follow us on Twitter. There are many ways of reaching out to us pel@partiallyexaminedlife.com and we'd of course, really appreciate if you use itunes or stitcher or something. Go on that platform and give us a nice rating or review. We haven't gotten a lot of those in a while. We always would like to hear from you in whatever way you see fit to reach out. Finally, our closing song, fittingly, is the Promise, recorded by when In Rome in 1987, I interviewed Clive Farrington, the primary singer songwriter, on Nakedly Examined Music, episode 40. Check that out@nakedlyexaminedmusic.com thanks and good night.

1:04:53 Wes: Good night.

1:04:53 Dylan: Good night.

1:04:54 Seth: Good night.

1:05:17 Mark: If you need a friend

don't look

to a stranger you know in the

1:05:27 Wes: end I'll always be there.

1:05:33 Mark: And when you're in doubt

1:05:37 Seth: and when

1:05:38 Mark: you're in danger Take a look all

around and I'll be there. I'm sorry but I'm just thinking of the ride I know they don't sound the way I plan them to be around the while I'll make it for me at this moment I promise you I will.

When your day is through and so

is your temple you know what to

do

I'm going to always be blood.

Sometimes if I shout

1:06:30 Seth: it's not what's

1:06:32 Mark: intended

These words just come out

with no pride Too bad I'm sorry but I'm just thinking of the rhyme I know they don't sound the way I planned them to be but if you wait around a while I'll make you fold me I promise, I promise you I'm sorry but I'm just thinking of the right words to say I know they don't sound the way I planned them to be and if I had to walk the world that make you fall for me I promise you I promise you Climb sa. I'm sorry but I'm just thinking of the ride was just so promise I know they don't sound the way I planned them to be but if you wait around a while I'll make it for me I promise I promise you I'm sorry but I just thinking I'll be right words to say I know they don't sound the way I planned them to be and if I have to walk the world and make it for me I promise you I promise you I will,

I will,

I will.