Page 21 - Oswald Ducrot, Slovenian Lectures, Digitalna knjižnica/Digital Library, Dissertationes 6
P. 21
Lecture I
to be more radical than Bally’s since the subjective aspect of meaning, that
is the illocutionary force, is not at all a representation of reality, not even
a representation of a psychological reality. It is used to constitute the act
which the speaker performs as he speaks. So, in the conception of the phi-
losophers of language and in particular, of speech-act philosophers, the
subjective aspect completely loses its informative aspect or character. But,
after the little pause we are going to have now, I am going to try to show that
this conception of speech-acts nevertheless gives too important a role to de-
scription. Indeed, for Searle, there is a whole part of meaning, that is the
propositional content, which is a pure description of the world and which
can be described in truth-conditional terms. Well, I am going to try to show
you that in fact, that propositional content is purely and simply an illusion.
I am going to try to show that there is nothing – I stress: nothing – in mean-
ing which is a description of reality. That is what I am going to do in a mo-
ment, if I have the courage to do so.
***
Let me begin by giving you the gist of what I was saying a moment ago.
I said that language like all social institutions and like all social activity de-
velops an image of itself. That image is to be found in that part of the vo-
cabulary which is about linguistic activity, for example words like mean or
meaning. It seems to me that one of the major tasks for a linguist is to criti-
cize that image which language gives of itself and particularly, to criticize the
conception of meaning which language develops in, so to say, a spontaneous
way. That spontaneous conception of meaning consists in thinking that the
fundamental function of our utterances is to provide information on reali-
ty and, consequently, that the semantic value of sentences consists in truth-
conditions: to describe a sentence semantically is to say under what condi-
tions it is true or false. I tried to show that this informative or truth-condi-
tional or pseudo-logical conception of meaning had been regularly questioned,
especially, in a Cartesian perspective, by the Port-Royal grammarians or by
Bally and also by English or American speech-act philosophers; but, to my
mind, their criticism is not radical enough. I am not going to go into speech-
act philosophy any further. Let me just remind you, however, that in Searles’s
formulation, it consists in saying that the meaning of every utterance is made
up of two parts: a propositional content and an illocutionary force applied
to that content (the illocutionary force is the type of act which in speaking,
the speaker makes himself out to be performing: an order, an affirmation,
a promise, and so on). What I reproach speech-act philosophy for is that
to be more radical than Bally’s since the subjective aspect of meaning, that
is the illocutionary force, is not at all a representation of reality, not even
a representation of a psychological reality. It is used to constitute the act
which the speaker performs as he speaks. So, in the conception of the phi-
losophers of language and in particular, of speech-act philosophers, the
subjective aspect completely loses its informative aspect or character. But,
after the little pause we are going to have now, I am going to try to show that
this conception of speech-acts nevertheless gives too important a role to de-
scription. Indeed, for Searle, there is a whole part of meaning, that is the
propositional content, which is a pure description of the world and which
can be described in truth-conditional terms. Well, I am going to try to show
you that in fact, that propositional content is purely and simply an illusion.
I am going to try to show that there is nothing – I stress: nothing – in mean-
ing which is a description of reality. That is what I am going to do in a mo-
ment, if I have the courage to do so.
***
Let me begin by giving you the gist of what I was saying a moment ago.
I said that language like all social institutions and like all social activity de-
velops an image of itself. That image is to be found in that part of the vo-
cabulary which is about linguistic activity, for example words like mean or
meaning. It seems to me that one of the major tasks for a linguist is to criti-
cize that image which language gives of itself and particularly, to criticize the
conception of meaning which language develops in, so to say, a spontaneous
way. That spontaneous conception of meaning consists in thinking that the
fundamental function of our utterances is to provide information on reali-
ty and, consequently, that the semantic value of sentences consists in truth-
conditions: to describe a sentence semantically is to say under what condi-
tions it is true or false. I tried to show that this informative or truth-condi-
tional or pseudo-logical conception of meaning had been regularly questioned,
especially, in a Cartesian perspective, by the Port-Royal grammarians or by
Bally and also by English or American speech-act philosophers; but, to my
mind, their criticism is not radical enough. I am not going to go into speech-
act philosophy any further. Let me just remind you, however, that in Searles’s
formulation, it consists in saying that the meaning of every utterance is made
up of two parts: a propositional content and an illocutionary force applied
to that content (the illocutionary force is the type of act which in speaking,
the speaker makes himself out to be performing: an order, an affirmation,
a promise, and so on). What I reproach speech-act philosophy for is that
