Meaning, intention, and application: Speech act theory in the hermeneutics of Francis Watson and Kevin J. Vanhoozer

Trinity Journal, Fall 2002 by Blue, Scott A

There is no "behind" to speech acts, and hence no inferences to be made from speech acts to some claim concerning some aspect of reality. Rather, we are led to an examination of the speaker's intention.52

It is my contention that those advocating the use of speech act theory to defend authorial intention and a stable text, including Watson and Vanhoozer, functionally agree with Harris in order to move beyond the difficulties associated with a merely linguistic approach to language and communication.

Vanhoozer points out that postmodern critics initially attacked the authority of the author by first undermining the notion of Platonic realism, that linguistic signs correspond to some reality outside of themselves.53 It is here where the nonrealists such as Jaques Derrida, Stanley Fish, and Richard Rorty make inroads in their quest to banish authorial intention. There is, in their estimation, no corresponding reality outside of linguistic signs. Signs mean something, because we give them meaning. For those confronting postmodernists, two options are thus available: continue the debate over linguistic signs, the author, and meaning or move beyond linguistics by changing the field of debate. Watson and Vanhoozer take the second option by pointing out that postmodern interpreters have overlooked Austin's distinction between locutions, which deal with signs, and illocutions, which emphasize language as a communicative action.54 Searle, upon whom Watson and Vanhoozer depend, notes this same difference:

All linguistic communication involves linguistic acts. The unit of linguistic communication is not, as has generally been supposed, the symbol, word or sentence, or even the token of the symbol, word or sentence, but rather the production or issuance of the symbol or word or sentence in the performance of the speech act. . . . More precisely, the production or issuance of a sentence token under certain conditions is a speech act, and speech acts ... are the basic or minimal units of linguistic communication.55

So Watson's insistence that "a series of words must be construed as a communicative action which intends a determinate meaning together with its particular illocutionary and perlocutionary force"56 and Vanhoozer's blended approach, which views communication "as the action that puts a language system into motion at a particular point in time by realizing certain possibilities offered by the code,"57 both move beyond a mere linguistic approach, incorporate the notion that language is a communicative act, and shift the playing field on the issue of authorial intent.

C. Language as a Communicative Act

Underlying Watson and Vanhoozer's emphasis on language as a communicative act is their dependence upon Searle's work in the area of speech acts. In his book, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language, Searle attempts "to provide us with the beginning of a theory of speech acts."58 In essence, he builds upon the foundation laid by Austin's How to Do Things With Words, yet moves the discussion forward.59 Searle understands speaking a language as the performance of speech acts. In particular, these acts include "making statements, giving commands, asking questions, making promises, and so on."60 Crucial for both Vanhoozer and Watson is the idea that speech act theory is a means of rescuing both meaning and its locale in the intent of an author. For Searle, there is no dichotomy between the study of the meaning of a sentence and the study of the performance of speech acts. Meaning is inextricably tied to the illocutionary act: "The speech act or acts performed in the utterance of a sentence are in general a function of the meaning of a sentence."61 He furthermore concludes, "Properly construed, they are the same study."62 In addition, Searle indicates meaning is determined irrespective of the perlocutionary act. For Searle, "Saying something and meaning it is a matter of intending to perform an illocutionary act."63