Speech_Act_Theory.pdf
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a tax on foreign currency transactions, however, that has attracted the greatest attention. As a means of raising the cost of speculative transactions, levying a “Tobin tax” would “throw some sand in the wheels of our excessively efficient international money markets” (p. 154)—a pro- posal that is similar in practice and in purpose to the long- standing policy of levying stamp duty on the buying and selling of British property and shares. By contrast, those who believe that speculation is pre- dominantly a stabilizing market influence continue to advocate for less market intervention. The theoretical and policy debates persist with no clear agreement in sight. SEE ALSO Bubbles; Efficient Market Hypothesis; Finance; Financial Instability Hypothesis; Keynes, John Maynard; Manias; Panics; Stability in Economics; Tobin, James BIBLIOGRAPHY Davidson, Paul. 1998. Volatile Financial Markets and the Speculator. Economic Issues 3 (2): 1–18. Dornbusch, Rudiger. 1976. Expectations and Exchange Rate Dynamics. Journal of Political Economy 84(6): 1161–1176. Flood, Robert P., and Peter M. Garber. 1980. Market Fundamentals versus Price-Level Bubbles: The First Tests. Journal of Political Economy 88 (4): 745–770. Friedman, Milton. 1953. The Case for Flexible Exchange Rates. In Essays in Positive Economics, 157–203. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kaldor, Nicholas. 1939. Speculation and Economic Stability. Review of Economic Studies 7 (1): 1–27. Keynes, John Maynard. 1936. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Reprinted in vol. VII of The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, eds. Donald Moggridge and Elizabeth Johnson. London: Macmillan, 1974. Kindleberger, Charles P. 2001. Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises. 4th ed. New York: Wiley. Minsky, Hyman. 1982. The Financial Instability Hypothesis: Capitalistic Processes and the Behavior of the Economy. In Financial Crises: Theory, History, and Policy, eds. Charles P. Kindleberger and Jean-Pierre Laffargue, 13–39. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. Spotton Visano, Brenda. 2006. Financial Crises: Socio-economic Causes and Institutional Context. London: Routledge. Tobin, James. 1978. A Proposal for International Monetary Reform. Eastern Economic Journal 4 (3–4): 153–159. Brenda Spotton Visano SPECULATIVE FICTION SEE Science Fiction. SPECULATIVE MOTIVE SEE Money, Demand for. SPEECH ACT THEORY Although the reflection on the performative dimension of language can arguably be traced back to the Sophists (Corax of Syracuse, Tisias, Gorgias, Protagoras, and Isocrates) of the fifth century BCE and their (lost) treatises on rhetoric and argumentation, it is John L. Austin (1911–1960) who usually is credited with being the first philosopher to systematically address this question. In his postmortem book titled How to Do Things with Words (1975), Austin showed that language can be used not only to describe states of affairs (as in This kitchen is very clean), but also to do things (in this case, to note that this kitchen is very clean). More specifically, Austin named the type of action a person performs in saying something an illocu- tionary act. For instance, in saying Come here! in specific contexts, I can be said to be giving my interlocutor an order, which is an illocutionary act. This act can also have consequences, such as my making my interlocutor come when I say Come here! Austin named this type of action a perlocutionary act, which is an act that comprises the intentional or nonintentional consequences that result from the illocutionary act. Although Austin provided a detailed classification of speech acts, it is John R. Searle who developed the most thorough systematization of this theory of language (Searle 1969, 1979; Searle and Vanderveken 1985; Vanderveken 1990–1991). Searle identified five different types of illocutionary acts, which he called assertives (i.e., holding something to be true, as in This kitchen is very clean), commissives (i.e., committing oneself, as in I’ll be there), directives (i.e., getting someone to do something, as in Come here!), expressives (i.e., expressing a psychological state vis-à-vis something that was done previously, as in Sorry for stepping on your toes), and declarations (i.e., trans- forming the world by making it conform to the proposi- tional content, as in I hereby declare that the session is open). Searle also identified what he called indirect speech acts, which correspond to the speech acts by which one says more than what is literally said. For instance, when I say Would you mind bringing me this chair? I am literally ask- ing my interlocutor if she is willing to bring me a chair. Searle calls this type of literal speech act a secondary illocu- tionary act by which a primary illocutionary act (or indi- rect speech act) is performed. In this case, the indirect speech act consists of (politely) asking my interlocutor to bring me a chair. Several critiques have, of course, been addressed to this theory. For instance, Stephen C. Levinson (1981, Speculative Fiction 56 INTERNATIONAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, 2ND EDITION
Transcript of Speech_Act_Theory.pdf
a tax on foreign currency transactions, however, that hasattracted the greatest attention. As a means of raising thecost of speculative transactions, levying a “Tobin tax”would “throw some sand in the wheels of our excessivelyefficient international money markets” (p. 154)—a pro-posal that is similar in practice and in purpose to the long-standing policy of levying stamp duty on the buying andselling of British property and shares.
By contrast, those who believe that speculation is pre-dominantly a stabilizing market influence continue toadvocate for less market intervention. The theoretical andpolicy debates persist with no clear agreement in sight.
SEE ALSO Bubbles; Efficient Market Hypothesis; Finance;Financial Instability Hypothesis; Keynes, JohnMaynard; Manias; Panics; Stability in Economics;Tobin, James
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Davidson, Paul. 1998. Volatile Financial Markets and theSpeculator. Economic Issues 3 (2): 1–18.
Dornbusch, Rudiger. 1976. Expectations and Exchange RateDynamics. Journal of Political Economy 84(6): 1161–1176.
Flood, Robert P., and Peter M. Garber. 1980. MarketFundamentals versus Price-Level Bubbles: The First Tests.Journal of Political Economy 88 (4): 745–770.
Friedman, Milton. 1953. The Case for Flexible Exchange Rates.In Essays in Positive Economics, 157–203. Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press.
Kaldor, Nicholas. 1939. Speculation and Economic Stability.Review of Economic Studies 7 (1): 1–27.
Keynes, John Maynard. 1936. The General Theory ofEmployment, Interest, and Money. Reprinted in vol. VII ofThe Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, eds. DonaldMoggridge and Elizabeth Johnson. London: Macmillan,1974.
Kindleberger, Charles P. 2001. Manias, Panics, and Crashes: AHistory of Financial Crises. 4th ed. New York: Wiley.
Minsky, Hyman. 1982. The Financial Instability Hypothesis:Capitalistic Processes and the Behavior of the Economy. InFinancial Crises: Theory, History, and Policy, eds. Charles P.Kindleberger and Jean-Pierre Laffargue, 13–39. Cambridge,U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Spotton Visano, Brenda. 2006. Financial Crises: Socio-economicCauses and Institutional Context. London: Routledge.
Tobin, James. 1978. A Proposal for International MonetaryReform. Eastern Economic Journal 4 (3–4): 153–159.
Brenda Spotton Visano
SPECULATIVE FICTIONSEE Science Fiction.
SPECULATIVE MOTIVESEE Money, Demand for.
SPEECH ACT THEORYAlthough the reflection on the performative dimension oflanguage can arguably be traced back to the Sophists(Corax of Syracuse, Tisias, Gorgias, Protagoras, andIsocrates) of the fifth century BCE and their (lost) treatiseson rhetoric and argumentation, it is John L. Austin(1911–1960) who usually is credited with being the firstphilosopher to systematically address this question. In hispostmortem book titled How to Do Things with Words(1975), Austin showed that language can be used not onlyto describe states of affairs (as in This kitchen is very clean),but also to do things (in this case, to note that this kitchenis very clean). More specifically, Austin named the type ofaction a person performs in saying something an illocu-tionary act. For instance, in saying Come here! in specificcontexts, I can be said to be giving my interlocutor anorder, which is an illocutionary act. This act can also haveconsequences, such as my making my interlocutor comewhen I say Come here! Austin named this type of action aperlocutionary act, which is an act that comprises theintentional or nonintentional consequences that resultfrom the illocutionary act.
Although Austin provided a detailed classification ofspeech acts, it is John R. Searle who developed the mostthorough systematization of this theory of language(Searle 1969, 1979; Searle and Vanderveken 1985;Vanderveken 1990–1991). Searle identified five differenttypes of illocutionary acts, which he called assertives (i.e.,holding something to be true, as in This kitchen is veryclean), commissives (i.e., committing oneself, as in I’ll bethere), directives (i.e., getting someone to do something, asin Come here!), expressives (i.e., expressing a psychologicalstate vis-à-vis something that was done previously, as inSorry for stepping on your toes), and declarations (i.e., trans-forming the world by making it conform to the proposi-tional content, as in I hereby declare that the session is open).Searle also identified what he called indirect speech acts,which correspond to the speech acts by which one saysmore than what is literally said. For instance, when I sayWould you mind bringing me this chair? I am literally ask-ing my interlocutor if she is willing to bring me a chair.Searle calls this type of literal speech act a secondary illocu-tionary act by which a primary illocutionary act (or indi-rect speech act) is performed. In this case, the indirectspeech act consists of (politely) asking my interlocutor tobring me a chair.
Several critiques have, of course, been addressed tothis theory. For instance, Stephen C. Levinson (1981,
Speculative Fiction
56 INTERNATIONAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES , 2ND EDITION
1983), Marina Sbisà (1984, 1987, 2002), and Emanuel A.Schegloff (1988) deplore that the orthodox speech acttheory fails to capture the complexity and sequential char-acter of human interaction, which, at first sight, rendersits use relatively sterile to people interested in the detailedstudy of interaction (but see Cooren 2000, 2005; Geis1995; Jacobs 1989; Sanders 1987; van Rees 1992).Another critique, coming from Jacques Derrida (1988),consists of highlighting the iterable character of speechacts, that is, their capacity of being repeated (or iterated)in a potentially infinite number of contexts. According toDerrida, this iterability undermines the identificationmade by Searle between what a speaker/writer means andthe type of speech acts he or she produces (a monologismalso denounced by Sbisà). According to this perspective,what the producer of a given speech act means is some-thing that is conventionally reconstructed a posteriori bythe participants and not something that defines a prioriwhat a given speech act will count as. This reflection pavesthe way for a model of speech acts that would take intoaccount the speech agency of things as diverse as docu-ments, as in This announcement invites a bid for the con-struction of their building, where we attribute to a text theaction of inviting; or spoken words, as in His words blessedtheir union, where the focus is on the agency of pro-nounced words (Cooren 2004).
SEE ALSO Communication; Psycholinguistics
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Austin, John L. 1975. How to Do Things with Words. 2nd ed.Eds. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà. Oxford: ClarendonPress. (Orig. pub. 1962).
Cooren, François. 2000. The Organizing Property ofCommunication. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Cooren, François. 2004. Textual Agency: How Texts Do Thingsin Organizational Settings. Organization 11 (3): 373–393.
Cooren, François. 2005. The Contribution of Speech ActTheory to the Analysis of Conversation: How Pre-sequencesWork. In Handbook of Language and Social Interaction, eds.Kristine L. Fitch and Robert E. Sanders, 21–40. Mahwah,NJ: Erlbaum.
Derrida, Jacques. 1988. Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: NorthwesternUniversity Press.
Geis, Michael L. 1995. Speech Acts and ConversationalInteraction. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Jacobs, Scott. 1989. Speech Acts and Arguments. Argumentation3 (4): 345–365.
Levinson, Stephen C. 1981. The Essential Inadequacies ofSpeech Act Models of Dialogue. In Possibilities andLimitations of Pragmatics: Proceedings of the Conference onPragmatics, Urbino, July 8–14, 1979, eds. Herman Parret,Marina Sbisà, and Jef Verschueren, 473–492. Amsterdam:John Benjamins.
Levinson, Stephen C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge, U.K.:Cambridge University Press.
Sanders, Robert E. 1987. Cognitive Foundations of CalculatedSpeech: Controlling Understandings in Conversation andPersuasion. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Sbisà, Marina. 1984. On Illocutionary Types. Journal ofPragmatics 8 (1): 93–112.
Sbisà, Marina. 1987. Speech Acts and Context Change. InProcess Linguistics, eds. Thomas T. Ballmer and WolfgangWildgen, 252–279. Tübingen, West Germany: MaxNiemeyer Verlag.
Sbisà, Marina. 2002. Speech Acts in Context. Language andCommunication 22 (4): 421–436.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1988. Presequences and Indirection:Applying Speech Act Theory to Ordinary Conversation.Journal of Pragmatics 12 (1): 55–62.
Searle, John R. 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy ofLanguage. London: Cambridge University Press.
Searle, John R. 1979. Expression and Meaning: Studies in theTheory of Speech Acts. Cambridge, U.K.: CambridgeUniversity Press.
Searle, John R., and Daniel Vanderveken. 1985. Foundations ofIllocutionary Logic. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UniversityPress.
Vanderveken, Daniel. 1990–1991. Meaning and Speech Acts. 2vols. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
van Rees, M. Agnès. 1992. The Adequacy of Speech Act Theoryfor Explaining Conversational Phenomena: A Response toSome Conversation Analytical Critics. Journal of Pragmatics17 (1): 31–47.
François Cooren
SPEED OFADJUSTMENTSEE Flexibility.
SPENCER, HERBERT1820–1903
Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) was a nineteenth-centuryEnglish social philosopher who sought to explain alldomains of the universe in terms of some “cardinal” or“first principles” of evolution. He termed his approach“synthetic philosophy,” and before he was done he wrotetreatises on ethics (1851, 1892–1898), psychology(1855), biology (1864–1867), and, eventually, sociology(1874–1896). He also wrote a major work on methodol-ogy in the social sciences (1873) that was far superior toanything written at the time, and he commissioned the
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Spencer, Herbert
