Mind b Language Vol. I No.

1 Spring 1986

ISSN 0268-1064 @ Bnsil Blnckruell

Forum 2. Is Philosophy of Language Empirical?

HERBERT 3. CLARK

Is philosophy of language empirical? That is, should philosophers of language be held accountable for matters of fact? The answer is, I suggest, sometimes yes and sometimes no: it depends on the issue. No one answer applies to all philosophy of language. It is a mistake to think one should. How should we approach this question? One way is to ask philosophers themselves, though I am sceptical of this method. People arent very perceptive about what they see in the mirror, and philosophers surely suffer from this affliction as much as anyone else. Yet philosophy, like other disciplines, is an activity people engage in, so another method is to look at what the people who engage in it actually do. This will be my tack as I examine one important province in philosophy of language, the theory of speech acts. As a brief reminder, the modern study of speech acts began approximately with H. Paul Grices papers on natural and nonnatural meaning, utterers meaning, and intentions, and with John Austins work on illocutionary acts, principally his book How to do things with words. These beginnings have been followed by the work of, among others, Peter Strawson, John Searle, Jonathan Cohen, Stephen Schiffer, David Lewis, Zen0 Vendler, Robert Stalnaker, Kent Bach, and Robert Harnish. Here I have named only philosophers, though on almost every issue they have been joined by linguists, psychologists, computer scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, and literary critics. Everyone, it seems, wants to get into the act. What have these philosophers done? One thing, clearly, is carry out empirical research and make empirical claims. Here are a few examples:
(1) Austins interest was in wh& people actually do with words and how. Through introspection, he examined in detail what made baptisms, bequests, and marriage vows felicitous, and he proposed such empirical generalizations as, There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect..., and The procedure must be executed by all participants

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both correctly and completely. Since Austin, investigators both inside and outside philosophy have assumed these claims to be empirical, argued about their validity, and revised them as the evidence warranted. (2) Austin devoted lecture 12 of How to do things with words to the empirical exercise of classifying illocutionary acts. (Recall his five categories: verdictives, exercitives, commissives, behabitives, and expositives.) In 1975 Searle took exception to Austins categories theoretically and empirically and proposed five categories of his own. In 1979 Bach and Harnish revised and filled out Searles scheme. All along, however, investigators from linguistics to sociology have debated the empirical adequacy of these schemes. (3) Many features of these classifications were based on linguistic and psychological evidence - that is, matters of fact. Austin appealed to the special character of performatiye utterances. Searle in section IV of his 1975 taxonomy paper used facts about [illocutionary] verbs for evidence and illustration and in section V appealed to the syntactic structure of performative utterances. Bach and Harnish argued for their speech act scheme with both linguistic and psychological evidence. (4)In Searles first paper on indirect illocutionary acts, he cited eight facts about their form from which he derived four empirical generalizations, drawing tacitly on linguistic work by Gordon and Lakoff, Herringer, and others. He appealed to these facts and generalizations as evidence for his account of indirect illocutionary acts in terms of Gricean implicatures. Bach and Harnish took much the same tack in their own account of indirect illocutionary acts. (5) Grice, in proposing the cooperative principle with its four maxims, appealed time and again to empirical evidence for support. His proposals have since been debated by philosophers, linguists, psychologists, and anthropologists both theoretically and empirically. (6) Every philosopher I have mentioned has appealed to intuitions about what one can and cannot say, what one can and cannot do with words. These appeals are empirical and no different from those made by linguists in their analyses of English, Thai, or Kannada.

None of this should be surprising. From Grice and Austin on, theories of speech acts have been theories of what people can actually do with words. They have not been about what people could conceivably do, or about what extra-terrestrials might do. They could have been that, much as theories of formal languages and automata are theories of conceivable languages. For speech acts at least, philosophers have presupposed that facts matter. The problem, as always, is to show how facts matter. With speech acts, most empirical claims have been about the products of speaking (e.g.,

Forum: Philosophy and Psychology

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utterances, illocutionary acts, word uses) and not about the processes that yielded them ( e g , formulating and issuing utterances, selecting illocutionary acts, choosing words). As a result, evidence for these claims has come more often from linguists than from psychologists simply because language products are more often studied by linguists, and language processes by psychologists. Yet, I would argue, evidence about language processes still counts, indirect though it may be. What speakers produce is necessarily constrained by the processes by which they produce what they produce, so theories of language products must ultimately be constrained by theories of language processes. To picture philosophy of language as immune from empirical evidence is therefore a distortion of fact. The issue, rather, is what facts matter and how.

Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305-2099