The two utterances "I walk to the store" and "I promise to walk to the store" contain the same propositional content, but the second has also an illocutionary force, (Searle) placing it into the category of illocutionary acts. I will show that within the correct context, utterances such as "I walk to the store" are also illocutionary acts. This leads to action verbs such as 'walk,' 'jump,' and 'sit' as performative verbs. The correct context is a purely text medium, where all interaction, whether it be spoken utterances, body language, or other physical movement is transmitted through text. Not only do the words hook up with the world, they are the world here. I am not arguing that Searle, Austin, and Vendler have been incorrect in their theories, indeed I shall use them to argue my points, but rather that word usage changes in these textual media forcing action verbs to be used performatively.
A general description of this media is necessary to begin with as it is a foreign concept to most. I will refer to this text medium as a textual reality, which is a virtual reality expressed completely and only through text. Textual realities are unique to the Internet, and I will try to describe one in a manner appropriate for my later points. Imagine for a moment a large room with several blindfolded people inside the room. These people are told to interact with each other and with the room as if they were not blindfolded. The room is unfurnished at the outset, but the nature of this room is that if one of the blindfolded participants vocally announces an intention to do something requiring an object, the object will instantly appear. For example, if one of the blindfoldees says "I sit down," and proceeds to sit, there will be a chair. You now have a group of people announcing every significant action of theirs; such as "I walk across the room towards the North corner," "I get a drink at the bar," etcetera. The dialog produced might resemble something like this:
Rose sighs and curls up very small on the couch
Pix goes over and offers rose a hug
Faithful goes over to Rose and offers her a lap to curl up in
Gryph steps up on the soapbox
MaxCat listens to Gryph.
This excerpt of conversation is, of course, from a conversation in a textual reality. This specific textual reality is IRC, or Internet Relay Chat, where people worldwide are able to talk and interact, through text, synchronously.
There is a duality of language in textual realities that participants exploit to use action verbs as illocutionary verbs. In textual realities, language is used both to speak and to interact with the world. Observing the room of blindfolded people, no one would argue that their announcements performed any actions. It is as likely that they would say things such as "I'm walking northwest" or "I'm sitting down now," using the gerund to describe their actions, not perform them. The common perception of the participants in textual realities is that, separate from the human at the keyboard, the person, there is also a persona that exists solely in the textual reality. This separation is the origin of the duality: the persona is both a channel for the human to communicate through and a character in its own right, saying and performing things in its own reality. The human saying (typing) the utterance is not necessarily performing an illocutionary act with an action verb, though he or she could be performing a traditional illocutionary act such as promising. For the persona, however, the utterance of an action verb is an illocutionary act. Within the limited reality of the personae, there is no difference between the uttering and the doing of an action. Parallel to invalidly claiming that "I didn't promise, I only said I promised," one cannot cancel an action "only said" in a textual reality.
Before continuing, we must make two significant adjustments to our own perception of what speech acts consist of in textual realities, in the senses of what they consist of, and to what they refer. On the first point, we see that merely phonetic acts, utterances of sound without meaning, rarely occur. Due to the abbreviated nature of any medium where people are trying to communicate at the speed of spoken communication without the benefit of voice or body language, participants do not waste time typing in merely phonetic acts. Merely phonetic acts do occur as errors either in the system or as typographical errors of the participants, however. Most apparently phonetic acts, after analysis, connect with some meaning and are therefore also phatic acts. Due to the loss of some extra-linguistic, and all nonlinguistic parts of communication, participants go out of their way to express what would normally be conveyed through these channels. Non-conversational implicature, for example, is produced through the actions of the personae and phatic acts. We encounter the second difficulty with rhetic acts. Rhetic acts are phatic acts that refer to something, but in a purely textual reality, what do they refer to? The reference of rhetic acts can be the text itself, some object that the human perceives outside of the textual reality, or also some 'object' within the textual. The references we concern ourselves with are those which allow personae to perform illocutionary acts with action verbs. These references are the last in the series-the 'imagined' objects within the virtual reality. These objects are no more real than Pegasus or Odysseus, but they are neither any less real. The theories of Frege and Strawson for referring offer the best model for textual realities, that these utterances lack a truth value. I add to this that they lack a truth value only outside of their context. Within the textual reality of The Odyssey, there is a difference between what is true and what is not. Odysseus either did or did not sleep on the shore, and within the context a one can assign truth value. This truth value does not connect to the rest of the world, however, because outside of the fiction there is nothing referred to. To follow Russell and say that the personae do not directly denote anything when they refer seems incorrect for the same reason-I would not have used Odysseus as an example if Homer had not written down The Odyssey. The personae, then, do have some object to refer to when they utter rhetic acts, if only within their textual reality. The nature of the existence of the persona itself remains unclear. Is a persona more real than a fictional character because of its link to a human being, merely a channel for the human to communicate through, or on the same level as Hamlet, a source of paradox? A last ditch answer links the existence of the persona to the sum of its utterances and its name as represented in the text located in computer memories worldwide. This fails to capture the closeness of the persona to the person, however. This paper assumes that personae exist and have truth values as much as the objects they refer to do. Even more than in normal conversation, the words in textual realities are not only part of the world but are the world. As such, both the personae and the objects are verisimilous, real within the context of their textual reality. This is the most difficult assumption of the paper, and I will return to it at the end. I also initially assume that personae, not the humans at the keyboards, perform the speech and illocutionary acts, though they may link in with the human, though I will later challenge this assumption.
The persona, performs acts such as walking, drinking, or grinning by expressing them through language within the context of a textual reality, and thereby performing illocutionary acts by making specific changes in their world. The criteria of Zeno Vendler for perfomative verbs support this assertion. Vendler requires that that a verb fulfill two of his three criteria to be considered in perfomative form. The criteria are that to say "I 'V,'" (where V is the verb in question), is to V, by saying "I 'V,'" the speaker 'V's, and to say "I hereby 'V'" yields a meaningful and grammatical sentence. Participants in textual realities rarely, if at all use the 'hereby' form (in 1334 pages of text, it was not used once). Moreover, it would not yield, a sensible sentence to utter "I hereby walk to the other side of the room" when one could more quickly utter simply "I walk to the other side of the room" to the same effect. That the other two Vendler criteria are fulfilled, is all that is required. By saying "I walk (to the other side of the room)" is to walk, and the persona walks. This leads us to accepting action verbs as perfomative verbs.
This first view is a naive way to look at personae. There is a puppet master, the human at the keyboard, for these personae. The persona does not itself utter "I 'V,'" but rather is only the avenue through which the human communicates. The human utters "I 'V,'" but does not personally V. The persona Vs, but is not the origin of the utterance "I 'V.'" One can analyze the entire situation of the human typing and the persona performing as simply the human issuing commands, a common illocutionary act in both Austin and Searle's taxonomies. This recovers the standard position of action verbs not being illocutionary acts and describes events within textual realities. The commands of the human at the keyboard are normal illocutionary acts, and the target of the commands is, by its very nature, forced to comply and carry out commands exactly as uttered. The persona, then, does not perform an illocutionary act but rather carry out a command given as a normal illocutionary act.
However, this neither fully describes the situation in textual realities. The commands to the persona, if expanded, are be commands to oneself. The grammar is "/me V." The '/' indicates to the computer that what follows is a command. It translates into English as "Computer, I command," 'me' is command, named for users to easily understand, and 'V' is the action. A command translated into English would read "Computer, I command myself to 'V.'" This is an unusual statement to utter, and indicates that there is an odd relationship between the person and the persona. I argue that the commands of the human to the persona cannot be analyzed separately as illocutionary acts if one is investigating the utterances of the persona. The utterances of the persona are too closely linked with the utterances of the human to be analyzed separately-neither the utterance nor the action of the persona would exist without the other; the human would not type in "/me walks" if there was not a persona which was going to walk in its textual reality. Language is the nervous system for the persona. One does not say "Arm, pick up the pen," but rather unconsciously uses nerves to perform that action. The keyboard likewise carries text signals, albeit consciously, to the persona. That may be a very strong assertion, but the connection between the person and the persona should not be underestimated. For an actor, who in his role (his persona, if you will), promises some future act, we would not say that he has broken his promise if he does not perform it outside of his role, for he did not non-defectively make it. However, in textual realities, promises the persona makes do apply to the human at the keyboard. One cannot say "My persona swore to, but my human did not" (Euripides, in Austin, 122). We see this here:
WolfOne breaks a promise to himself, right now
KosherHam: Uh, Wolfie, what promise...?
WolfOne: I promised myself two weeks ago I wouldn't listen to Metallica anymore
We must also remember that other participants in the conversation (within the textual reality) do not have any sense of the humans typing or giving commands. The only things evident to the other participants, and, indeed, in all records of events, are the actions of the personae performed with action verbs. Further, it is possible to have programs which act freely, without constant human interference. These programs have no one typing their commands at a keyboard, yet can interact with the other personae using action verbs. What else could these action verbs be but illocutionary acts? Take for example, this fragment:
Woscoe hands Max a small herring.
MaxCat sniffs the small herring.
MaxCat thanks Woscoe, and eats the small herring.
Woscoe sniffs at Kath's sandwich and wonders why he just has these herrings.
Woscoe tosses Max a small herring.
MaxCat catches the small herring.
MaxCat thanks Woscoe, but he is still eating the small herring.
MaxCat will save the small herring for later.
Kath tosses Woscoe a turkey club sandwich.
Woscoe grins and chows down.
MaxCat finishes eating the small herring.
MaxCat jumps from the floor onto Woscoe's lap and starts purring louder.
It is not immediately obvious which MaxCat is the program who has been made to respond (here, as a virtual cat) to other personae in a verisimilitudinous fashion. MaxCat is similar to the sign warning of danger that Austin discusses (125) which performs an illocutionary act, despite its being an inanimate object. This seems to prove that illocutionary acts are performable using action verbs in textual realities-not only is the utterance of the human inseparable from the persona actions, there are cases when there is no human utterance at all; all that exists is the action verb, which performs an act within the textual reality.
We unfortunately still have not entirely described the situations that we find in textual realities, so we must continue to adapt our theory. We now must reduce the permissibility of illocutionary acts performed which we just finished arguing for, because there is contradictory evidence. In this fragment we see a persona reporting on the actions of the human:
NJBill: "Come of think of it, coffee is an excellent idea"
NJBill will BRB [BRB is an abbreviation of "be right back"]
Gryph has already had his 2 cups
NJBill is back, coffee in hand (well, in cup, actually)
This is a description of what the human is doing, and it is common practice in textual realities for the participants to communicate some of the actions of the human at the keyboard, especially when these activities effect their participation, such as anything involving being away from the keyboard. The form of the description is the same those forms the persona uses to perform illocutionary acts. Is it possible, then, that what we have interpreted as illocutionary acts before are nothing more than a condensed grammar which actually were nothing more than descriptions? This is a seductive view. It explains the apparently illocutionary acts with action verbs as only a description, incorporates the normal view of illocutionary acts used as commands to the computer by the human, and allows for interactions between personae and their virtual environment. It also explains samples of text such as this one below, where Dafydd does not perceive his utterance as performing the action, and adds on two phatic acts1 to perform the act.
Dafydd blows a raspberry at Geoff . :-p phthp phthp phthp phthp...
Geoff would blow a raspberry back, but his tongue is ceramic. :)
The text now is a narrative produced simultaneously by many authors. It is a work of public fiction, where each participant is in control of one character (excepting unusual circumstances) of whom they pull the puppet strings. This view explains as well the lack of the use of the 'hereby' form from Vendler's criteria-the personae are like characters in a book, whom the author is describing their actions for the reader. Characters in books do not perform illocutionary acts when the author writes "Jones walks to the corner store on for a cup of coffee," rather, the author is describing Jones' actions. The author would not use "Jones hereby walks..." in such a description, as it would be ungrammatical. Personae occasionally describe the actions of the humans at the keyboard because it is not the persona, but rather the human who is speaking, switching from describing the actions of his persona to describing his own actions. The conjecture that what we have argued for as illocutionary acts are only descriptions is also supported by the use of other personae in one persona's description, in that characters can interact with others without their immediate consent, as seen here, though XmasCarol does give consent on her turn:
Pix dashes back in, grabs Carol, twirls her around then leans over and kisses her throughly [sic]
XmasCarol faints, overwhelmed by Pixel's kiss
Indeed, seeing all action in textual realities as description is powerful in the scope of what it explains more fully than the previous hypotheses presented.
We began the last section on description by saying that we would only uncover some of the illocutionary acts as descriptions, but we ended up seeing all such uses of action verbs turn out to be descriptions. However, the existence of descriptions is not a contradictory position to the original argument, and we can recover it still. Vendler's criteria require that only two of the three sentences must yield truthful and meaningful phrases. Certainly it is odd that the 'hereby' form goes unused, but it is also odd that we are considering action verbs candidates for illocutionary acts at all. The lack of 'hereby' is likely an artifact of the generally abbreviated discourse that is inherent in textual realities. Moreover, descriptions are passive events. Some actions performed in the textual reality interact with and even change the reality. Back to the book example, the descriptions the author gives to the reader can change the reader's perception of the 'reality' within the book. However, when one includes that the events can come off in unexpected and disadvantageous fashions for the performer, by no fault of the performer, we realize that it cannot be only description. The environment does not necessarily respond cooperatively to some utterances. Events such as these would not happen if the participants were merely describing their world all the time. Instead, personae are also interacting with it through illocutionary acts, which use action verbs.
Key in that last sentence is the use of 'also.' The argument for descriptions is such that it also was not fully negated. The best description of utterances of action verbs in textual realities employs both descriptions and illocutionary acts.
How does one distinguish between descriptions and illocutionary acts in textual realities if they both exist and take the same form? The participants are intuitively able to follow the switching because they are part of the textual reality. This intuition leads us to a rule to distinguish between the two. A basic distinction is to find to what an utterance involving an action verb involving the persona refers. If it is to some object outside of the textual reality then it is necessarily a description. This so because outside of textual realities, action verbs cannot be used performatively. Any action verb referring to the outside world will be used to describe what the human is doing, but cannot itself perform the action Otherwise, the action verb is not certainly a description and therefore a candidate for an illocutionary act. It remains possible that it is the human merely describing the actions of the persona, not intending it to be performative, as in the above raspberry example. If an utterance interacts with the environment or other personae, it changes the textual reality as an illocutionary act in real life changes reality-the utterance perfoms an act, and is therefore an illocutionary act. This needs further explanation to fully delineate what utterances are descriptions and which illocutionary acts, however. If the utterance is indisputable by other personae because it does not interact with them nor the shared textual reality, it has an automatic truth value of true within that reality. By merit of its lack of interaction, the utterance does not contradict anything, and only contributes to the environment passively. Utterances with automatically true truth values within the reality are descriptions of what the persona is doing. These do not happen often because few utterances are so resistant to actions of other personae. If Jones uttered "I sit down in the chair," Smith, interacting with Jones in a textual reality, could say "...but I remove the chair and you hit the floor," and others would accept this as what happened. Jones could have uttered "I'm sitting in the chair, smoking a cigar," and Smith would be unable to pull the chair out from behind him, because Jones had described his persona, not acted something out with it. Utterances with non-guaranteed truth values, true or false, and sentences with undetermined or mutable truth values which use action verbs, are therefore illocutionary acts within the textual reality.
If one remains skeptical about letting action verbs come under the umbrella of illocutionary verbs, even in only textual realities, take comfort in the assumptions underlying this paper. Remember that most of these illocutionary acts are on the same level of reality as Pegasus and Odysseus. They are fictional, virtual constructs with only some real-life implications under some circumstances. Some of these constructs partake of reality by being represented with data on computers defining what they are. For this paper, I assumed a stance of accepting these various constructs as "real in the context," and this view allowed us to delineate between what is merely description and what is an illocutionary act, but accepting this idea of "real in context" is certainly debatable.
I hope to have shown at least two things. First, if we accept that the personae and their environment are real in their context, it is certain that we have cases of action verbs validly in perfomative form. Secondly, even if we reject "real in context," there remain cases where action verbs perform some computer function merely by being uttered. They change some aspect of the information about a textual reality as stored in a computer. The action verb itself is not perhaps illocutionary, but an illocutionary act is nevertheless performed; the human is obliquely commanding the computer to change its data, using an action verb to do so.
The most straightforward approach is to accept action verbs as valid for illocutionary acts only when in a strictly textual reality, but this requires accepting that there are truth values in this context that do not translate to the outside world. If this is too unpalatable, we can still see a peculiar occurrence when action verbs are spoken in the perfomative form, and an illocutionary act happens, but is separate from the action verb.
1 I include here the sideways 'smiley- face' [ :-p , :) ] as a phatic act as it consists of marks, conveys meaning, and is uttered with a meaning in mind.
All rights reserved on my works. Do not use without prior authorization. For licensing/usage of the material, please contact me.
| email: | (my name) (`at') G r i f f J o n (`.dot')c o m |
|---|---|
| PGP | PGP Key |
| efax: | 1.925.666.3613 |
| IM | |
| ICQ: | 16386214 |
| Y! MSN AIM | GriffJon
|
| Web | |
| /. | #14945 |
| LJ: | LiveJournal |
| Flikr: | Photos |