A genuine speech act is a speech act whose sincerity condition and whose further felicity conditions are actually fulfilled in performance. It is the non-defective form of the speech act — and thus the contrasting concept to the defective AI speech act.
The Sincerity Condition
John R. Searle (Speech Acts, 1969, ch. 2–3) identifies, among the constitutive rules of the speech act, the sincerity condition: whoever makes an assertion pretends to believe what he says; whoever makes a promise pretends to have the intention to fulfil it. A speech act is genuine when the speaker actually has the expressed psychic state — when the pretending is no mere pretending.
The genuine speech act thus does not differ from the defective one by its outward form. A grammatically faultless, situationally apt sentence can be a defective speech act as soon as the speaker does not hold the expressed state. The difference lies not in the output, but in the bearer.
Presupposition: Original Intentionality
The genuine speech act requires original intentionality on the speaker’s part: an act in the first person that is of itself directed at a state of affairs and is not first made directed by an interpreter. Whoever sincerely asserts must be able really to hold the asserted state of affairs to be true — and this presupposes a bearer that is originally intentional.
It is precisely here that the boundary with artificial intelligence runs. An AI system produces strings of signs that have the form of a speech act without holding an expressed psychic state. Its utterances rest on derived intentionality — they are directed because a human interpreter reads them as directed, not because the system of itself means anything. The genuine speech act and the defective AI speech act are mutually exclusive: no AI output can be a genuine speech act so long as the system lacks original intentionality.
Relation to the Truthful Statement
The genuine speech act is the speech-act-theoretic side of what is described in terms of content as a truthful statement: the sincerity condition does not demand that what is said be true, but that the speaker hold it to be true and stand by it. Truthfulness is the agreement of what is said and what is meant; it is possible only for a bearer that can mean anything at all.
Ontological Classification
- is a form of: Speech Act
- presupposes: original intentionality
- contrasting concept: defective AI speech act
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Searle, John R. (1969): Speech Acts. An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Searle, John R. (1979): Expression and Meaning. Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.