The speech act is the linguistic enactment that does not merely describe or communicate but does something: asserting, promising, asking, warning, baptising, forgiving. The concept goes back to John L. Austin (How to Do Things with Words, 1962) and John R. Searle (Speech Acts, 1969) and is one of the most influential concepts of analytic philosophy of language.
Austin’s Three Act-Dimensions
According to Austin, every utterance is simultaneously:
- Locutionary act — saying something meaningful (a sequence of sounds with meaning)
- Illocutionary act — in saying something, doing it: asserting, asking, promising, commanding
- Perlocutionary act — by saying something, bringing about an effect: convincing, frightening, consoling
Austin’s central point is the disclosure of performatives: statements such as “I promise”, “I baptise”, “I dismiss you” are not descriptions but enactments. In place of the truth/falsehood condition come felicity conditions — the conditions under which the enactment succeeds.
Searle’s Sincerity Condition
Searle systematises Austin. Speech acts follow constitutive rules (analogous to the rules of chess), not merely regulative ones. The central condition of every assertive speech act is the sincerity condition: whoever asserts that p thereby expresses the belief that p. Whoever does this without the belief lies — which presupposes the speech-act type parasitically. A lie is conceptually an assertive speech act under violation of the sincerity condition.
In Expression and Meaning (1979) Searle classifies five types of speech act:
| Type | Example | Sincerity condition |
|---|---|---|
| Assertive | ”p is the case” | belief in p |
| Directive | ”Do p!“ | desire for p |
| Commissive | ”I promise p” | intention to p |
| Expressive | ”I thank you” | feeling towards p |
| Declarative | ”Hereby opened” | (institutional power) |
Genuine and Defective Speech Act
A speech act is called genuine when its sincerity condition and its further felicity conditions are fulfilled in the enactment. It is called defective (Searle’s own term) when the conditions are structurally or situationally unfulfillable — fictional, parasitic, mechanical. The lie is defective through violation despite fulfillability; the LLM output is defective through structural unfulfillability: in the model there is no subject that could have a psychic state or carry an intention.
Cf. AI-Defective Speech Act for the ontological implication: the “promises”, “assertions”, “apologies” of a language model are one and all defective — not out of malice, but out of structural impossibility.
Performativity and Binding
Speech acts are the primary medium through which persons bind themselves. Whoever promises takes on a duty; whoever asserts takes on a commitment to truth; whoever forgives enacts a change of status. Searle (The Construction of Social Reality, 1995) shows that institutional facts — marriage, money, property, the state — rest on collective intentionality and on status functions (“X counts as Y in context C”) that are constituted through declarative speech acts.
Thus the speech act is not merely a linguistic phenomenon but a fundamental anthropological operation: through speaking, persons create a social reality in which they bind themselves and obligate one another.
Speech Act and Truthfulness
Sincerity is not a maxim but a virtue — the habitual disposition to a fitting word-relation (Hildebrand, Ethics, 1953). The sincerity condition of the speech act is the formal-pragmatic mirroring of this personal attitude. Where truthfulness as a virtue is not possible, the sincerity condition too cannot be fulfilled.
Ontological Classification
- is an act of a Person in their linguistic existence
- constitutive component of Dialogue and Address
- requires: the original intentionality of the speaker
- subclasses: genuine speech act vs. AI-Defective Speech Act
- special form: Truthful Statement
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Austin, John L. (1962): How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon.
- 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.
- Searle, John R. (1995): The Construction of Social Reality. New York: Free Press.
- Grice, H. Paul (1989): Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- Habermas, Jürgen (1984): The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, transl. Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press.
- Hildebrand, Dietrich von (1953): Christian Ethics. New York: David McKay.