Uptake is typically understood as the hearer’s recognition of the speaker’s communicative intention. According to one theory of uptake, the hearer’s role is merely as a ratifier. The speaker, by expressing a particular communicative intention, predetermines what kind of illocutionary act she might perform. Her hearer can then render this act a success or a failure. Thus the hearer has no power over which act could be performed, but she does have some power over whether it is performed. Call this the ratification theory of uptake. Several philosophers have recently endorsed an alternative theory of uptake, according to which the hearer can determine the nature of the act the speaker performs. According to this theory, if the hearer regards an utterance as illocutionary act y, then it is act y, even if the speaker intended to perform act x. Call this the constitution theory of uptake. The purported advantage of this theory is that it identifies a common but underanalysed way in which speakers can be silenced. I argue that despite its initial intuitive pull, the constitution theory of uptake should be rejected. It is incompatible with ordinary intuitions about speech, it entails a conceptual impossibility (the unintentional exercise of normative powers), and it has unsavoury political implications, entailing that marginalised speakers barely qualify as agents.
In 1952 two teenagers, Christopher Craig and Derek Bentley, attempted to burgle a warehouse in London. Christopher brought a revolver with him. Police officers arrived to find the boys on the roof of the warehouse. One police officer climbed up and grabbed hold of Derek, while instructing Christopher to hand over his gun. Derek shouted to his friend, ‘Let him have it, Chris!’. Christopher opened fire. He shot the police officer holding Derek non-fatally in the shoulder, and then shot the next police officer who climbed onto the roof in the head, killing him instantly. In the boys’ trial there was disagreement as to whether by shouting, ‘Let him have it’, Derek had incited Christopher to murder the police officer or ordered him to surrender his gun. The former interpretation triumphed. Despite not firing the gun himself, Derek was charged with murder and in 1953 he was executed by hanging.
This case raises the question of who determines illocutionary force. Let us assume that Derek intended to order Christopher to surrender the gun, but Christopher interpreted Derek as inciting him to murder the police officer. Whose judgement is authoritative? I.e., who decides which act was performed? For Derek, this question was a matter of life or death. More generally, it is as much an issue of ethics as it is of philosophy of language. It has a bearing not only on debates about intentionalism and conventionalism, but also on how we conceive of the autonomy and normative powers of speakers.
In this paper I consider two ways of theorising the power of a hearer’s ‘uptake’. According to one theory, the potential illocutionary force of an utterance is determined by the speaker, who, in accordance with conventions, expresses a communicative intention to perform a particular illocutionary act. Her illocutionary act is successful only if her hearer recognises that intention. The hearer has no power over
We might think that this theory paints too rosy a picture of human communication, since it cannot accommodate the fact that sometimes hearers seemingly make it the case that speakers perform illocutionary acts which are
A second theory of uptake has recently emerged which allows that hearers can make an utterance constitute an illocutionary act which is different from the illocutionary act the speaker intended to perform
In Sect.
In ordinary language, ‘uptake’ usually means understanding, recognition, or acceptance. In his
An illocutionary act is an act performed in speaking, which constitutively enacts changes in the normative statuses of the speaker and the hearer. It is different from a locutionary act, which is the act of uttering a sentence with a ‘certain sense and reference’ (Austin
Austin describes the role uptake plays in illocutionary acts as follows: Unless a certain effect is achieved, the illocutionary act will not have been happily, successfully performed. This is not to say that the illocutionary act is the achieving of a certain effect. I cannot be said to have warned an audience unless it hears what I say and takes what I say in a certain sense. An effect must be achieved on the audience if the illocutionary act is to be carried out. How should we best put it here? And how can we limit it? Generally the effect amounts to bringing about the understanding of the meaning and of the force of the locution. So the performance of an illocutionary act involves the securing of uptake. (1976, pp. 116–117).
Austin claims that uptake is necessary for a successful illocutionary act; for an illocutionary act to occur, a speaker must perform a particular kind of utterance and a hearer must respond to that utterance in a particular way. Not all speech act theorists agree with this. For example, Kent Bach and Robert Harnish consider it sufficient for illocutionary success that the speaker expresses the relevant communicative intention (more on which shortly). This expressive act may
William Alston purports to establish the non-necessity of uptake by using examples like the following (
Others argue that uptake cannot be necessary for illocutionary success because this would have unsavoury ethical consequences. For example, it entails that if a woman tries to refuse sex, but her attempted refusal does not receive uptake (either because her partner does not hear her or because he hears her but does not correctly interpret her), then she has not refused.
I will henceforth assume that uptake is necessary for illocutionary success. The theories of uptake I will canvas therefore do not present a faithful picture of received speech act theory, since many speech act theorists deny the necessity of uptake. Of course, whether one believes uptake is necessary depends on how one understands uptake; questions about uptake’s phenomenology and power and questions about its necessity cannot be cleanly separated. I start with the assumption that hearers play some kind of necessary role in the performance of illocutionary acts, and I will consider different ways of theorising that role.
Here are two questions we could ask about uptake: ‘What is it like for the hearer?’ and ‘What role does it play in illocutionary acts?’ In this section I consider the first question, which concerns uptake’s phenomenology. In Sect.
Austin’s definition of uptake as the hearer’s ‘understanding of the meaning and of the force of the locution’ (1976, p. 117) is not particularly illuminating. It is not clear what determines ‘force’, nor what makes it detectable to the hearer, nor exactly what Austin means by ‘understanding’. I will now canvas two (not necessarily incompatible) ways of understanding the phenomenology of uptake: as the hearer’s ‘recognition’ of the communicative intention expressed by the speaker, and as the hearer’s ‘recognition’ of the conventionality of the speaker’s utterance.
Uptake is most typically understood as the hearer’s perception of or inference about the speaker’s communicative intention. In the case of illocutionary acts we succeed in doing what we are trying to do by getting our audience to recognize what we are trying to do. But the ‘effect’ on the hearer is not a belief or a response, it consists simply in the hearer understanding the utterance of the speaker. (1969, p. 47).
This view of uptake is widely endorsed, even by those who deny the necessity of uptake. Those who endorse it include Kent Bach and Robert Harnish (1979), Stephen Levinson (1983), Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson (1986), and Jennifer Hornsby (
There are at least two ways of thinking about the psychology of this intention ‘recognition’. It could be an event akin to the perception of high-level features in visual experience; one instantly and automatically ‘perceives’ the speaker’s intention. This might be facilitated by linguistic markers, like the use of performative verbs, which trigger recognition in the hearer. Or it could involve the hearer
Alternatively (or additionally), uptake might consist in a hearer’s recognition of the conventionality of a speaker’s utterance, i.e. its satisfaction of the conventions attendant on a particular illocutionary act type.
Many speech act theorists believe that utterances must satisfy certain conventions, or ‘felicity conditions’, to constitute illocutionary acts. Austin, for example, thought that for each illocutionary act there must be an ‘accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect’, which speakers must utilise (Austin
On a conventionalist understanding of uptake, uptake consists in the hearer ‘recognising’ that an utterance satisfies a set of conditions governing a particular illocutionary act. This might seem to involve circularity. If felicity conditions are necessary conditions for illocutionary success, and uptake is necessary for illocutionary success, then uptake is itself a felicity condition. And since uptake is the hearer’s recognition that the utterance satisfies a set of felicity conditions, uptake must therefore recognise itself.
We can overcome this problem by distinguishing between first order and second order felicity conditions. First-order felicity conditions concern the utterance, the context, the hearer (excluding her uptake), and the speaker. For an illocutionary act of type Φ to succeed, it must satisfy the first-order felicity conditions governing acts of type Φ. The hearer’s provision of uptake could be a second-order felicity condition, consisting of the hearer’s recognition that the utterance satisfies all (or most) first-order felicity conditions. As with intention recognition, recognition of conventionality could be a form of perception or an inferential process.
The intentionalist view of uptake and the conventionalist view of uptake are not necessarily incompatible. On many accounts of illocutionary acts, the speaker’s expression of a communicative intention is itself a felicity condition that must be satisfied for an utterance to be a particular kind of illocutionary act (see, for example, Searle
That said, speaker intention does seem to be the feature of an utterance to which hearers are
In this section I will consider two ways of conceiving of the power of uptake, assuming that uptake is necessary for illocutionary success. The two theories I present are not the only theories available, so arguments against one are not necessarily arguments in support of the other.
According to the first theory of uptake, the hearer’s power is limited to either ratifying the speaker’s attempted illocutionary act or failing to ratify it. The potential illocutionary force of an utterance is predetermined by the speaker’s expression of a communicative intention in accordance with conventions. She determines the illocutionary act her utterance
I turn now to a second, newer theory of uptake, which I call the
Quill R Kukla, writing as Rebecca Kukla, defends a version of this theory. They claim that ‘there is probably no principled or sharp line between a speech act receiving mistaken uptake and a speech act being constituted, perhaps in unexpected ways, by its uptake’ ( [I]f I ask my dinner companion, “Do you think we should get married?,” this speech act might constitute a marriage proposal, the start of a conversation about the future, a request for an opinion, or a joke. Which it is depends partly upon the social context and input: are we a functioning couple? Is this the right kind of setting for a proposal? What was the rest of the conversation about? But it is also partly dependent upon the uptake: if my companion laughs in my face, or takes me unexpectedly seriously and gives me a definitive answer of a certain sort then I might learn on the spot what sort of speech act I actually produced, and the answer might surprise me. (
According to the uptake as ratification theory, if a speaker intends to propose, but her hearer interprets her as making a joke, she fails to perform an illocutionary act. Her utterance could only ever have been a proposal or a failed proposal. Yet according to Kukla, the hearer’s interpretation determines
Kukla therefore denies that the speaker’s communicative intention determines the force of her utterance. They claim that ‘intentions in speaking are part of the story that gives a speech act the performative force it has, but they are not privileged or definitive; the speaker may only discover, in how her utterance is taken up, what sort of speech act it really was’ (
For Kukla, speech acts have force ‘only in virtue of the concrete social difference that they make, or how they are taken up in practice’ (
Though Kukla is clear about the power of uptake, they are less clear about the phenomenology of uptake, claiming that it involves ‘others’ enacted recognition of [a speech act’s] impact on social space’, though that recognition is not ‘a separable moment of passive recognition’ (
This paper is not about Kukla’s specific theory of uptake, but rather about the more general idea (which Kukla endorses) that uptake constitutes the force of an utterance. Going forward, I will assume that, regardless of whether uptake involves ratification or constitution, it always involves hearers sincerely (but not necessarily accurately) engaging with a speaker’s intentions by detection or deduction. I do not attribute this view to Kukla specifically. The key disagreement between the two theories, as I present them, concerns whether a hearer’s
An advantage of the constitution theory is that it enables us to isolate an unacknowledged form of silencing, to which marginalised speakers seem particularly vulnerable. Kukla illustrates this using the following example. Celia is a floor manager in a factory and has the institutional authority to give workers orders. Yet when she attempts to do so, her workers interpret her utterances as requests, because ‘they are deeply unaccustomed to taking women as authorities in the male-dominated space of the workplace’ (
We already know that marginalised agents can be locutionarily silenced, i.e. blocked from speaking at all; perlocutionarily silenced, i.e. prevented from producing certain perlocutionary effects; and illocutionarily silenced, i.e. prevented from performing illocutionary acts (see Langton
There are strong and weak versions of the constitution theory. On the strong version, hearers can transform the speaker’s utterance into any illocutionary act. The speaker’s utterance need not resemble, or satisfy any of the conventions for, the act they ultimately perform. For example, imagine a speaker says, ‘Hello’, with the intention to greet her hearer. If her hearer interprets the speaker as intending to perform a declaration of war, the speaker could end up declaring war. Kukla can be read as endorsing this strong version, as they claim that speakers often cannot ‘marshal standard conventions in the standard way’ and a speech act can be performed ‘with an unconventional output, given its input’ (
This strong version of the constitution theory looks like Humpty-Dumptyism in reverse. While Humpty Dumpty declares that ‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean’ (Caroll
Presumably the hearer’s interpretation, like the speaker’s intention, is constrained by rationality and conventions. A rational speaker cannot intend to do what she believes to be impossible; she acts roughly in conformity with linguistic conventions (see Dummett
The weak version of the constitution theory could address these worries. This version holds that the hearer’s interpretation is bound by rationality and conventions. She can make it the case that a speaker performed an act she did not intend to perform, but the act the speaker ultimately performs must be sufficiently similar to the act she intended to perform. An attempted greeting cannot become a declaration of war, but an attempted order could become a request.
Rae Langton suggests that unintentional illocutionary acts can occur when a speaker attempts to perform an act with a ‘hearer-dependent’ felicity condition (
For this theory to work, there must exist classes of speech acts with the following characteristics. They share all or most of their felicity conditions, and have a similar normative force, which varies among the acts in strength rather than in kind. One of the felicity conditions the acts have in common is a) hearer-dependent and b) satisfiable to varying degrees.
Langton says little about the phenomenology of uptake, but I will assume again that hearers consider themselves to be co-operative. In cases where a hearer renders an attempted order a request, this occurs because the hearer sincerely believes the speaker intended to request and not because she is deliberately overruling the speaker. She will reason along the lines of ‘Surely the speaker cannot be ordering me, since they lack the authority to do so—they must be making a request, and I will treat their utterance as such’. And given requests and orders are sufficiently similar in pragmatic structure, this reasoning can lead the hearer to constitute the speaker’s attempted order as a request.
The weak version of the uptake as constitution theory requires more fleshing out, but it strikes me as more plausible than the strong version. In accordance with our intuitions, it grants the speaker at least some authority over what she does; she cannot completely predetermine the nature of the speech act she performs, but she can at least roughly determine its shape. Moreover, the idea that illocutionary force is a matter of degree is already widely accepted in the linguistic literature on reinforcement and mitigation (where what is increased or decreased is typically referred to as the act’s ‘strength’).
That said, the uptake as constitution theory, even in this weak form, should not be adopted. In the next section I offer three objections which apply to both the strong and weak versions of the constitution theory.
Before we can decide which theory of uptake to adopt, we must decide on criteria to use when evaluating theories of speech. We must ask ourselves what speech act theory is, and what we want it to be. I propose that our theories of speech should be compatible with our everyday intuitions about speech, our moral intuitions about normative powers, and our political intuitions about autonomy. I will now show that the uptake as constitution theory fails on all three counts.
Following Gilbert Ryle, we should understand one of the tasks of a philosopher as analogous to the task of a cartographer. A cartographer mapping a village must translate the locals’ knowledge of ‘every house, field, stream, road and pathway’ into ‘universal cartographical terms’ (1971, pp. 440–441). Her map is compatible with local knowledge, but presents it in impersonal terms and situates it in a broader context. Similarly, the philosopher abstracts from and universalises our everyday concepts and explains how they relate to other phenomena. Speech act theorists should produce theories which reflect how we think and talk about
To see how the two theories of uptake fare against this ideal, we should ascertain ordinary people’s intuitions about cases like Celia the manager. Defenders of the uptake as constitution theory might think this test is already in their favour. After all, Celia’s employees are ordinary people, and they think she performed a request. The uptake as constitution theory can therefore claim that it reflects ordinary intuitions better than the uptake as ratification theory. Yet this is not the correct way to employ the test. The workers are missing some important information; they do not know Celia’s intentions. They likely believe she intended to make a request, when in reality she intended to make an order. To ascertain their intuitions about the role of uptake in this scenario, we must describe the whole scenario to them, including the speaker’s intention.
It is unlikely that, once informed that Celia intended to give an order and not make a request, the workers would maintain that she made a request. Instead, they would give a reason for why they
Even if my prediction is true—that the workers would revise their judgements when informed of Celia’s intentions—one might object that we cannot extrapolate from this to the claim that all hearers in all such scenarios would revise their judgements when informed of speakers’ intentions. We might think that the prediction is likely true in Celia’s case because the workers’ intuitions are skewed by their knowledge of Celia’s authority over them. This knowledge may make the workers instinctively more acquiescent and more likely to revise their judgements.
It is helpful to consider a modified scenario in which Celia attempts to order a friend, not her workers.
We often tell others that their speech had unintended perlocutionary effects. For example, we might tell a speaker that she offended us, even if she did not intend to do so. We also disagree with speakers about certain properties of their speech; for example, we might tell a speaker that her comment was racist, even though she did not intend it as such. And we also tell speakers that their attempted speech acts were not successful, despite their intentions to perform the act successfully. For example, Celia’s friend would probably tell her that despite her intentions, she failed to perform an order. Yet if we are rational, and if we believe a speaker is rational (i.e. not a Humpty Dumpty), we do normally treat her professed intentions as determining the
That ordinary people have intentionalist intuitions about illocutionary force does not entail that the uptake as constitution theory is false. It is possible that our intuitions about what determines force are at odds with reality. However, if we are taking seriously the thought that the task of speech act theorists is to map reality and take seriously ordinary speakers’ intuitions, then we should prefer the theory of uptake that does not entail that our intuitions about speech are wrong.
Another reason to reject the constitution theory of uptake is the fact that it entails a conceptual impossibility: that we can perform unintentional illocutionary acts. I offer below a simple argument for why illocutionary acts cannot be unintentional. I will defend each premise in turn. P1: To perform an illocutionary act is to exercise a normative power. P2: To perform an unintentional illocutionary act is to unintentionally exercise a normative power. P3: Normative powers cannot be exercised unintentionally. C: One cannot perform an unintentional illocutionary act.
To perform an illocutionary act is to constitutively (rather than causally) change the normative situations of oneself and one’s hearer by creating entitlements and obligations. When I perform a promise, for example, I create for myself an obligation to fulfil that promise, and my hearer acquires an entitlement to my doing what I promised to do. When I make an assertion, I commit myself to the truth of the proposition I assert. Illocutionary acts, then, seem to involve the exercising of
We can create obligations and entitlements in a variety of ways. For example, if I tread on your foot, I acquire an obligation to apologise. This does not mean that the act of placing one’s foot upon another person’s foot involves any kind of normative power. Rather, in treading on your foot I cause the non-normative circumstances to change in a way that triggers a pre-existing general obligation—to apologise when I hurt someone, perhaps. This act is very different from promising. When I make a promise, I deliberately and robustly change the normative situation by communicating my intention to do so.
Even if they do not mention normative powers specifically, most speech act theorists believe that illocutionary acts constitutively enact normative changes. This enactment seems to require the exercising of normative powers. For example, Kukla and Lance define speech acts as follows: [W]e loosely follow Brandom in understanding speech acts as performances constitutive of changes in normative status among various members of a discursive community. Thus, for instance, to assert that P involves undertaking a commitment to P, taking up the role of one at whom challenges of P may be directed, etc. (2009, p. 112).
Recall that to exercise a normative power is to constitutively alter a normative situation; Kukla and Lance describe speech acts in similar terms. Similarly, Searle claims that ‘just about every’ speech act involves taking on commitments: Just about every speech act involves a commitment of some kind or other. The famous examples are speech acts like promising, where the speaker is committed to carrying out a future course of action, but asserting commits the speaker to the truth of the proposition asserted, and orders commit the speaker to the belief that the person to whom he or she gives the order is able to do it, to the desire that he or she should do it, and to permitting the hearer to do it. In short, what people have thought of as the distinctive element of promising, actually pervades just about all speech acts. (2001, p. 147).
Key to these theories is the thought that when we perform an illocutionary act we constitutively take on and assign to others normative statuses. The change in normative statuses is not a downstream effect of the illocutionary act but rather constitutive of it.
There have been several analyses of particular illocutionary acts in terms of normative powers, especially promising (Raz
In fact, since all illocutionary acts seem to involve a speaker taking a normative stance, and constitutively delimiting her entitlements and obligations, perhaps we can conclude that all illocutionary acts involve the exercise of normative powers. This seems to be the view taken by Richard Moran (
Some might object that this is too quick. Maybe there are some illocutionary acts, like promising and consenting, which involve exercising normative powers, and some illocutionary acts which do not. For example, we might think that only illocutionary acts with a world-to-word fit require a speaker to exercise normative powers, since these involve a speaker attempting to change the world with her speech, rather than simply describing it. I will show later that even if it is true that not all illocutionary acts involve exercises of normative powers, this is not a fatal blow to the objection I put forward in this section. Nonetheless, for the time being I will assume that to perform any illocutionary act is to exercise a normative power.
One may wonder how the claim that illocutionary acts are exercises of normative powers can be reconciled with the claim that to perform an illocutionary act is to express a communicative intention using a convention. I propose that conventions
P1 held that to perform an illocutionary act is to exercise normative powers. P2 largely follows from this; it holds that an unintentional illocutionary act (if it were possible) would involve an unintentional exercise of normative powers.
When I speak of an ‘unintentional illocutionary act’ I have in mind a speaker performing an utterance with the intention that it constitute a particular illocutionary act Φ (like an order), where that utterance actually constitutes illocutionary act Ψ (like a request). The illocutionary act the speaker in fact performs is not the act she intended to perform.
It is natural to assume that each illocutionary act involves either the exercising of a different normative power or the exercising of a normative power in a unique way. If I intend to perform act Φ, but actually perform act Ψ, then either I have exercised a different normative power from the power I intended to exercise, or I have exercised my normative power in a different way from how I intended. I did intend to exercise my normative powers in
Here is an analogy to support P2. Imagine I possess ‘musical powers’, in that I can play the piano. I can exercise those powers in different ways (or exercise different musical powers, depending on how one looks at it), in so far as I can play different pieces. I sit down at the piano and attempt to perform Beethoven’s
There is a common thread in accounts of normative powers. Gary Watson defines normative powers as ‘powers to create or rescind practical requirements
The italics I have added to the above quotations point to the common thread; the thought that exercises of normative powers are intentional. Though these philosophers disagree about the precise contours of normative powers, they all agree that to exercise one’s normative powers is to perform an intentional act, or an
To see why this is so, we should reflect on why we need the notion of normative powers. Our obligations and entitlements could come from many places. They could be simply given to us, either by external normative facts and laws, if we are externalists, or by our passive non-cognitive states, if we are internalists.
Having now defended P1, P2, and P3, I can show why the uptake as constitution theory fails. I started with a claim that most of us can accept; that illocutionary acts constitutively alter the normative situation of the speaker and hearer. I claimed that the best way to make sense of this was to parse illocutionary acts as exercises of normative powers (P1). Because illocutionary acts and exercises of normative powers stand in this constitutive relationship, to intentionally perform an illocutionary act is to intentionally exercise one’s normative powers, and to unintentionally perform an illocutionary act would be to unintentionally exercise one’s normative powers (P2). However, one cannot unintentionally exercise one’s normative powers, because exercising one’s normative powers is, by definition, an act of will (P3). Therefore one cannot perform unintentional illocutionary acts (C). The uptake as constitution theory, because it entails that one can perform unintentional illocutionary acts, therefore entails an impossibility and should be rejected.
Earlier I considered an objection to P1; perhaps not all illocutionary acts involve the exercise of normative powers. If this is true, it is not actually a fatal blow to the objection I have mounted against the constitution theory. We could quite easily construct a modified argument, as follows: P1*: There are some illocutionary acts such that to perform them is to exercise a normative power. Call these ‘illocutionaryNP acts’. P2*: To perform an unintentional illocutionaryNP act is to unintentionally exercise a normative power. P3: Normative powers cannot be exercised unintentionally. C*: One cannot perform an unintentional illocutionaryNP act.
If the constitution theory entails that we could perform at least one kind of unintentional illocutionaryNP act, then it still entails an impossibility, and we still have good reason to reject it. The strong version of the theory would definitely entail this, since it allows that a speaker could end up performing any kind of illocutionary act, regardless of her intentions. Whether the weak version of the constitution theory entails this is less clear and would depend on whether any illocutionaryNP acts form the speech act classes I discussed in Sect.
There is one final reason to reject the uptake as constitution theory: it has unsavoury political implications, entailing that marginalised speakers lack so much autonomy as to barely constitute agents at all.
Being able to perform illocutionary acts by exercising our normative powers is part of what it means to be autonomous (Hurd
That both theories have this result is not cause for concern. It is obvious that many agents are frequently prevented from performing acts they intend to perform. Indeed, one of the main motivations for emancipatory movements like feminism and anti-racism is to point out the ways in which certain groups lack positive autonomy, and to develop strategies for increasing that autonomy. If we embraced a theory of speech or action which entailed that everyone had full positive autonomy, we would struggle to explain why emancipatory movements still exist.
Negative speaker autonomy
The uptake as ratification theory entails that we all have negative speaker autonomy, since it precludes the possibility of unintentional illocutionary acts. The uptake as constitution theory entails that we can lack negative speaker autonomy, and marginalised people in particular are most likely to lack it. For advocates of the theory, like Kukla, this is a selling point. One of Kukla’s goals is to show that marginalised speakers are less autonomous than typically thought, and suffer a ‘special sort of incapacity’ (
And yet I propose that the constitution theory ends up harming the people whose plight it is designed to highlight. Those at the bottom of the social hierarchy, according to the constitution theory, will rarely succeed in performing their intended speech acts, and will constantly perform speech acts they did not intend to perform, for example consenting, refusing, and promising when they do not intend to. They are still bearers of rights and duties, which they often accrue due to others’ misinterpretations, but they are frequently unable to exercise or fulfil these, since any attempts to do so will likely be misinterpreted and therefore reconstituted as acts other than the ones they intended to perform. It is hard to see how such a person is really an agent in the first place, since they have no recognisable autonomy. This is politically unpalatable. The account may also have worrying implications for how we ought to treat such a person. If it is an ontological fact that they lack autonomy, then we likely have less stringent moral duties towards them than we do to more autonomous beings, and it may even be appropriate to subject them to paternalistic control.
It is surely more palatable to say that marginalised people have the same degree of negative speaker autonomy as anybody else, but they are wronged by (a) having less positive speaker autonomy and (b) being frequently misinterpreted. The uptake as ratification theory enables us to say this. It also makes it more reasonable for people like Celia to be frustrated about their situations. According to the ratification theory, Celia’s workers have erred, and Celia could ‘correct’ them. She has the epistemic upper hand. On the uptake as constitution theory, the hearers have not erred; they are correct about what Celia did, and Celia is wrong. In this situation, it is hard to imagine what recourse or redress could be available to her.
In this paper I put uptake, a notion frequently invoked by speech act theorists but rarely examined, in the spotlight. I sketched different ways of understanding the phenomenology of uptake, then considered two theories of uptake’s power: the uptake as ratification theory and the uptake as constitution theory. The latter presents an intriguing challenge to the more popular ratification theory by drawing attention to the fact that marginalised speakers are not only prevented from performing illocutionary acts, but also taken to be performing acts they did not intend to perform. However, the theory goes too far in affording the interpretations of hearers constructive power. The theory is at odds with how we ordinarily think and talk about speech; it would require the unintentional exercising of normative powers, which is a conceptual impossibility; and it has unsavoury political implications, by rendering marginalised speakers so profoundly lacking in autonomy as to barely count as agents at all. For these reasons, the uptake as constitution theory should not be taken up, and if we must choose between the constitution theory and the ratification theory, the latter has the upper hand.
I thank Clare Chambers, Jane Heal, Rae Langton, Marina Sbisà, and two anonymous reviewers for this journal for their helpful feedback on this paper. My research was supported by a studentship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
In 1993, Derek Bentley won a posthumous pardon, and in 1998 his murder conviction was quashed. See R v. Derek William Bentley (deceased) [1998] EWCA Crim 2516.
I have simplified this case for rhetorical effect. I suggest that Derek could be interpreted as performing two different illocutionary acts—inciting Christopher to kill and ordering him to surrender the gun. Yet the difference between the two acts might be better parsed as a difference in locutionary content, rather than a difference in illocutionary force. Inciting and ordering are both, after all, exercitives. Under both interpretations Derek is telling Christopher to do something. The debate concerns what exactly he told Christopher to do. In addition, the debate in question did not take place within an ordinary conversation. It took place in a court of law, where some participants had greater interpretive powers than others, where several different notions of responsibility were at play, and where some participants had the power to reject speakers’ accounts of their intentions. The rest of the paper is about illocutionary uptake in ordinary conversation, so we cannot use the verdicts reached on the Bentley case and the criteria used to reach them as a guide to making judgements about uptake in ordinary conversation. Nonetheless, I hope that this example makes it easier to imagine how we might find ourselves unsure about the illocutionary force of an utterance, and why such scenarios can be of moral and political importance. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pushing me to clarify these issues.
Versions of this theory have been endorsed by Kukla (
Strawson argues that there are some essentially conventional speech acts, like marrying and christening, which, unlike the speech acts of ordinary conversation, do not require uptake (1964, p. 456). I am concerned only with ordinary speech acts, not with institutional acts like these.
See discussions in Bird (
I assume that the hearer is also the addressee. Sometimes these come apart; one can overhear a speech act addressed to someone else (see Goffman
This account of uptake arose out of the combined efforts of Austin (
My account of intention recognition is simplified and idealised in several ways. For example, I assume that we can always easily grasp the intentions speakers express. In reality, attributing intentions to speakers is often difficult. Some hearers are more skilled than others at detecting intentions, and some speakers make it easier than others to detect their intentions. Some, for example, deliberately express their intentions in ambiguous ways (perhaps for politeness reasons). I have also assumed that intentions remain stable over time; in reality, speakers can change their mind during speech, and sometimes interrupt their utterances to modify the intentions expressed. It may be that speakers are not actually sure of the intention they have expressed, and attribute them post hoc. Or, if we are tempted by interactionalist approaches to meaning (see fn.9), intentions might be negotiated or co-constructed by all interlocutors. For ease of explanation, I set aside these possibilities.
A third theory of uptake holds that hearers and speakers work together to decide upon the utterance’s force, negotiating and co-constructing it in the course of the conversation. Robert Arundale defends such a view, defining communication not as a matter of encoding and decoding intentions, but rather as ‘a complex process of at least two participants interactively achieving separate yet conjoined operative interpretings of a given utterance or behaviour’ (
Kukla rejects the perlocutionary/illocutionary distinction, which is why they speak of ‘speech acts’ and not ‘illocutionary acts’. In Sect.
We could parse the difference between the two theories slightly differently. We could grant that for either theory, uptake involves accurately identifying the speaker’s intention (i.e. it is always factive). However, we could hold that for the uptake as ratification theory, uptake is necessary for an utterance to be an illocutionary act, while for the uptake as constitution theory, it is merely sufficient. On the latter theory, if a hearer interprets the speaker differently from how she intended, there has been no ‘uptake’, technically speaking, but the speaker’s interpretation could also be sufficient to make the utterance count as an illocutionary act (just not the one the speaker intended).
One might counter that ‘Humpty-Dumptyism in reverse’ is in fact what Alice is defending in the first place, given she argues that Humpty cannot help but refer to glory when saying ‘glory’, no matter what he intends. However, Alice is not arguing that it is her own understanding of the word ‘glory’ which determines what Humpty-Dumpty means, but rather the existence of linguistic conventions governing the meaning of the word. Alice’s view, then, is neither Humpty-Dumptyism nor Humpty-Dumptyism in reverse, but rather a conventionalist position in between the two.
Technically speaking, if uptake is necessary for illocutionary success, then all illocutionary acts have a hearer-dependent felicity condition; the hearer’s provision of uptake. Yet I suggested in Sect.
Alessandra Tanesini endorses a similar view (
For more on felicity conditions which can be satisfied by degrees, see Sbisà (
Verdictive speech acts might form a similar class, in so far as they all involve offering some kind of appraisal or verdict, and they all generate a reason for others to accept that verdict, but the strength of the reason will vary depending on how much epistemic authority is attributed to the speaker.
Kukla presumably would not accept the existence of such speech act classes, since they argue elsewhere that a request is not just a weak order, but rather has a distinctive pragmatic structure and generates distinctive kinds of reasons (Lance and Kukla
See Holmes (
I am thankful to a reviewer for suggesting I compare these two versions of the Celia scenario.
Joseph Raz first introduced the idea of normative powers to moral and political philosophy (1972, 1977, 1979). Philosophers have since offered different accounts of why normative powers exist. Raz argues that each normative power exists because it has a specific justification: ‘it is the nature of the reasons justifying the norm [e.g., the obligation created by a promise] which determines whether acts affecting its existence or application are power exercising acts’ (1972, p. 95). It matters little for my argument why or how normative powers exist, but I do require readers to accept
I borrow the concepts of triggering and robust obligations from David Enoch (
A reviewer points out that some cases seem to fall somewhere between the foot-treading example and promising. Consider the act of ‘taking the Queen’s shilling’, a case discussed by Brandom (
This ‘unintentional’ illocutionary act therefore involves some intentional action. I can conceive of at least three other kinds of unintentional illocutionary acts, which I do not consider here. First, deliberately open-ended illocutionary acts—a speaker intentionally performs an utterance, and intends that this utterance constitute an illocutionary act, but lacks a specific intention as to which illocutionary act in particular it will constitute. (This may be the best way to conceive of Kukla’s ‘Do you think we should get married?’ example, but it is definitely not the right way to conceive of Celia’s attempted order.) Second, inadvertent illocutionary acts—a speaker performs an intentional action which was not intended to be an illocutionary act, but it nonetheless receives some kind of uptake. For example, a person could intentionally perform the act of singing to herself while not intending that this action be an illocutionary act, but nonetheless be interpreted by a hearer as performing an illocutionary act. Third, non-intentional illocutionary acts—a speaker unintentionally produces sounds (perhaps the vocal tics of Tourettes, or sleep-talk) and receives uptake.
The two pieces are famously similar, so the example works for both strong and weak versions of the uptake as constitution theory.
One can accept that willing is a ground of normativity without also accepting that willing is the only ground of normativity. For a defence of a ‘hybrid’ model of normativity, according to which willing grounds some but not all of practical normativity, see Chang (
On the different potential sources of normativity, see Korsgaard (
My concepts of negative and positive speaker autonomy are based on a distinction drawn by Alan Wertheimer (
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