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Searle's work on speech acts is understood to further refine Austin's conception. However, some philosophers have pointed out a significant difference between the two conceptions: whereas Austin emphasized the conventional interpretation of speech acts, Searle emphasized a psychological interpretation (based on beliefs, intentions, etc.). [12]
Searle maintained that even if one was to see a written statement with no knowledge of authorship it would still be impossible to escape the question of intentionality, because "a meaningful sentence is just a standing possibility of the (intentional) speech act". For Searle, ascribing intentionality to a statement was a basic requirement for ...
Searle (1975) set up the following classification of illocutionary speech acts: assertives = speech acts that commit a speaker to the truth of the expressed proposition; directives = speech acts that are to cause the hearer to take a particular action, e.g. requests, commands and advice; commissives = speech acts that commit a speaker to some ...
According to the Speech Act Thesis – stemming more from the theory of social acts devised in 1913 by the German phenomenologist Adolf Reinach than from the writings of Austin and Searle [6] – through the performance of speech acts (acts of promising, marrying, accusing, baptizing) we change the world by bringing into being claims, obligations, rights, relations of authority, debts ...
Searle further claimed that performatives are what he calls declarations; this is a technical notion of Searle's account: according to his conception, an utterance is a declaration, if "the successful performance of the speech act is sufficient to bring about the fit between words and world, to make the propositional content true."
In the 1960s John Searle extended this concept to the broader field of speech act theory, where due attention is paid to the use and function of language. In the 1970s Searle engaged in polemics with postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida, about the determinability of context and the nature of authorial intentions in a performative text.
Studying J. L. Austin's theory of the illocutionary act in the perspective of deconstruction, Derrida argued in his 1972 paper "Signature Event Context" that Austin had missed the fact that any speech event is framed by a "structure of absence" (the words that are left unsaid due to contextual constraints) and by "iterability" (the repeatability of linguistic elements outside of their context).
Both rely on speech act theory developed by Searle in the 1960s [3] and enhanced by Winograd and Flores in the 1970s. They define a set of performatives, also called Communicative Acts, and their meaning (e.g. ask-one). The content of the performative is not standardized, but varies from system to system.