A Critique Of John Searle’s Classification Of Illocutionary Acts As A General Theory Of Language

This thesis concerns the classification of illocutionary acts and the related issue of intentionality, in which I critically analyzed the classifications of illocutionary acts as proposed by John Searle and some other linguists and philosophers of language. As according to Searle, a classification of illocutionary acts would potentially be an empirical refutation of what was allegedly Wittgenstein’s claim that there could not be a general theory of language use. However, following an analysis of the methodologies used in these various classifying attempts, it became clear that all of them lacked the internal rigor that any complete category system would require, which was manifest in the loose choice of the classification principles and the vagueness of those principles themselves.The investigation of the three principles Searle had employed in his taxonomy of illocutionary acts showed that even the most logically rigorous one of the three, the so-called "direction of fit", faced ineluctable difficulty, namely the justification for the dichotomy of "words" and "world", which was presupposed in the notion of "direction of fit". The same problem also arose in the famous Searle-Derrida debate in the1970’s, in which the two could not settle on the meaning of the crucial concept of "iterability". Searle’s understanding of it was obviously within a convention-based perspective, which gave rise to the dispute on the so-called "parasitic discourse".The emphasis on the convention of language use loomed large in the whole body of work of Searle and was best epitomized in his advocacy of the dichotomy of original intentionality and derived intentionality, which has been consistently criticized by other prominent philosophers like Daniel Dennett. Such a dichotomy culminated in his most famous thought experiment, the Chinese Room Argument, in which he in effect demoted language, everyday language as well as programming language, to mere derived intentionality. And although ostensibly sympathetic towards Wittgenstein’s idea of "meaning as use", Searle has left no room for such an idea in his theory of intentionality, the evidence of which could be readily detected in his early discussion about the "knowing of pain" in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigation. The distinction of "linguistic" and "non-linguistic" institutive facts in Searle’s latest work on social philosophy could be seem as an attempted rectification for this problem.Following a brief look into another direction, the various accounts of collective intentionality proposed by major philosophers like Raimo Tuomela and Margaret Gilbert, it could be argued that there is a parallel between a general theory of collective intentionality and a general theory of language use and that the idea of "meaning as use" was not merely a random hypothesis but was rooted in Wittgenstein’s claim that there could not be a general theory of language. A potential perspective for further studies on issues of language use and collective intentionality was also suggested towards the end of this thesis.