JOURNAL OF IQRO – ЖУРНАЛ ИҚРО – IQRO JURNALI – volume 15, issue 02, 2025
ISSN: 2181-4341, IMPACT FACTOR ( RESEARCH BIB ) – 7,245, SJIF – 5,431
ILMIY METODIK JURNAL
Hаbibоvа Mаnzilа Nuriddinоvnа
Tеаchеr аt thе Dеpаrtmеnt оf Uzbеk
Lаnguаgе аnd Litеrаturе, Russiаn аnd Еnglish Lаnguаgеs,
Bukhаrа Stаtе Mеdicаl Institutе nаmеd аftеr Аbu Аli ibn Sinа
Tеl: 97 852-55-05; е-mаil: hаbibоvа.mаnzilа@bsmi.uz
https://оrcid.оrg/0009-0003-3574-0391
DEFECTIVE ILLOCUTION:
A PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS OF SPEECH ACTS AND MEANING
Abstract:
This paper explores the nature of promising as an illocutionary act by identifying the
necessary and sufficient conditions for its successful and non-defective performance. It analyzes
these conditions in terms of propositions that both entail and are entailed by the act of promising.
Furthermore, the discussion extends to cases where promises may be defective yet still
performed. The investigation is grounded in speech act theory, especially Austin’s notion of
infelicity. Additionally, the paper examines the complexity of reference in language, scrutinizing
definite descriptions, proper names, and non-referential noun phrases.
Keywords:
Illocutionary acts, promising, speech act theory, reference, definite descriptions,
proper names, use-mention distinction, linguistic pragmatics.
Introduction
The act of promising, a central type of illocutionary act, raises intricate philosophical questions
about what it means for such an act to be successfully and non-defectively performed. Drawing
on insights from speech act theory, particularly the foundational work of J.L. Austin, this paper
investigates the conditions under which the act of promising is achieved. A central aim is to
clarify these conditions in non-circular terms that avoid presupposing the very concept they are
meant to analyze. In doing so, this work contributes to a broader understanding of how language
functions in the context of commitment and obligation.
However, the inquiry does not end with promising. It broadens to consider the structure of
reference in language—how speakers successfully or unsuccessfully refer to objects using names,
descriptions, and other expressions. In particular, the paper explores cases where referring
expressions seem to lack clear referents, or where reference succeeds despite false or
inappropriate descriptors. These examples illustrate the limits of existing theories, such as
Russell’s theory of descriptions and the idea of logically proper names, and they expose the
philosophical stakes of how meaning, intention, and linguistic form interact. The discussion also
addresses the nature of quotation, use-mention distinctions, and the conventions that govern them.
These considerations are essential for any theory aiming to explain how utterances can refer to
language itself or to abstract institutional facts. The overarching goal is to provide a framework
that accounts for both the pragmatic and institutional aspects of speech acts, without resorting to
reductionist explanations.
It challenges simplistic accounts of reference and use-mention conventions, illustrating how
mischaracterizations can obscure the mechanisms of linguistic meaning. The aim is not to reduce
institutional facts to brute facts but to offer a model that incorporates intention, rules, and
contextual understanding. Ultimately, the paper rejects the idea of logically proper names and the
view that proper names lack descriptive content, arguing instead for a contextual and pragmatic
understanding of reference and speech acts.
In order to give an analysis of the illocutionary act of promising I shall ask what conditions are
necessary and sufficient for the act of promising to have been successfully and non-defectively
performed in the utterance of a given sentence. I shall attempt to answer this question by stating
JOURNAL OF IQRO – ЖУРНАЛ ИҚРО – IQRO JURNALI – volume 15, issue 02, 2025
ISSN: 2181-4341, IMPACT FACTOR ( RESEARCH BIB ) – 7,245, SJIF – 5,431
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these conditions as a set of propositions such that the conjunction of the members of the set
entails the proposition that a speaker made a successful and non-defective promise, and the
proposition that the speaker made such a promise entails this conjunction. Thus each condition
will be a necessary condition for the successful and non-defective performance of the act of
promising, and taken collectively the set of conditions will be a sufficient condition for such a
performance. There are various kinds of possible defects of illocutionary acts but not all of these
defects are sufficient to vitiate the act in its entirety. In some cases, a condition may indeed be
intrinsic to the notion of the act in question and not satisfied in a given case, and yet the act will
have been performed nonetheless. In such cases I say the act was “defective”. My notion of a
defect in an illocutionary act is closely related to Austin's notion of an” infelicity”.
1 Not all of
the conditions are logically independent of each other. Sometimes it is worthwhile to state a
condition separately even though it is, strictly speaking, entailed by another.
The notion of singular definite reference is a very unsatisfactory one, but one we can hardly do
without. The most obvious cases of referring expressions are proper names, but as soon as we
consider other kinds of expressions such as singular definite descriptions we find that some of
them are referring expressions, some obviously not, and some seem to fall in between.
Furthermore, some occurrences of proper names are not referential, as in, e.g., “Cerberus does
not exist”. Philosophers who discuss definite descriptions almost invariably fasten onto examples
like “the king of France”, or “the man”, and seldom onto examples like “the weather”, “the way
we live now”, or “the reason why I like beans”. This ought to arouse our suspicions. Consider for
example the difficulty of applying Russell's theory of descriptions, without any paraphrases of
the original, to a sentence like “The weather is good”: “(3x) (xis a weather· (y) (y is a weather-+
y = x)· xis good)” hardly makes any sense. Yet one is inclined to say the expression “the
weather” performs a similar role in “The weather is good” to that of the expression “the man” in
“The man is good”. Let us consider some occurrences of definite descriptions which are clearly
not referential occurrences. In an utterance of “He left me in the lurch” the expression “the
lurch” is not used to refer. Similarly in “I did it for his sake” the expression “his sake” is not used
to refer.
We can see this more obviously by contrasting the occurrence of “the lurch” and “his
sake” in these sentences with the occurrences of “the building” and “his brother” in the sentences
“He left me in the building” and “ I did it for his brother”. Still, how do I know that the former
pair do not and the latter pair do refer? I know that because, as a native speaker, I can see that the
utterances of the former pair do not serve to pick out or identify some object or entity and that
utterances of the latter pair do. This fact has certain interesting linguistic consequences, and to
someone who could not see the obvious lack of reference of “the lurch” and “the sake”, pointing
out these consequences might be an aid. For example, the first pair are not answers to the
corresponding question forms: “For whom or what of his did I do it?” and “In what did he leave
me?”, whereas the latter pair clearly do answer such questions. Furthermore, in these sorts of
contexts, “sake” and “lurch” do not admit of plural forms, whereas “brother” and “building” do.
From the point of view of a generative syntax we might say that “his sake” and “the lurch” are
not noun phrases at all and “sake” and “lurch” are not nouns in these occurrences.
“Well,” it might be said, “why can't we just adopt it as a convention that quotation marks around
a word make a new word out of it, the proper name of the original?” One might as well say, why
not adopt it as a convention that in the sentence “Snow is white”, “is” is the name of my
grandmother. The fact is, we already have conventions governing the use of quotation marks.
One (only one) of them is that words surrounded by quotation marks are to be taken as talked
about (or quoted, etc.) and not as used by the speaker in their normal use. Anyone wishing to
introduce a new convention owes us first an account of how it squares with such existing
1
J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford, 1962), especially lectures II, III, IV. P54
2
W. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, 1960), p.236
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conventions, and secondly, what motivates the introduction of the new convention. But first,
since we already have perfectly adequate use-mention conventions, it is not clear how the
proposed new convention is going to relate to them without inconsistency. Secondly, if one
searches in the literature for any motivation for the 'convention' that quotation marks around a
word or other expression make a completely new proper name one finds only various false views
about language, e.g., “the fundamental conventions regarding the use of any language require
that in any utterance we make about an object it is the name of the object which must be
employed, and not the object itself. In consequence if we wish to say something about a sentence,
for example, that it is true, we must use the name of this sentence, and not the sentence itself.”
One's only reply can be that there is no such fundamental convention. Bits of discourse or other
oral or visually presentable items can quite easily occur in discourse as the topic of the discourse.
Another difficulty with the analysis arises from my desire to state the conditions without certain
forms of circularity. I want to give a list of conditions for the performance of a certain
illocutionary act, which do not themselves mention the performance of any illocutionary acts. I
need to satisfy this condition in order to offer a model for explicating illocutionary acts in
general; otherwise I should simply be showing the relation between different illocutionary acts.
However, although there will be no reference to illocutionary acts, certain institutional concepts,
such as e.g. “obligation”, will appear in the analysans as well as in the analy sandum; I am not
attempting to reduce institutional facts to brute facts; and thus there is no reductionist motivation
in the analysis. Rather, I want to analyze certain statements of institutional facts, statements of
the form “X made a promise”, into statements containing such notions as intentions, rules, and
states of affairs specified by the rules. Sometimes those states of affairs will themselves involve
institutional facts.
Sometimes the descriptor may not even be true of the object referred to and yet the reference is
successful. Whitehead offers a good example: speaker, “That criminal is your friend”, hearer,
“He is my friend and you are insulting”.
In such a case the hearer knows quite well who is being
referred to, but the referring expression, far from being an identifying description, contains a
descriptor which is not even true of the object. How does this square with the principle of
identification? If we are not careful, such examples are likely to fool us into supposing that there
must be much more to referring than just providing identification, that referring must involve a
special mental act or at least that every successful reference pre-supposes, besides an existential
statement, an identity statement: “The object described by the descriptor is identical with just the
one I mean”. But all this would be incorrect. In the above example there is nothing mysterious, it
is clear that the context is sufficient to provide an identifying description, for the word “that” in
“that criminal” indicates that the object either is present or has already been referred to by some
other referring expression and that the present reference is parasitic on the earlier. The descriptor
“criminal”
is not essential to the identification, and though false it does not destroy the
identification, which is achieved by other means.
3
A. Tarski, 'The semantic conception of truth', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 4 (1944);
reprinted in H. Feigl and W. Sellars (eds.), Readings in Philosophical Analysis (New York, 1949).
4
Alston in effect tries to analyze illocutionary acts using only brute notions (except the notion of a rule).
As he points out, his analysis is unsuccessful. I suggest that it could not be successful without involving
institutional notions. Cf. W. P. Alston, 'Linguistic Acts', American Philosophical vol. I, no. 2 (1964).
5
Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (Cambridge, 1920), p. 10.
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The view that there could be a class of logically proper names, i.e., expressions whose very
meaning is the object to which they are used to refer, is false. It isn't that there just do not happen
to be any such expressions: there could not be any such expressions, for if the utterance of the
expressions communicated no descriptive content, then there could be no way of establishing a
connection between the expression and the object. What makes this expression refer to that
object? Similarly the view that proper names are “unmeaning marks“,
that they have 'denotation'
but not 'connotation', must be at a fundamental level wrong.
Conclusion
Through a rigorous examination of promising as an illocutionary act, this paper delineates the
complex interplay between intention, institutional norms, and linguistic performance. By
articulating a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for a successful and non-defective
promise, it clarifies what is at stake in the act of making a commitment through speech.
Furthermore, the exploration of reference reveals that successful linguistic identification often
relies more on context and pragmatic understanding than on semantic precision or descriptive
accuracy.
The paper argues against the viability of logically proper names and against simplistic accounts
that treat proper names as devoid of meaning. It also criticizes misguided proposals to redefine
quotation conventions without regard to existing linguistic practices. These discussions
underscore the need for a nuanced approach to both meaning and reference—one that respects
the complexity of language as a social and institutional phenomenon.
Ultimately, this work contributes to the philosophical project of understanding how language
functions not merely as a vehicle for conveying information but as a tool for performing actions
and enacting social relations. Such understanding requires careful attention to both the rules that
govern language and the contexts in which it is used.
REFERENCE
1. Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words (Vol. 88). Oxford University Press. (See
especially Lectures II, III, IV, p. 54)
2.
Quine, W. V. O. (1960). Word and object. MIT Press. (p. 236)
3.
Tarski, A. (1944). The semantic conception of truth. Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research, 4(3), 341–375. Reprinted in Feigl, H., & Sellars, W. (Eds.). (1949). Readings in
philosophical analysis (pp. 341–374). Appleton-Century-Crofts.
4.
Alston, W. P. (1964). Linguistic acts. The American Philosophical Quarterly, 1(2), 5–16.
5.
Whitehead, A. N. (1920). The concept of nature. Cambridge University Press. (p. 10)
6.
Mill, J. S. (1949). A system of logic (Book I, Chapter 2, Para. 5). Longmans, Green.
(Original work published 1843)
6
J. S. Mill, A System of Logic (London and Colchester, 1949), book I, chapter 2, para. 5.
