Language, philosophy and the risk of failure: Rereading the debate between Searle and Derrida

Continental Philosophy Review

Volumn 35, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 117-133

  Kenaan, Hagi ^a  

^a TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY   (Israel)

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EID: 52649168382     PISSN: 13872842     EISSN: 15731103     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1016583115826     Document Type: Review

References (38)

1. This assumption is so deeply rooted that it prevails in the whole spectrum of the literature, from textbooks on communication and linguistically-oriented treatments of the subject to the most sophisticated philosophical accounts. I quote just a few examples. Cf. A. Akmajian, R. Demers, and R. Harnish, Linguistics: An Introduction to Language and Communication (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), pp. 391-392:
2. "Linguistic communication is easily accomplished but, as it turns out, not so easily explained; any theory of linguistic communication worth the title must attempt to answer the following question: How does successful communication work?" A similar statement can be found in the introduction to the communication theory expounded by Kent Bach and Robert. M. Harnish in Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1979), p. xiii.
3. See also Katz's account of the "communicative act" in The Philosophy of Language (New York: Harper and Row, 1966): pp. 103-104:
4. "The Speaker...chooses some message he wants to convey to his listeners...this message is encoded in the form of a phonetic representation of an utterance by means of the system of linguistic rules with which the speaker is equipped....Hence, because the hearer employs the same system of rules to decode what the speaker employs to encode, an instance of the successful communication occurs [my emphasis]. In the Language of Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975),
5. Fodor puts the question of communication as follows: "The fundamental question that a theory of language seeks to answer is: How is it possible for speakers and hearers to communicate by the production of acoustic wave forms? To put it more precisely: under certain conditions the production by speaker S of an acoustic object U which is a token of a linguistic type...suffices to communicate a determinate message between S and any other suitably situated L-speaker. How is this fact possible?" p. 103. Further on (p. 106), Fodor explicitly presents successful communication as the "paradigm case" for his investigation. The fact that the terms "model of communication" and "model of successful communication" are typically, and uncritically, interchangeable in the literature is even evident in Gareth Evans's renowned The Varieties of References (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 21. Introducing the Fregean "model of the communicative situation" which "serves as a clear and effective benchmark" for his investigation, Evans interchangeably speaks of the "Fregean model of successful communication."
6. See, for example, The Philosophy of Language, ed. A.P. Martinich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 103: "Austin presented a tentative...theory of speech acts in How to Do Things with Words. John Searle substantially revised that theory and presented what has since become the standard theory in Speech Acts"
7. Jacques Derrida's "Signature Event Context"
8. and John Searle's "Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida"
9. first appeared in the form of a polemic in Glyph 1 (1977).
10. Derrida's reply to Searle, "Limited Inc abc," appeared in Glyph 2 (1978).
11. They were reprinted together with "Signature Event Context" in Limited Inc, ed. G. Graff (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988).
12. For a critical discussion of "Derrida's Austin" which resists the common temptation to reproduce the patterns of the debate, see Stanley Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 55-127.
13. Jacques Derrida, "Signature Event Context," Glyph 1, (1977): 15. Hereafter, SEC.
14. J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J.O. Urmson and M. Sbisa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 21.
15. Derrida, SEC, p. 15.
16. Derrida, SEC, p. 17.
17. John Searle, "Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida," Glyph 1 (1977): 198. Hereafter, Reply,
18. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, tr. C.K. Ogden (London: Routledge, 1981), p. 78, 4.116.
19. Searle, Reply, p. 203.
20. Searle, Reply, p. 204.
21. Searle, Reply, p. 204.
22. As Searle points out, "parasite" utterances are not simply more complicated than standard cases but are, in fact, logically dependent on the standard. "The existence of the pretended form of the speech act is logically dependent on the possibility of the non-pretended speech act" (p. 205).
23. Searle, Reply, p. 205.
24. In A Pitch of Philosophy, Cavell provides an alternative reading of Austin's "exclusion": "It is hard to conceive that one who has read through Austin's comparatively small quantity of writing will fail to recognize that the headings Austin suggests for what the doctrine he has just excluded is a doctrine or a theory of-'extenuating circumstances' and 'factors reducing or abrogating the agent's responsibility' (which Austin places in quotation marks as indicating, I assume, that he is quoting something he takes as well enough known to need no more than reminding of)-are headings that refer to Austin's own work on excuses, summarized, as said earlier, in one of his thirteen collected papers. ...I accordingly conclude that Austin has excluded this general doctrine only from explicit discussion in How to Do Things with Words ('I am not going into the general doctrine here'), that in saying so he is implicitly including it, in his way, in asking us to 'remember' its pertinence" (p. 86). And thus, according to Cavell, one should read Derrida as having "iterated Austin's views without knowing this piece of them."
25. For Derrida, Austin is clearly the most interesting and radical philosopher in the Anglo-American tradition of the philosophy of language (SEC, p. 13). In this respect, his critique of Austin is a fortiori a critique of the philosophical tradition to which Austin belongs.
26. SEC, p. 17.
27. Although a successful communicative outcome is in itself not always the sole purpose of communication - serving as a means for achieving other ends - it is nevertheless commonly regarded as communication's principal aim among a series of objectives ordered by the relation of means to ends.
28. Indeed, it should not be surprising that the term " communication" serves to designate the act itself, its constitutive purpose, and the fulfillment of that purpose in the act's successful outcome.
29. Robert B. Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 160.
30. Brandom, Making It Explicit, p. 259.
31. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, p. 22.
32. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, p. 22.
33. See, for example, how A.P Martinich introduces the "elements of communication" in the opening of his Communication and Reference (Berlin and Hawthorne, NY: Walter de Gruyter, 1984): "At least three things are needed in an act of communication: a message, a sender, and a receiver...human beings however cannot communicate with one another except through some medium that carries the message from the sender to the receiver...for a philosophical treatment of communication in general, then, we need to consider four element: message, sender, receiver, and medium."
34. William G. Lycan, Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 189.
35. Brandom, Making It Explicit, p. 469.
36. Brandom, Making It Explicit, p. 370.
37. Stephen Neale, "Context and Communication," in Definite Descriptions, ed. Gary Ostertag (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), p. 321.
38. Derrida, SEC, p. 17.