Metaphysics (metaphysical burden),

Read pp.1-5

What do the following terms that Searle uses in his book mean?

The theory of speech acts

A speech act in linguistics and the philosophy of language is an utterance that has performative function in language and communication. According to Kent Bach, " almost any speech act is really the performance of several acts at once, distinguished by different aspects of the speaker's intention: there is the act of saying something, what one does in saying it, such as requesting or promising, and how one is trying to affect one's audience." The contemporary use of the term goes back to J. L. Austin's development of performative utterances and his theory of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts. Speech acts are commonly taken to include such acts as promising, ordering, greeting, warning, inviting and congratulating.

Speech acts can be analysed on three levels:

1. A locutionary act, the performance of an utterance: the actual utterance and its ostensible meaning, comprising phonetic, phatic and rhetic acts corresponding to the verbal, syntactic and semantic aspects of any meaningful utterance;

1. an illocutionary act: the pragmatic 'illocutionary force' of the utterance, thus its intended significance as a socially valid verbal action (see below);

The concept of an illocutionary act is central to the concept of a speech act. Although there are numerous opinions regarding how to define 'illocutionary acts', there are some kinds of acts which are widely accepted as illocutionary, as for example promising, ordering someone, and bequeathing.

According to Austin's preliminary informal description, the idea of an " illocutionary act" can be captured by emphasizing that " by saying something, we do something"

An interesting type of illocutionary speech act is that performed in the utterance of what Austin calls performatives, typical instances of which are " I nominate John to be President", " I sentence you to ten years' imprisonment", or " I promise to pay you back." In these typical, rather explicit cases of performative sentences, the action that the sentence describes (nominating, sentencing, promising) is performed by the utterance of the sentence itself.

1. and in certain cases a further perlocutionary act: its actual effect, such as persuading, convincing, scaring, enlightening, inspiring, or otherwise getting someone to do or realize something, whether intended or not (Austin 1962)

Metaphysics (metaphysical burden),

Metaphysics is a traditional branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world that encompasses it, ^[1] although the term is not easily defined.^[2] Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms: ^[3]

1. Ultimately, what is there?
2. What is it like?

A person who studies metaphysics is called a metaphysicist ^[4] or a metaphysician. ^[5] The metaphysician attempts to clarify the fundamental notions by which people understand the world, e.g., existence, objects and their properties, space and time, cause and effect, and possibility. A central branch of metaphysics is ontology,