7.3 Speech act theory and linguistic anthropology

7.3.2Intentions

Although for Austin, as we have seen, having certain intentions is part of the felicity conditions necessary for an utterance to count as action, it is in Searle’s version of speech act theory that intentions assume a central place in the definition of communication:

In speaking I attempt to communicate certain things to my hearer by getting him to recognize my intention to communicate just those things. I achieve the intended effect on the hearer by getting him to recognize my intention to achieve that effect, and as soon as the hearer recognizes what it is my intention to achieve, it is in general achieved. (Searle 1969: 43)

This definition is inspired by Grice’s earlier definition of “non-natural (i.e. conventional) meaning”:

Perhaps we may sum up what is necessary for A to mean something by x as follows. A must intend to induce by x a belief in an audience, and he must also intend his utterance to be recognized as so intended. (Grice [1957] 1971: 441)

To illustrate how this definition works, Grice draws a distinction between a situation in which we try to get a very avaricious man out of a room by throwing some money out of the window and a situation in which we try to get him out by pointing to the door or giving him a little push. Only in the latter case, can we be said to mean (non-naturally) that the avaricious man leave the room. The difference is that in the first case, we can get him to leave without him recognizing our intentions, whereas in the second case we need him to recognize our intentions in order for him to leave.

Rosaldo sees a number of interconnected problems with this view of communication. First, she argues, the emphasis on intentions and their recognition by the addressee places too much emphasis on individual actions and individual achievement. It implies that any form of action is mostly (or simply) “the achievement of autonomous selves, whose deeds are not significantly constrained by the relationships and expectations that define their local world” (1982: 204). This view of social action is a prerequisite to accepting Grice’s and Searle’s logic of argumentation. Without realizing it, when we read about speakers’ intentions in the speech act literature, we forget to ask questions that would enlarge the context of the interaction and force us to find out more about dimensions that are not introduced into the discussion. As Elizabeth Povinelli (1995) points out in her discussion of the role of narratives about the Dreaming

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in Australian courts, the Aborigines’ view of rocks and other objects as intentional beings that can feel, hear, and smell, is incomprehensible to the land commissioner representing the non-Aboriginal community. The only thing he can do is to classify the Dreaming narratives as native “beliefs” which provide evidence for the authenticity of the land claims. But, Povinelli argues, such statements are much more than religious beliefs. They index a set of relations to nature and a set of practices with and in natural environments that are in contrast with the western (capitalist) notion of “labor.” The Belyuen women Povinelli lived with assume that

humans are simply one node in a field of possible intentionality and appropriation. The Dreaming epitomizes the transformation and appropriation of landscapes’, humans’, and animals’ bodies and personalities for reasons individuals and social groups can only try to interpret. [...] Belyuen women compare hunting activities and capitalist wage-labor, saying that the one produces a lightening and lifting of the body while the other produces anxiety and despair.

(Povinelli 1995: 513)

Only if we understand land and humans as interlocutory subjects, can we understand the Aborigines’ notion of leisure as a labor with social and economic value (Povinelli 1995: 514).

This example points to the fact that to engage in interpretation, an activity which includes the assignment of intentionality, involves understanding the relationship between individuals (e.g. speakers and addressees) and the social and natural world within which they operate.

Going back to Grice’s example of how to get rid of an avaricious man, we must realize that there is much cultural content left out in Grice’s description of the situation. As ethnographers, if faced with a situation similar to the one described by Grice, we would want to ask many questions. How was the evaluation of the man being “very avaricious” established? To what extent does this category depend on the specific encounter and/or relationship between people? What notion of social responsibility is implied by the fact that a person would leave the room to get money he sees being dropped from a window? Why are we assuming that the person would not connect the money he finds with our presence and not assume that we are responsible for it? How would responsibility be assigned if the avaricious man were run over by a car while trying to get the money thrown from the window? And so on.

These questions are partly motivated by another claim made by Rosaldo, namely, that for Ilongots attention to social relations seems to be a more central part of communication than interest in individual intentions. In other words,

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Ilongots seemed to Rosaldo more concerned with figuring out how to maintain social relationships than with reconstructing motives and psychological states (see also Duranti 1993a, 1993b; Kuipers 1990: 42–3; Ochs 1982; Schieffelin 1986, 1990; Shore 1982: ch. 10). When Rosaldo was outraged by people not showing up to work with her, they would not give excuses or regrets but present gifts and other things that might help control and soften her anger. Ilongots did not seem interested in evaluating the intentions of the parties involved, but in controlling the potential consequences or effects of the situation as defined by Rosaldo’s reaction. What actually happened earlier seemed to matter less. The apparent lack of interest in factual details and reconstruction of past psychological states is intimately related to what Rosaldo describes as a different theory of person among the Ilongots.

This type of cultural practice can be better accounted for by assuming an institutional view of intentions, as proposed by Wittgenstein, who was wary of psychological explanation for linguistic behavior:

An intention is embedded in its situation, in human customs and its institutions. If the technique of the game of chess did not exist, I could not intend to play a game of chess. In so far as I do intend the construction of a sentence in advance, that is made possible by the fact that I can speak the language in question.

(Wittgenstein 1958: 108, §337)

This perspective is an implicit call for the kind of work that ethnographers do, namely, the documentation of particular practices and their relationships to larger societal institutions and concerns.

One cannot guess how a word functions. One has to look at its use and learn from that. (Wittgenstein 1958: 109, § 340)

Unfortunately, this statement has often been trivialized and reduced to the slogan “meaning is use.” This characterization of his theory misses the complexity of Wittgenstein’s argument about language forms as activities or cultural practices that must be understood within the context of a community of users.

7.3.3Local theory of person

One of Rosaldo’s goals was to “bracket” (in the phenomenological sense of “suspending judgment about”) the notion of speaker as social actor assumed by speech act theorists and thus suggest that it was not a universal notion but a cul- ture-specific one.

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I want to argue here that ways of thinking about language and about human agency and personhood are intimately linked: our theoretical attempts to understand how language works are like the far less explicated linguistic thoughts of people elsewhere in the world, in that both inevitably tend to reflect locally prevalent views about the given nature of those human persons by whom language is used. (Rosaldo 1982: 203)

Rosaldo’s statement means that Searle’s preoccupation with sincerity and intentionality reflects and at the same time reproduces western ideas about human agency. These ideas favor attention to the speaker’s psychological state and pay little attention to the social sphere in which such a putative psychological state is investigated. Speech act theorists do not reflect upon the type of thinking and acting subject that is being implied by their work. This lack of reflexive thinking is a major difference between the analytical philosophical tradition represented by speech act theory and the ethnographically based interpretive work done by Rosaldo, whose critique of speech act theory is reminiscent of Whorf’s critique of commonly held assumptions about human mind and human action based on western European languages:

One significant contribution to science from the linguistic point of view may be the greater development of our sense of perspective. We shall no longer be able to see a few recent dialects of the Indo-European family, and the rationalizing techniques elaborated from their patterns, as the apex of the evolution of the human mind, nor their present wide spread as due to any survival from fitness or to anything but a few events of history – events that could be called fortunate only from the parochial point of view of the favored parties. They, and our own thought processes with them, can no longer be envisioned as spanning the gamut of reason and knowledge but only as one constellation in a galactic expanse.

(Whorf [1940] 1956e: 218)

With the analytical tools of linguistic and interpretive anthropology, Rosaldo recast Austin’s and Searle’s theory of how speakers do things with words as an interesting but rather poor ethnography of western personhood and action. One of the characteristics of the western subject as understood by speech act theorists is that of “an inner self continuous through time” (Rosaldo 1982: 218). It is only on the basis of such an assumption that certain kinds of judgments can be made about sincerity, responsibility, and intentionality. But such an assumption is not

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necessarily shared by all cultures and, in fact, much of contemporary cultural anthropology is dedicated to studying the different ways in which cultures represent the relationship between individuals and their public personae. Whereas Austin and Searle’s perspective privileges the individual’s thoughts and intentions in interpretations, cultural anthropologists like Geertz and, before him, the founders of the “culture and personality” school (see Langness 1987) have tended to emphasize the separation found in many cultures between the private and the public self or the individual and the collective. Although Hollan (1992) is right that some cultural anthropologists have exaggerated the contrast between “western” and “non-western” selves, different ethnographic studies reveal a variety of ways in which context plays a role in the construction of the person. For example, Adjun Appadurai’s (1990) discussion of begging and praise in Hindu India cautions us that the self is not just contained “inside” the individual. It also lives in embodied practices that rely on ritualized, interactive public behavior.

... praise is not a matter of direct communication between the “inner” states of the relevant persons, but involves the public negotiation of certain gestures and responses. When such negotiation is successful, it creates a “community of sentiment” involving the emotional participation of the praiser, the one who is praised, and the audience of the act of praise. Praise is therefore that set of regulated, improvisatory practices that is one route to the creation of communities of sentiment in Hindu India. (Appadurai 1990: 93–4)

To say that there are ritual, aesthetic, hyperbolic, and emotional aspects of begging that are embedded in a “community of sentiment” means that the meaning of one’s words or actions cannot be restricted to what the individual speaker/ actor intends. Culture is more than a shared set of beliefs. It includes practices and predispositions that can only live within a community (see section 2.5).

These ethnographically informed discussions of speech act theory epitomize some fundamental differences between analytical philosophers and contemporary cultural and linguistic anthropologists. Given the variability assumed by ethnographers in the notion of person across cultures (and contexts), any ethnographic discussion of the use of words in social interaction could not just be a factual reconstruction of events but also (or rather) an attempt to describe the participants’ interpretive strategies in deciding which reconstruction is contextually acceptable or more appropriate. This different focus does not necessarily mean that all ethnographers subscribe to a hyper-pragmatistic view of meaning (“truth is whatever works in this context”) but that they do have different

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