Philosophy of Language or Speech Acts' Philosophy (original) (raw)

In this paper I address the question of the philosophy of language. Not exactly as a philosophy of a faculty – the capacity, for example, to speak a language –; not as a philosophy of a universal structure, or logic, or grammar, that would express itself through all the particular languages that the people speak, but mainly as a practice, a social practice of action and communication. For this, I will build on what is usually called as the Speech Acts Theory. My point is that the philosophy of language, as we usually understand it, at least in the analytic philosophy, grew as a response to a logical and epistemological questioning. Most of the authors that are currently quoted were first concerned with the question of the foundations of science, and in particular of mathematics that they addressed by growing what we call today the modern logic, a highly formalised and mathematized logic that did not exist in Kantian times. In the nineteenth century, however, mathematics not only made a leap forward, asserting themselves as a purely rational science, cutting its last links with empiricism – with intuition, to use Kant concepts – but provided also new ways to think logic and to analyse the inferences’ relations. Logic grew as a powerful tool, so powerful that some philosophers thought it could henceforth absorb – and justify – all the other sciences, including the mathematics themselves. This was the time of logicism. I will try to show, today, that there is an alternative to the philosophy of language, which is usually known under the name of “Speech Acts Theory”. This theory, which was put forward by John Langshaw Austin (1911-1960) and by John Roger Searle (1932 - ), sees language as a social and communication practice, that requires to be considered as such. I will introduce it briefly and discuss some of its main thesis. I do not aim to present here a comprehensive view of all the concepts proposed by Austin and Searle. But I would like to highlight at least the main differences between the philosophy of language and the speech acts theory. I hope that, by doing so, I will also be able to show you that this theory opens new ways to understand the language and could be a genuine alternative to the philosophy of language.