Re: Speech Acts

On 21 May 2012, at 17:43, Henry Story wrote:
> I have read the Searle/Derrida debate, gathered in Limited Inc [1], last year. 
> But then I don't think I fully understood where Derrida was coming from,
> and have been trying to get some understanding of the big picture. 
> I think I have a bit of a better overview now of the space, and I could re-read 
> it again, but also there are a few books on the  subject which I wanted to read.
> 
>  - "Derrida/Searle, Déconstruction et language ordinaries" Raoul Moati

So I just finished this. 

It is very helpful book, arguing very clearly for an understanding of how the two authors diverge and why, which is pretty difficult to work out if you don't have a good grounding in both philosophies. The author argues that for Derrida there is a phenomenological presupposition of the way intentionality functions which he reads mistakenly into Austin. Where for Searle linguistic conventions, and for Austin context - also understood as conventional games - gives the explanation of an act of language, and so does not imply the need for a (subjective) intention (or at least allows the internal state to differ from what is said ), Derrida tended to read this Husserlian Intentionality into their use of meaning: the intention behind the saying he believed to be the model Searle was using. For Derrida too meaning is conventional, but he believes it is always transforming and changing in a way he believes undermines the idea of the sameness of meaning to lead us to an ontology of the priority of change, or iteration over identity (which seems to echo the title of Deleuze's first book "Différence et repetition"). But this just leads me to think that the next place to look at is Ruth Garrett Millikan, since her biological model of language builds on evolutionary theories, which describe organisms that are of course are always changing and transforming and work with a context ( the eco-sphere ) which is not clearly isolatable but yet which is essential to understanding the life of the organism. 


>  - "Deconstruction and Speech Act Theory: A Defence of the Distinction between Normal and Parasitic Speech Acts"
>     http://www.e-anglais.com/parasitic_sa.html
>  - In Millikan's "Language: A Biological Model" 'Proper Function and Convention in Speech Acts'
> 
> I am not sure if Nissenbaum speaks of speech acts yet, but she speaks of context and its importance to privacy, 
> which is I think part of how this ends up getting to be interesting to the philosophy of the web. 
> 
>  in my "Philosophy of the social web" slides 40-47 I cover a little bit the relation between speech acts
> and HTTP requests on the world wide web.
> 
>  That is probably enough for the moment. 
> 
> My guess is that the language games for the forms of life of humans before the internet, 
> such as Searle, Austin, Wittgenstein and Derrida were, may no longer apply to forms of 
> life with computers (us), where things that resemble human speech acts but are not
> quite the same, (perhaps these are document acts) come to be very useful. I think that
> should perhaps bring a new angle to the debate.
> 
> 	Henry
> 
> 
> [1] http://www.amazon.com/Limited-Inc-Jacques-Derrida/dp/0810107880
> 
> 
> Social Web Architect
> http://bblfish.net/
> 

Social Web Architect
http://bblfish.net/

Received on Tuesday, 22 May 2012 08:43:55 UTC