Wittgenstein and Speech Act Theory

Although some speech act theorists have denied any real connection between their own work and Wittgenstein’s, anyone who reads essays about speech act theory and then Philosophical Investigations will undoubtedly be struck by the similarities between the two ideas about language. Both begin by rejecting the idea that language can do nothing but state facts about the world; instead, they believe that language has many different uses in human activity. Given these significant similarities, I would like to explore the way in which Austin’s notion of felicitous and infelicitous speech acts might clarify Wittgenstein’s thoughts about language.

For Austin, utterances cannot simply be analyzed as either true or false because not all utterances make claims about the world. Thus, he suggests that it is better to analyze utterances as felicitous or infelicitous instead: felicitous utterances are those that succeed in performing the actions that they attempt, while infelicitous utterances are those that fail. Speech acts can become infelicitous for a variety of reasons, including the fact that they are performed in an improper context, the custom to which the appeal is not in place, and they are performed insincerely, in the absence of the proper intentions.

It is clear in Wittgenstein’s writings that the way in which a word is used determines its meaning. However, sometimes it is hard to know whether any use of a word that an individual might invent would then become a part of the word’s meaning, or if there has to be a certain number of individuals using the word in a new way in order for that new use to become a part of the meaning.

I think that Austin’s notion of infelicitous speech acts could really clear up this ambiguity in Wittgenstein because it allows us to talk about people using words in uncustomary ways without having to wonder whether their uncustomary use is an expansion of the meaning of the word. When someone uses a word in a new way, it is as if she is appealing to a custom that does not exist: there is no custom in which she can ground her use of the word, so the action that she is seeking to perform through her utterance fails, thereby rendering her speech infelicitous. Similarly, if someone were to use a word in the wrong context, we could describe her utterance as infelicitous instead of having to wonder whether we should allow that new use into the meaning.

I do not mean to suggest here that Wittgenstein is incapable of dealing with this issue within his own ideas—because there are more Wittgensteinian ways of addressing it—but I think that the analysis provided by Austin is a much clearer and less ambiguous way of solving the problem because it helps us understand exactly when we are justified in saying that some use of a word is illegitimate.