Quite interesting discussion over at Peirce-L on Peirce and Speech Act theory. Joseph Ransdell suggested that Peirce had a notion of speech act somewhat like Austin, except that Peirce starts with an analysis of assertion. Given Peirce's notion of continuity, it follows that assertions come in degrees. Thus it ranges from a mere suggestion to the force of command with our normal more neutral sense of assertion being in the middle. Speech acts then become modifications from the assertion as the exemplary case of a speech act. Thus a suggestion is a weak assertion, a question a very weak one, and so forth. What is most interesting, and what I've long struggled with, is the meaning of a proposition. For Peirce a proposition is a possible assertion.
This is important since possibilities are so important for Peirce - far more foundational than I think they tend to be in most analytic philosophy where the "actual" is taken as more foundational. Perhaps I'm simply reading him through too much of a Heideggarian lens. Peirce, however considers all thinking as a kind of dialog with ones future self. Ransdell emphasizes this point a great deal. (In a way Peirce's emphasis of dialog as essential to philosophy makes him much more of an heir to Plato than most philosophers) If propositions are possible or potential assertions, then their role in thought makes a lot of sense and avoids a lot of the problems other discussions of propositions have had. The problem is that Aristotle divorced propositions from dialogs, thus losing that nature of possibility, and rendering them the problematic character they've often held.
Remembering . . . that philosophy is a science based upon everyday experience, we must not fall into the absurdity of setting down as a datum and starting-point of philosophy any abstract and simple idea, as Hegel did when he began his logic with pure Being; but we must set out from ideas familiar and complex, as Hegel began his greater masterpiece by considering a man sitting under a tree in a garden in the afternoon. We must not begin by talking of pure ideas, -- vagabond thoughts that tramp the public roads without any human habitation, -- but must begin with men and their conversation.
We are familiar with the phenomenon of a man's expressing an opinion, sometimes decidedly, often otherwise. Perhaps it will be a mere suggestion, a mere question. Any such suggestion that may be expressed and understood relates to some common experience of the interlocutors, or, if there is a misunderstanding, they may think they refer to some common experience when, in fact, they refer to quite different experiences. A man reasoning with himself is liable to just such a misunderstanding. About this common experience the speaker has something to suggest which is supposed to be new to his auditor. Now this suggestion will be found inductively, by the examination of instances, to consist invariably in this, that if the auditor or any other man will act in a certain way, more or less vaguely described, he will find that common experience to connect itself with a new experience after a fashion analogous to other connections of experiences, which have made this mode of connection familiar to both parties.
For example, if example be needed, suppose a man to go out of his house at night and see the light of a distant fire in the sky. He meets a neighbor and remarks, "There is a fire." If he had only said "a fire exists," he would have conveyed next to no meaning at all. Not quite no meaning, since the remark would even so refer to that universe that is familiarly known to both men. But in saying "There is a fire," he refers to the common experience of that very place and time, and virtually says that if the second person will raise his eyes and look about him, he will find the common experience of that place and time to connect itself with the experience of a light as of a fire, the mode of connection being the familiar one that the speaker indicated.
Let us take another example. Let the second man, having seen the fire, ask "Would you say, now, that that fire was about three miles away?" This virtually suggests that if the first man or any other man will fill his purse, and take ship, and go to Westminster, and break into the houses of parliament, and bring away the standard yard, and lay it down repeatedly on the ground from where the two stand to where the fire is, and utter the cardinal numbers in their order as the successive layings down proceed, or if he will perform any other experiment virtually amounting to that, then the last number uttered might be 5280, and if it should prove to be a number near to that, he might not be surprised. Extensive experience leads us to expect that if an experiment virtually amounting to that were tried a hundred times, different numbers would be obtained which would cluster about one of them, and that among a million trials the clustering would be still more marked, according to a law well-known to mathematicians. It is possible, no doubt, that if our experience were still more extensive, we should find that if the experiment were tried, say, more than a billion times, then a new phenomenon would emerge and the oftener it was tried the less marked might grow the clustering. Our hope, however, in endeavoring to make a measurement extremely precise, is that there is a certain value toward which the resultant of all the experiments would approximate more and more, without limitation. Having that hope, the Berkeleyan theory [JR: in context, Peirce’s theory] is, that whenever we endeavor to state the distance, all that we aim at is to state as nearly as possible what that ultimate result of experience would be. We do not aim at anything quite beyond experience, but only at the limiting result toward which all experience will approximate, -- or, at any rate, would approximate, were the inquiry to be prosecuted without cessation. And the theory is that so it is with all attempts at knowing anything more than what we immediately experience. (Peirce, CP 8:112)
Also see two other longer excerpts from Peirce I've linked to before. The first is on vagueness. The second is on logical analysis.
I meant to add to the end, some comments by Edmund Arens on Austin's and Searle's speech act theory. (From The Logic of Pragmatic Thinking: From Peirce to Habermas, thanks to Geoffrey Sykes at Peirce-L)
. . .Whether the perlocutionary act succeeds or not not depends on the consequences of those actions that go beyond an illocutionary understanding of the speaker's intention and are brought about by understanding..
I cannot fully accept either Austin's emphatic tendency or Searle's tendency to relativize the perlocutionary act to such an extent that it is almost eliminated, and I would therefore insist that the perlocutionary act forms a fundamental part of the theory of the speech act. This is above all because the speaker not only wants to be understood but also must at the same time intend his discourse normally to have effects on the person addressed that are relevant to action. (Arens, 52)
You'll note that one of the big points of attack by Derrida on Searle are quite similar to the above. Searle grounds speech acts around semantics rather than pragmatism. That is there are pragmatic rules which provide the possibility and validity of communicative agreement. Arens references to this as Transcendental Pragmatics and says it is "a reflection about the conditions of the possibility and validity of linguistic communication." Of course the way Habermas attempts to correct this and the way Derrida do are quite radically different. Although perhaps that is my bias due to too much ignorance of Habermas and a recollection of his many anti-Derrida comments.
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