SPEECH ACT, CONCEPTUAL INCOMMENSURABILITY AND CROSS-CULTURAL MISJUDGEMENT

Abstract

This essay examines J. L. Austin's Speech Act Theory in which he tries to explicate the pragmatic property of speech by analysing an utterance into locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts, which of a statement, the speaker's correspond to the linguistic property purpose or intention, and the effect a statement produces on the hearer, respectively. Among locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts, however, Austin specially focuses on the importance of illocution and extends his analysis by making a distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary acts in terms of convention. According to Austin, illocutionary acts are conventional because to perform them, the speaker must rely on the socially accepted convention to be able to inspire a social force into his or her utterance. But, perlocutionary acts for him, are not conventional. By insisting on the non-conventionality of perlocutionary acts, Austin's theory undermines the potency of customs. norms and traditions not only on the hearers' understanding and interpretation of illocutions but on their performance of perlocutionary acts. In other words, by categorising perlocutionary acts as not conventional, Austin's theory fails to reckon with the biases and prejudices of distinct conceptual schemes in the performance of acts and is therefore not sufficient for understanding, not only the lived experiences of others, but of discovering the genuineness of their beliefs and the meanings they attribute to their use of words. The essay argues further that Austin's disdain for the role of conventions in the performance of perlocutionary acts is responsible for the infelicities that apparently felicitious utterances in Western cultures encounter in other non-Western societies, and this consequently results in the so-called misfire of utterances which engenders the problem of cross-cultural

misjudgement. The essay however concludes that the challenges of infelicities and misfires and the cross-cultural misjudgements that result therefrom can be overcome through the methodic application of phenomenological epoche, which encourages us to suspend, bracket or set aside our cultural attitudes, biases and judgements, and the principle of charity which requires that we seek to understand the point of view of others from its solidest, most persuasive form, by considering its best. strongest, possible interpretation. This is the only way the investigator can gain rational access into the lived experiences of others and in the process, discover the genuineness of their beliefs and the meanings they attribute to their use of words.