What is a speech act, and why text misfires
Austin's idea was that some sentences do a thing rather than report one, and that the doing can fail in ways a false statement cannot. Written chat fails in exactly those ways.
A speech act is an utterance that does something rather than merely reports something: a promise, a bet, a naming, an apology. The term comes from J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on speech acts uses ‘speech act’ and ‘illocution’ as synonyms.
The reason this is worth five minutes, rather than being a piece of philosophy trivia, is the second half of Austin’s idea. An act can fail without anybody saying anything false, and the commonest way it fails is that the other person does not take it up. Written chat is unusually good at producing that failure and unusually bad at recording it.
Some sentences do a thing rather than report one
Austin’s starting point, quoted in the encyclopedia entry from the opening pages of his book, was that many utterances which look like statements are either not intended at all, or only intended in part, to record or impart straightforward information about the facts. Saying ‘I promise’ is not a report of an inner promise. It is the promising.
The entry sets out the ordinary cases: we christen a ship, pronounce a couple married, appoint someone to a post, declare proceedings open, rescind an offer. None of those sentences can be checked against the world the way a weather report can. They either come off or they do not.
Force is separate from content, and only one of them is written down
Austin’s word for the dimension along which they come off is force. The encyclopedia entry explains why he needed a separate word: construed as a bit of observable behaviour, the communicative significance of an act may be underdetermined by what has been said or observably done. Its example is a deep bow, which might be obeisance, or indigestion, or something else again.
A chat message is exactly that problem in text. The content is on the screen in full. The force, whether the sentence was an offer, a complaint, a joke or a concession, is carried by everything that did not get typed. This is the same gap that conversational maxims and politeness theory approach from their own directions.
A misfire is not the same as a lie
Austin set out the conditions a speech act has to meet to be performed felicitously, and the entry divides the failures into two classes: misfires and abuses. A misfire is the case in which the putative act fails to be performed at all. The entry’s example is a person standing before a ship declaring it named something, who has not named anything, because they lack the authority to do so. An act of speech happened. No speech act did.
This is a different kind of wrongness from a false statement, and it is worth having the vocabulary for it, because a conversation that has gone wrong in this way cannot be repaired by checking the facts. Nothing untrue was said.
The bet that does not exist until you accept it
The entry gives the case that matters most for anyone reading back their own messages. Some attempts misfire because the addressee fails to respond with an appropriate uptake. Its illustration is a bet: one person cannot bet another a hundred dollars on who will win an election unless the other accepts the bet. Without acceptance there was an attempt to bet and no bet.
Read that against a chat window and the asymmetry is plain. Half of what determines whether your sentence did anything at all sits in the other person’s reply, their silence, or the thing they said three days later about something else.
One side of a chat holds the attempt, never the uptake
Portraitor reads one person’s messages. Its home page describes the step where you choose which person to analyse, and says their messages are read while everyone else in the conversation stays as context. That design is the reason the product can state what it does about privacy, and it is also a hard limit on this particular question.
What a portrait of your own side can carry is the attempt: how often you commit to things, hedge, apologise, ask rather than instruct. What it cannot carry is whether any of it came off, because uptake is the other person’s, and on Austin’s account the act is not complete without it. Reading only your own messages is the honest frame for that, and what a chat analysis cannot tell you says the rest of it plainly.
So the useful version of the question is not whether you were understood. It is which acts you keep attempting, and in what words. That one is answerable from your own export, and it is what the uploader on the Portraitor home page actually does. How two people establish that they have understood each other at all is the subject of grounding in communication.
Frequently asked questions
Frequently asked questions
What is a speech act in simple terms?
It is an utterance that performs an action rather than describing one, such as promising, betting, apologising or naming. The encyclopedia entry on speech acts uses the term interchangeably with ‘illocution’, which is Austin’s word.
Who came up with the idea of a speech act?
J. L. Austin, in How to Do Things with Words. The encyclopedia entry quotes his opening pages and credits him with the term ‘illocutionary force’. Searle developed the account afterwards, and the entry discusses his 1968 argument about conditions of successful utterance.
What is the difference between a misfire and an abuse?
Austin’s two classes of failure. A misfire is where the act is not performed at all, for instance because the speaker lacks the authority or the addressee gives no uptake. An abuse is where the act is performed but insincerely.
Can an analysis of my messages tell me if I was understood?
No. Portraitor reads the messages of the one person you choose, with everyone else as context, so the other person’s uptake is not in the material at all. It can report the acts you attempt and the words you use for them.
The sentence was yours. Whether it did anything was never entirely up to you.
Your conversations, read the way you would read someone else’s.
Portraitor takes a chat export you already have, anonymises it in your browser, and returns a structured reading of how you come across. Identifying details are removed in your browser before anything is sent.
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