Armchair: The philosophical method
The early work on speech acts was dominated by philosophical approaches. In his William James Lectures delivered at Harvard in 1955, the philosopher J. L. Austin developed his theory of speech actions as a reaction to logical positivism (published posthumously in 1962, revised 1975). Language, he argued, was not only used to make true or false statements, but it was used to carry out actions, to promise, to apologize, to ask and so on. Such actions are not true or false; they are felicitous or non-felicitous (see Allen 1998 for an overview). John R. Searle, also a philosopher, developed and systematized Austin’s account. He provided a detailed account of the structure of illocutionary acts with the example of promises.
In order to give an analysis of the illocutionary act of promising I shall ask what conditions are necessary and sufficient for the act of promising to have been successfully and non-defectively performed in the utterance of a given sentence. (Searle 1969: 54)The analysis proceeds by stating four different types of rules, viz the propositional content rule, the preparatory condition, the sincerity condition and the essential condition (see Nature – Armchair – Philosophical for an application of such an analysis to compliments).
For a discussion of this method in connection with a particular set of research questions see: