This week we explore 'speech act theory', the idea that our speech acts and whether _how_ it acts depends on the audience. We ask: should philosophy be done from the armchair, or do philosophers need to go and find out what people really think? Note: this episode discusses issues around sexual consent and non-consent.
Today we are examining speech acts and uptake. A central contribution from J. L. Austin has been the idea that our speech sometimes doesn’t only say things – sometimes it does things. When we speak, we don’t only convey content or information. We sometimes also - for instance - promise, name, refuse, or order: in short, our speech sometimes acts.
And that has prompted a great deal of philosophical debate over when speech acts are successfully performed, and whether that depends on the effects on the audience. This might sound like an esoteric matter, but philosophers think that thinking about how – and when- speech does things has implications for what we should think of pornography, and for when people really consent to sex.
Our guest today is Dr Sarah Fisher, a Research Fellow here in the department of political science on a cross-disciplinary project on the ethics of content moderation on social media and the future of free speech online, funded by UKRI.
Mentioned in this episode:
Some references suggested by Sarah for further reading:
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
speech, uptake, speech act theory, people, refusal, refusing, act, performed, vignettes, intuition, audience, judgements, pornography, philosophers, matter, langton, case, argues, view, paper
SPEAKERS
Sarah Fisher, Emily McTernan
Emily McTernan 00:06
Hello. This is UCL Uncovering Politics. And this week, we ask: should philosophy be done from the armchair or do philosophers need to go out and find out what people really think? And we'll explore the idea that our speech acts perhaps in ways that depends on the audience.
Hello. My name is Emily McTernan. And welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics, the podcast of the School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at University College London.
Today, we are examining speech acts and uptake. A central contribution from JL Austin has been the idea that our speech sometimes doesn't only say things – sometimes it does things. When we speak, we don't only always convey content or information. We sometimes also, for instance, promise, name, refuse, or order, amongst other things. In short, our speech sometimes acts.
And that has prompted a great deal of philosophical debate over when speech acts are successfully performed, and whether that depends on their effects on the audience. This might sound like an esoteric matter, but philosophers think that thinking about how and when speech does things has implications for what we should think about pornography, or when people really consent to sex.
Usually, philosophers thinking about speech acts think from the armchair. But today we will be discussing a paper that goes and investigates what people really think. Our guest today is Dr Sarah Fisher, one of its authors, and a Research Fellow here in the Department of Political Science on a cross-disciplinary project on the ethics of content moderation on social media and the future of free speech online funded by UKRI.
Welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics, Sarah. It's great to have you with us.
Sarah Fisher 01:40
Thank you very much, Emily, it's fantastic to be here.
Emily McTernan 01:43
Let's dive straight into speech act theory. So speech act theory has become very popular amongst philosophers. But let's start with the basics.
Could you explain a bit to our listeners about speech act theory, and what it tells us about how speaking performs actions? How can things be done with words?
Sarah Fisher 01:58
Yeah, so as you said in the intro, we really have to go back to the middle of the 20th century and a philosopher called John Langshaw Austin, because Austin noticed something really interesting about speech – that we don't just say things and mean things when we speak, but we actually do things with our words.
And so for example, when two people stand at the altar, and say 'I do', they're not just expressing their commitment to one another, but they're actually enacting a marriage – they're changing their marital status and their legal status. And when a judge issues a verdict in a court of law, they're not just expressing their opinion about whether the defendant is innocent or guilty, but they're making that person innocent or guilty in the eyes of the law. And even just in less formal situations, if you say, 'I bet you this' or 'I promise you that', you're taking on some commitments that you didn't have before, and so you're changing your moral status, even if not your legal status.
And so, as you quite rightly said, speaking is not just a matter of capturing information about reality and communicating that amongst ourselves. But it's actually about changing and shaping our reality, at least our social reality, in certain important and interesting ways. And this was Austin's kind of core insight.
And so speech act theory has kind of grown up in the wake of Austin and thinks about exactly what do we do with our words and how do we do that.
Emily McTernan 03:36
Fantastic. And, as you've said, it's become kind of increasingly modern – it's grown up. And it's become really important in philosophy and in moral and political issues within philosophy.
I wonder if you could talk to us a little bit about that. What's made it so relevant and interesting to the philosophers?
Sarah Fisher 03:51
Yeah, that's right. There's been a real explosion of interest in speech act theory over the last maybe 15 to 20 years. And I think that's been sparked in large part by the work of a philosopher called Rae Langton.
So Langton argues that speech can sometimes do quite dubious things, including subordinating people.
And so she argues in particular that pornography is a type of speech that falls into this category. Now, you might think that sounds a bit strange. We don't normally talk about pornography as being a type of speech. So does it really count as speech?
But Langton is looking across the Atlantic to court cases and legal scholarship in the US, where there's been debates about whether pornography is protected by the First Amendment which provides the right to free speech. And so we might accept them that pornography can be seen as a type of speech.
And then the question is: well, what does Langton think is is particularly problematic or bad about pornography? And what she says is that it ranks women as inferior, it legitimates discrimination, and it deprives women of power. So it's not just that it has these effects downstream, as it were, but that pornography is actually an act of subordination. So yeah, it's an act of subordination that subordinates women.
And so, as you can imagine, this has been quite a controversial argument that has provoked lots of debates. And that's not just been about the case of pornography, but also more broadly, whether speech can subordinate other social groups.
And I think this is a debate which has kind of evolved in tandem with a growing recognition of the deep effects of power imbalances in society, and also a pivot in the philosophy of language, in particular, towards ethical and social and political concerns. So there's been this kind of general trend, and a real growing interest in, what speech act theory can tell us about these kinds of issues.
Emily McTernan 06:10
And you said that there's been an interest moving away from the pornography case to other kinds of ways in which speech can subordinate other groups. Could you give us a couple of examples?
Sarah Fisher 06:19
So one of my colleagues, one of one of the coauthors on this paper, does really fascinating work in speech act theory, about how consultation processes that some governments run can end up perhaps subordinating certain groups that aren't listened to or heard in the right kind of way. And so this uses the framework and the tools of speech act theory to look at kind of specific legal and political instance.
That's just one example. But, of course, there are many more.
Emily McTernan 06:56
So let's turn now to one of the central issues investigated in the paper – the central issue investigated in the paper – uptake. I guess this is one of the tools you were talking about in speech act theory.
So could you tell us what is uptake? And why is it taking to be so important when we're thinking in terms of speech beings a way of acting and not only saying something?
Sarah Fisher 07:13
Yeah, absolutely.
So uptake is about whether the audience recognises what speech act is being performed. And one part of Langton's argument that's particularly important regarding uptake and regarding our paper concerns silencing.
So Langton argues that such as the power of pornography to kind of shape how we understand things, that women might end up in a situation where even though they literally say 'no' in response to a sexual advance, they might end up being unable to perform that act of refusal. And that's a very specific kind of silencing which occurs, because the audience – the man in this case – just understands that 'no' not as an act of refusal, but perhaps as an act of consent or something else. And so the very fact that the audience doesn't recognise a certain utterance to be a refusal makes it the case, according to Langton, that that refusal has not been performed.
And so this relates to a kind of general philosophical claim in speech act theory, which is that uptake – audience uptake – is a necessary for a speech act to be performed. So I can only warn you or ask you a question or make you a request or make a promise if you understand that that's what I'm doing. And if you don't understand that that's what I'm doing, or you think I'm doing something else, then I failed to do that thing.
Emily McTernan 08:59
So it's a tricky case, this case of refusal. So is the claim here, just to be really clear, the claim is that when the woman says 'no', and it's not heard as 'no', she's failing to refuse or she's failing to successfully perform the refusal? I mean, it sounds like we're saying she hasn't really said 'no'. But that's not what you mean quite, is it.
Sarah Fisher 09:16
That's not what Langton-
Emily McTernan 09:18
-Yeah, sorry, I put the words into your mouth. That sounds like a strange thing to say at first blush, right? Because you might say it's sort of letting the man off the hook by saying, 'Oh, no, she hasn't refused, even though she clearly said no'.
Sarah Fisher 09:26
I think that's exactly the worry. And that's why there's been so much controversy and discussion about this in the silencing literature. And I think it is a strong claim.
So the claim is that the woman said 'no', but it might be that she hasn't refused. Now, that's not to say that she has consented, but still, she has failed to refuse. She has not refused, because of the lack of uptake. And so that's something which a lot of people have wanted to resist.
And indeed, that was the motivation behind this paper that we're talking about today, because one of the coauthors, Leo Townsend, he, I guess, more or less agreed with Langton that insofar as the woman is not understood as refusing, then she fails to refuse.
Whereas I didn't see it like that. I quite disagreed and had the opposite intuition that really, as long as the woman has performed all of these steps, the conventional steps that are required for refusal, then she's performed the speech act of refusal, regardless of whether the audience interprets her as having done so or not.
Emily McTernan 10:52
Great, that's putting out a different position. So one position is it depends on what the audience takes you to be doing. And one position you're going for there is the thought that what matters is the kind of social convention. So if a 'no' is generally understood as a 'no', as a refusal, then that woman providing she's done it in a standard kind of way has successfully refused. Is that correct?
Is there anyone who thinks it's about the intention of the speaker?
Sarah Fisher 11:13
Yes, exactly.
Emily McTernan 11:15
So what I mean to say is 'no', and that's what would count, is that right?
Sarah Fisher 11:19
Absolutely. So there's these three ingredients that are kind of appealed to in speech act theory: conventions – you know, using the right kind of words, having the right kind of authority, in some cases, being in the right kind of social situation; and then there's intention – you know, what's in the speaker's mind, what did they want to do with their words; and then there's uptake – what did the audience actually take them to be doing?
And so there's these three components, and speech act theorists differ as to which ones they think are necessary or sufficient for performing speech acts. And some people think it's kind of a mixture of all of them. And so there's lots of different views you might have about the importance of those.
But you're right that Leo's view was that uptake was at least necessary for performing a speech act, whereas I didn't think it was. So that was our kind of initial dispute.
And it turns out that this reflects a kind of wider argument that's happened in the speech act literature, where some people are quite kind of adamant and think it's sort of obvious that you have to get uptake if you're going to be able to count as performing a speech act. And on the other side, there are people that just think it's absolutely obvious that that's not the case.
And through the literature, people have kind of tried to provide these hypothetical scenarios, little speech situations or conversations, which are designed to elicit people's intuitions and kind of give support for their point of view. But in the end, it looks like we've just got a clash of intuitions here and a bit of an impasse in the literature.
Emily McTernan 13:14
And here's where your paper comes in. So your study is doing something very different than to lots of this work on speech act theory. So rather than thinking about these examples, these vignettes, these intuition pumps, from the armchair, it's a study into how people actually think about the necessity of uptakes or whether uptakes are really needed for us to successfully perform some kind of speech act like a refusal.
So I guess it's clear now what motivates that turn to empirical research. Is it that you're hoping to see a way forward in this impasse in the philosophical debate?
Sarah Fisher 13:43
Yeah, ideally. I mean I don't think it's going to be so straightforward that you can read off, you know: most people think this, then it must be the right answer. That's not necessarily the case.
But we did notice that quite a lot of philosophers talk about what's natural to say about a certain case, and what most people would say, or, you know, they think it would be bizarre to claim that uptake was necessary here, or whatever. And we thought that was an important place here for actually going out and seeing across a larger swathe of ordinary speakers what actually is obvious and natural and bizarre.
So really this kind of empirical research is designed to sort of help understand who's got intuition – who's got ordinary intuition – on their side. And, therefore, which camp needs to present especially powerful arguments in order to overcome those ordinary intuitions if they're going to convince us.
And so we just were interested. We didn't know what to expect. Maybe also among lay people, views are going to be quite polarized, or maybe we'd find that people were really falling into one or other camp and perhaps kind of vindicating that camp's appeals to intuition.
Emily McTernan 15:07
So what would you say to the sceptic who says: perhaps people's first judgements to intuition pump cases or these vignettes that you offer or these cases of 'is it really a refusal' just aren't that informative? Why would we care about unreflective or naive judgements? You might think the philosopher is better suited to telling something really complicated, like is uptake necessary for this speech act to succeed, than just some random person on the street.
Sarah Fisher 15:31
Yeah, and I think this is a good challenge. And it's an important challenge whenever we're talking about empirical kind of intuition work. And it's something that we address in the paper.
You know, ultimately, you might argue that speech act theory is just the kind of thing that's too technical to ask ordinary lay people about. You have to really be kind of embedded in this Austinian theory to really make good judgements about this.
But in a sense, that does go against Austin's kind of ordinary language approach where he and those who follow him do appeal to our intuitions about what somebody is doing and what they mean. And as I said, within the recent literature, you've got quite a lot of people appealing to that ordinary intuition in making their case. And so I think there is a good case for doing this kind of work, even if you're somewhat sceptical about the overall project of experimental philosophy.
Emily McTernan 16:34
And experimental philosophy is this brand-new philosophy that says, actually, in general, we should all be going out there and asking people stuff. So if you want to know what is it to blame someone or when should we blame people, go ask people rather than trying to guess at it as philosophers in the armchair.
Fantastic. So this is an example of if it. You're right – it does seem like it's particularly pressing in these cases where it's meant to be a bit of ordinary language philosophy. You might think it really matters what ordinary language looks like.
I do have a question about that, though. Why not go and look at, if you like, speech acts in the wild, rather than vignettes? So the paper is carried out through asking people I think about a series of vignettes – a series of cases, and what do they think's happening in the cases. Is there any drawback to doing that rather than trying to look at how people normally talk and understand each other in the wild?
Sarah Fisher 17:19
Yeah, I think there would be a place for such investigation as well. So you could do a kind of corpus study and try to see how people individuate speech acts. But I think it would probably be somewhat difficult to get at people's judgements about the role of uptake.
So what we were trying to do was to see whether people thought that a speech act was still performed, despite the fact that the audience didn't think that speech act was being performed. So you're going to have to try and find some very specific cases. I'm not sure how easy that would be, looking through a corpus.
But I think you're right that if it could be done, it would give it would complement the research that we've done here by giving a kind of more natural, yeah, more natural view of how people actually behave in conversational environments. But yeah, we were looking from a kind of third personal perspective in order to try and isolate specific differences between the cases and see how people responded to those.
Emily McTernan 18:31
Great. And were you worried about that framing effects of the vignettes or the way that they might be introducing confounding features? There is one that you consider in the paper. I wonder if you could talk to us a bit about the challenges you find coming up with other kinds of vignettes to get exactly the intuitions you wanted and not something else that was coming in in the background.
Sarah Fisher 18:47
Yeah, absolutely. And I think this was the most difficult thing about the project is trying to come up with these vignettes without introducing other confounds. In other words, are there differences between the vignettes that might be affecting people's judgements rather than the ones you're trying to probe?
And so we redrafted and redrafted these vignettes lots and lots of times and sent them around our friends and colleagues asking them for their opinions. And we managed to kind of remove some of the problems. But yeah, it's very, very difficult not to introduce confounds.
And so I think we did initially have some vignettes about thanking, but we ended up taking those out because the feedback we got was that it's just very difficult to do an indirect kind of thanking. So either you say the words 'thank you' and then it's very difficult to see that as anything other than a thank you, or you say something much more loose and indirect, and then it's quite difficult to see it as a thanking. So that was particularly difficult, and we ended up kind of having to move away from that speech act and towards the four that we ended up with, which were telling, refusing warning and promising.
Emily McTernan 20:09
That's fascinating about 'thank you'. So it turns out that's a very easy speech act to do or it's very hard for it to not get uptake, unless we do something very strange when we thank people. Is that right?
Sarah Fisher 20:19
I guess so. I think we had in our vignette... We didn't want to have a case where it said 'thank you' because it's very difficult then I think for people to imagine what else somebody could have been doing apart from thanking. They might be doing something in addition, but at the very least they're thanking somebody. So then we have-
Emily McTernan 20:38
-A sarcastic 'thank you'?
Sarah Fisher 20:41
Sarcasm is really tricky. And that was another difficulty we face because in speech act theory this is seen as a kind of non-serious use of language, which falls into another category. So we had to also try to avoid things like sarcasm and irony, things like actors performing on a stage also as kind of non-serious use of language. So we ended up... And insincerity was another tricky one. So there are some cases where you can read them in two different ways: either the person is refusing, say, but doing it insincerely, or they're not refusing at all. And that's a very subtle difference that we had to navigate around. So, yes, tricky.
Emily McTernan 21:26
Sounds like coming up with these vignettes was a significant effort.
So let's turn to the results of your study. You consider some features that might make a difference to whether uptake matters. So the stakes of the situation that we're in, the kind of speech act we have – so the warnings or refusals or something else – and what happens after the uptake failure. What turned out to matter?
Sarah Fisher 21:47
We went out with these scenarios. We got people's views on them. And the kind of the big, I guess, the first thing that you notice about the results is that people generally did agree that the speech act had been performed across the board. And that was particularly clear for refusing.
Emily McTernan 22:09
So that's that it didn't matter what the audience thought had happened. So the person who was the person spoken to in your vignette. It just mattered what the person had said? Well, that's the thing that was the dominant feature, not what the audience's response was, is that right?
Sarah Fisher 22:22
Exactly. So we had these little scenarios, and then we would ask people to rate their agreement with a statement along the lines of 'James warned Mary about the lion' or 'Caroline refused John's offer of food'. And then people had to say to what extent they agree with that statement on a seven-point scale.
And most of the time, they were at the top end of that scale – agreeing that James had warned Mary or that Caroline had refused, even though the audience in those cases didn't think that that's what this speaker done. So there was no uptake. So it looks like, at kind of first blush at least, it looks like people think that uptake is not particularly important.
Emily McTernan 23:11
So you were right and your co-author was wrong – that's the way that we think about this.
Sarah Fisher 23:15
I'm very gracious in victory because there are many reasons why we could have accidentally skewed people towards that view. And I think one – we can talk about this maybe later – but one avenue for future research would be to change kind of tweak aspects of the experimental design to see if that view is stable or if it changes.
But yes, it looked like most people were with me. Less so for promising. So there was more ambivalence about our promising cases and whether the speaker had really promised when the promisee didn't think that that's what they've done. Warning and telling were kind of in between refusing and promising.
Yeah, and then so we found these differences between different types of speech acts, which was interesting, especially because one or two people in the literature, including the philosopher Max de Gaynesford, have argued that some speech acts are uptake dependent and some aren't. So rather than taking this kind of absolute view, they think that it depends what speech act you're talking about.
And we did find evidence that people's intuitions are affected by the type of speech. So that was really interesting. And yeah, it looked like refusing people were very adamant, which is also interesting, because that's the one which is really debated in the literature.
Emily McTernan 24:48
Have you got any ideas about the potential explanations? So do you think there are reasons – good reasons – why we behave so differently about promising as opposed to refusal?
Sarah Fisher 24:57
It's really hard to say. So it could be that the nature of the speech act means that it's kind of driving these different judgements. And so people have argued, especially with regards to promising, that there's this kind of reciprocity involved, and so you really need the audience to be on board. Whereas perhaps refusing, there might be a sense that this is something that you have autonomy over. And really it doesn't matter what other people think. So it might be something to do with the nature of the speech act. And that would be kind of the most substantive result.
But it is possible that there was something going on with our cases. And this is why it would be good to try a load more cases to see if this all stands up, because it might be that people were kind of latching on to particular things in the way we worded our case, or the particular situation that kind of made them say different things about the different speech acts. So that's still possible. And I think it would be good in future work to rule that out.
Emily McTernan 26:08
And did increasing the stakes change the intuition? So whether the stakes of the speech succeeding or not succeeding – say, the refusal – changed, did that alter what people thought about the need for uptake?
Sarah Fisher 26:20
It's complicated.
We thought it would. So we noticed that the kind of the dominant case in the literature, the sexual refusal case, the stakes are so high in this case. Whereas you can imagine other refusal cases, and people have come up with them, where the stakes are much lower. And so it might be about refusing food or something – not much hangs on, you know, whether or not you're understood to be refusing. And so we thought, maybe, maybe there would be some important difference.
And we found some evidence for stakes effects, but they weren't uniform and they didn't replicate across all of the parts of our experiments. So for some speech acts, it looked like raising the stakes made people more likely to say that the speech act was performed, despite the lack of uptake, whereas in other cases, it had exactly the opposite effect. So this is one aspect of our findings where I think it would be really good to go away and try and unpick a bit more exactly what was driving those different decisions. So that would be a very interesting thing to do.
Emily McTernan 27:43
I guess would that be a form of interviews with the people who answered the vignettes to see what was the reason you thought this and then that?
Sarah Fisher 27:48
That would be a really nice way to do it, yeah. And so that's one option. And also maybe coming up with even more fine-grained vignettes, potentially.
Emily McTernan 27:59
So it sounds like you got lots of ideas for what's next for speech act research. Is there anything in particular you want to do? So you want to look at the vignettes again. You want to see if the stakes are really making a difference. So what's next? Is that the next part of this research? Or are you seeing yourself going some other direction?
Sarah Fisher 28:13
So I think that those things would be really good first steps to verify the results that we got and to see what's lying under some of those more puzzling effects.
I'm kind of interested... The more I think about this research, the more I think that people's judgements just depend on what speakers could have done or what they ought to have done. So for example, you might think that someone didn't really promise if they failed to say, 'I promise that' because they could have said, 'I promised that', and merely saying 'I will' just leaves it too ambiguous. And so I think that that would be an interesting area to do more work – to look and see, you know, how kind of rich are these judgements and sort of ‘oughts’ and normative questions.
Emily McTernan 29:12
There's a thought that the morals and politics might be coming in at the beginning and not the end. So we sort of see speech act as we get to import this philosophy of language. And it tells us some interesting things about moral and political issues like consent. And you're saying actually maybe our moral and political judgements come in way before that. Is that the thought?
Sarah Fisher 29:27
Right.
Emily McTernan 29:27
Yeah, great. That's a fascinating idea. I look forward to seeing your work on that in future.
And finally, let's link it back the work on speech acts here to your broader project at the moment. So at the moment, you're thinking about content moderation. How is speech at theory going to inform your work on content moderation do you think?
Sarah Fisher 29:46
Yes, so social media platforms are tasked with the unenviable job of having to make thousands, millions of decisions every day about what kind of user posts can be left up on their platform and what kinds needs to be removed or otherwise de amplified to reduce their reach.
And I think that ultimately, what they're grappling with is the question of what speech act did somebody perform. So was this a threat or was it just a bit of political rhetoric? Is this hate speech or is the slur term being used in a kind of empowering way by an in-group member?
So content moderators have to ask these kinds of questions. And that is inevitably going to raise the issue of, well, what determines which speech act was performed? And so then we're right into this philosophical issue of: is it uptake that's decisive; is it the user's intention; is it the conventions that they've used; and what indeed are those conventions once we get into online environments?
And so yeah, these questions, I think, are going to be ultimately at the heart of content moderation. And I think that it's useful to apply the tools of speech act theory to this particular case.
Emily McTernan 31:12
Do you think in this case your coauthor ends up being right and uptake really will matter? You might think the social media platform, what really matters is you're affecting the world. So what matters, in fact, is whether I make a threat and other people think it's a threat, and so they feel threatened, and not, in fact, the question of whether my speech act succeeds, or is that unfair?
Sarah Fisher 31:22
I think that's a really interesting hypothesis. I think, personally I probably still want to resist it somewhat. But I can see the pressure where what you're trying to do in content moderation is to reduce the kind of viral harm. And so it really does matter how audiences interpret things.
On the other hand, you also want to make sure that people are able to express themselves freely, and you don't want them to be beholden to audiences being perhaps unreasonable. So these things have to be weighed up carefully, I think. And this raises questions, especially because the audience in online environments is often so unpredictable. You don't know what's going to happen to your post once you put it out there. So this raises definitely new issues, and tricky ones.
Emily McTernan 32:24
Thank you, Sarah, for that fascinating conversation about experimental philosophy, speech acts, online and offline.
Today, we've been looking at Sarah Fisher's paper, coauthored with Kathryn Francis and Leo Townsend. It's called 'An empirical investigation of intuitions about uptake', and it is available now in Inquiry. As ever, these details are in the show notes for this episode, which will also include a link to the paper.
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I'm Emily McTernan. This episode was researched by Alice Hart and produced by Eleanor Kingwell-Banham. Our theme music is written and performed by John Mann.
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