Speech Act Theory Ancient Rhetoric and C PDF

ALEXANDER ARWEILER (Mnster)
What is a literary speech act? Quintilian, John Searle, and

the notion of constatives
Statements are supposed to be about facts, states of affairs, and true things.
Speech act analysis and rhetoric both investigate the question of what speakers
do when stating something, and what the facts are that speakers refer to. Be-
cause truth and reliability are expectations held strongly in scientific dis-
course, the investigation of statements involves a methodological dimension
which is relevant for understanding the role of ordinary language terms in Latin
criticism. One focus of the following pages will be the question of how speech
act analysis and rhetoric help to describe what facts we may have in mind when
stating facts about statements found in (Latin) literary texts. A leading interest
will be to explore the (not yet fully acknowledged) impact of speech act analysis
and rhetoric on describing the conditions of literary utterances, and to question a
common type of inferring statements about historical or psychological facts (y
was) from statements within a text (x says: y was).1
1. Analyzing concepts and looking for methods
Latinists engage in the study of sentences and the production of sentences about
the sentences they have studied. They work on and with words, meaning, refer-
ence, predication, representation, and a whole lot of other notions regarding the
use of words and symbols. Given this obsession, it is astonishing to note that the
efforts of various disciplines in the 20th century to understand and to analyze
language have left comparatively few traces in Latin scholarship. Especially in
the different branches of philosophy of language, including speech act analysis,
1
I am grateful to Therese Fuhrer and Damien Nelis for their patience and many helpful
suggestions. A preliminary warning may not be out of place: the complexity of the
field, and especially my own ignorance of it, makes the following highly eclectic,
sometimes perhaps misleading. Yet, I think it is worthwhile to start an exploration,
which may get one or another reader interested in following things up in a better way
than I have done. All English translations of Quintilian are taken from: Quintilian, In-
stitutio oratoria / The Orators Education, ed. and transl. by D.A. Russell, 5 vols.
(The Loeb Classical Library), Cambridge 2001.
198 Alexander Arweiler
but also linguistics, logic and epistemology, people are studying what are at the
same time objects of Latin scholarship and its means of communication.2 While
many classicists in the 19th century showed considerable interest in what was
going on in philosophy, it seems that only a few stayed tuned when it became
especially interesting for enthusiasts of the logos, whether it be in logic and epis-
temology after Frege, or philosophy of language in the tradition of Wittgenstein.
This is not to say that there is not, especially in Anglo-American scholarship, an
admirable sophistication in reading ancient texts, but that it is not easy to find a
Latinist who explains why and how s/he uses ordinary words such as to mean,
to intend, to refer to, true or fact, what criteria s/he uses to create a valid
argument, or on what grounds s/he believes a statement about a Latin sentence to
be true or false.3 Most Latinists will agree upon more or less correct uses of the
terms epic, aposiopesis, or cum inversum, but they obviously do not agree
upon the correct uses of ordinary language terms, or, to put it more precisely:
there is no disagreement, but not much interest in possible problems concerning
intensional or extensional meaning, the conditions of reference and inference, or
other key terms of argumentation and linguistic analysis.4
An optimistic account could be that Latinists, like scholars e.g. in social sci-
ences, are working with a kind of systematized common sense and employ
categories that we are all familiar with from our ordinary pretheoretical experi-
2
The Stoic distinction between extensional and intensional meaning, to take an exam-
ple, has been revitalized by Frege and the modern logicians (e.g. Odysseus has no
reference, but a meaning, no extension, but an intension), but has had no impact on
classical scholars; a still useful account is provided by von Kutschera in J. Simon
(Hg.): Aspekte und Probleme der Sprachphilosophie, Freiburg 1974, p. 111-36. R.
Rorty: Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge 1989, p. 3-22 is an enthusiastic
account of what new concepts of truth and language may mean to literary studies and
philosophy.
3
These concerns are methodological, not theoretical in the sense in which some Latin-
ists use the word in opposition to critical practice. Objections to methodology in Latin
scholarship sometimes resemble those objections which P. Grice: Studies in the way
of words, Cambridge 1989, p. 178 discusses as common reproaches against ordinary
language philosophy. On the view that speech act analysis itself is not a theory but
a loose assortment of observations about various aspects of language, on the one
hand, and of its use, on the other, see J.J. Katz: Literal Meaning and Logical Theory,
in: The Journal of Philosophy 78,4 (1981), p. 203-33, here 204, who (somewhat in-
consistently) argues that it was actually two theories which needed to be separated,
one dealing with grammatical and one with extragrammatical features.
4
On one account of intension see e.g. von Kutschera in Simon (n. 2) 136: Die Intensi-
on eines Ausdruckes A ist die Weise, wie A in der Sprachgemeinschaft verstanden
und gemeint wird, und sie wird bestimmt durch die Regeln des Sprachgebrauchs.
What is a literary speech act? 199
ence.5 Actually, we should neither underestimate the success of such working

assumptions in practice, nor overestimate the potential of scientific explanation
as a model for literary studies which is not to say that the level of coordination
and cooperation in the natural sciences would not be a good thing to aim at.6 The
problem arising from a practice that works with a pretheoretical experience of
key terms is that it affects more than just some marginal objects of the field or
small areas of research where single errors are easy to correct (or to ignore): it
affects any sentence spoken or written in academic discourse, even the most
humble ones.
To illustrate these concerns, we may look at how Paul Grice sketched the na-
ture and purpose of conceptual analysis (as part of ordinary language philoso-
phy):
To be looking for a conceptual analysis of a given expression E is to be in a posi-

tion to apply or withhold E in particular cases, but to be looking for a general
characterization of the types of cases in which one would apply E rather than
withhold it. ... the characteristic procedure is to think up a possible general charac-
terization of ones use of E and then to test it by trying to find or imagine a par-
ticular situation which fits the suggested characterization and yet would not be a
situation in which one would apply E. If one fails, ... then one is more or less con-
7
fident that the suggested characterization of the use of E is satisfactory.
Obviously, an inquiry of that kind is a field of its own that the normal reader of
Cicero, Vergil, or Pliny, would hardly be able to cope with, for it would probably
prevent her/him from finishing the very first sentence s/he was about to write
down about Cicero, Vergil, or Pliny. The Gricean description is only one (even if
a very important one) of several approaches, and, additionally, conceptual analy-
5
J.R. Searle: Consciousness and Language, Cambridge 2002, 133 on social sciences;
deductive logic is not apt for practical reason, see J.R. Searle: Rationality in Action,
Cambridge/London 2001, p. 239-67.
6
On different types of explanation in natural sciences see Searle (n. 5), p. 131f.; cf.
Searle ibid. p. 86-9 on intentional explanation and causal explanation. J. Surowiecki:
The Wisdom of Crowds. Why the Many are Smarter than the Few, London 2004, p.
164 argues that scientists knowledge is not cumulative but collective, which
makes their collaboration more successful (demonstrated exclusively for natural sci-
ences, medicine etc, ibid. 158-72). Cf. K.-O. Apel: Auseinandersetzungen in Erpro-
bung des transzendentalpragmatischen Ansatzes, Frankfurt 1998, p. 305 on connec-
ting the conditions of valid knowledge with convention: Es kann vielmehr berck-
sichtigt werden, da ... die Gemeinschaft der Wissenschaftler letztlich durch Konven-
tionen (d.h. sprachlich explizite bereinknfte) die intersubjektive (paradigmatische)
Geltung von ,Grundstzen ... und von ,Basisstzen der empirischen Wissenschaft
(vorlufig) festlegen mu.
7
Grice (n. 3), p. 174.
sis is not meant to teach methods or the right use of concepts.8 However, it may
be an incentive to developing a conceptual awareness which can partially pre-
vent us from errors committed because of a careless use of ordinary language
terms. As Grice, Searle and others have made clear, even in conceptual analysis
there are only concepts with loose boundaries and it can never be an aim to
give a full account of a concept.9 Grice has already mentioned the expressions
used in the professional apparatus of the literary critic as good candidates for
conducting a conceptual analysis, provided that they are expressions which their
users can be in a position to use in particular cases, without being in a position to
say (in general terms) everything there is to be said about how they are used.10
Even if not every critic will be able or willing to conduct a full analysis of every
term s/he uses, the necessity of what I have called conceptual awareness seems
evident.11
It is precisely this conceptual awareness that can be developed by studying
the possible connections between rhetoric, speech act analysis and Latin scholar-
ship. Before starting the discussion, we may consider briefly what hitherto pre-
vented many scholars from becoming interested in these connections.12 One
reason why philosophers did not consider rhetoric is that rhetoricians develop a
notion of speech acts by starting from the possible effects on the audience, which
seem to belong to what Austin called the perlocutionary and which are some-
8
See Grice (n. 3), p. 176: ... dictionaries are designed for people who wish to learn to
use an expression correctly, whereas conceptual analyses ... are not. On the notion of
use cf. Agazzi in L.E. Hahn (ed.): The Philosophy of A.J. Ayer, La Salle/Illinois 1992,
p. 65 who argues that we cannot fully characterize a concept by describing those cir-
cumstances in which we do (or do not) use the corresponding term; we also need to
make clear the point of the concept, that is, to specify what we use the corresponding
term for.
9
Grice (n. 3), p. 177: The fact that there are cases (even lots of cases) where the appli-
cability of an expression E is undecidable ... may prevent one from providing a neat
and tidy conceptual analysis of E; it may prevent one from specifying a set of condi-
tions the fulfilment of which is both necessary and sufficient for correct application of
E. But it does not prevent one from giving any sort of conceptual analysis of E. The
problem was part of a heated debate between Searle and Derrida; on loose bounda-
ries and distinctions always applying more or less, cf. J.R. Searle: Literary Theory
and Its Discontents, in: New Literary History 25,3 (1994), p. 637-67, esp. 637-39.
10
Grice (n. 3), p. 179.
11
A similar position is taken e.g. by W.C. Booth: The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2nd edition,
Chicago 1983 (first publ. 1961), p. 73-5 who discusses the consequences of careless
uses of terms such as theme, meaning, style, sincerity or seriousness.
12
An exception is W.C. Booth: The Rhetoric of Rhetoric. The Quest for Effective Com-
munication, Oxford 2004, p. 67 who mentions ordinary language philosophy as one of
the major rescuers of rhetoric.
times considered irrelevant to a theoretical investigation.13 But it is not the his-

torical effect how a particular audience actually reacted to an utterance (in
spoken or written discourse) that is interesting for rhetoricians, but the question
which conditions would have to be fulfilled in order to make an utterance mean-
ingful and allow it to function in the way the speaker intends it to work. This is
obviously not alien to speech act analysis in general. Furthermore, accounts vary
in the extent to which the perlocutionary is assessed in terms of a necessary di-
mension of communicative acts, and it seems that rhetoric has the potential to
deal with areas, such as the ethical, social, political, or aesthetic communication
within a community, which restrictive approaches cannot account for.14 Another
reason for ignoring rhetoric is that Austins chosen paradigm of a communica-
tion situation has certain helpfully oversimplified features;15 this paradigm has
been substantially enlarged by Searle and others, and it is these additions some
quite recent that, in contrast to earlier studies, have a remarkable affinity to
problems dealt with in rhetoric.16 Finally, rhetoric in Rome (and for the greater
part of its history) comprises theories of persuasion, of communication, of argu-
mentation, and of the uses of language, and it applies concepts from logic, epis-
temology, psychology, or politics; it deals with perception, appropriateness, style
and many other subjects a universal approach to the uses of language that can-
not but be suspect to contemporary academic disciplinarity.17
13
Defenders of logical approaches like Katz (n. 3), p. 230 understand Searles and
Grices theory of meaning as essentially perlocutionary; but cf. Q. Skinner, Conven-
tions and the Understandings of Speech Acts, in: The Philosophical Quarterly 20
(1970), p. 118-138, here 124: For we must distinguish effects of speaking from
speaking for effect: the former is obviously a perlocutionary matter, but the latter
(even if not illocutionary) is not. S. Cavell: Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow,
Cambridge/Mass. 2005, p. 17 suggests that we should pay more attention to the perlo-
cutionary in order to relate speech act analysis and (polemics against) moral judg-
ments.
14
Cavell (n. 13), p. 155-92 closes a gap between speech act analysis and literary/rhe-
torical studies, esp. for the account of perlocutionary acts which he regrets were
ruled out by Austin; cf. ibid. p. 173: We might say: Perlocutionary acts make room
for, and reward, imagination and virtuosity, unequally distributed capacities among
the species. Illocutionary acts do not in general make such room ...
15
Skinner (n. 13), p. 119.
16
For a list of basic principles of Searles philosophy in relation to literary criticism see
Searle (n. 9), p. 640-8.
17
Reductionist (and therefore misleading or false) uses of rhetorical are common even
in Latin scholarship; the term does not imply, or connote embellishment, abuse,
ideology, manipulation, lie, distortion, nor is there any sense in talking about
something being merely rhetorical or just rhetoric (as opposed to true, real, or
authentic) or talking about a rhetorization of Latin literature at some point of its
history. It is at best tautological to ascribe rhetorical to a particular element or use
of language (choice of words, style, composition etc.), because any linguistic utter-
2. The first contact Constatives in Austin and Searle
Austin used constatives to name a class of utterances which comprises state-

ments, assertions, descriptions and similar acts, and his interest in them was at
least partly motivated by their privileged role in philosophical (and scientific)
discourse as having a special relation to truth.18 A considerable portion of
Austins work in How to do things is devoted to testing and refuting criteria for
distinguishing constatives from performatives.19 The investigation ends with an
identification: Once we realize that what we have to study is not the sentence
but the issuing of an utterance in a speech situation, there can hardly be any
longer a possibility of not seeing that stating is performing an act.20 As Austin
had developed, along the way, the central notion of a speech act as being an
utterance of an illocutionary act and a propositional act, statements now appear
in a different light. The truth or falsehood of a proposition can vary according to
the particular circumstances of the utterance, because reference depends on
ance which is different from unarticulated noise can be correctly described as rhe-
torical. On various misunderstandings of the term see Booth (n. 12), p. 4-9; 12-16. T.
Reinhardt/M. Winterbottom: Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, Book 2, Oxford 2006, e.g.
p. 244 on inst. 2,15,1-11; 278 and passim, offer important comments on Quintilians
view (opposing Cicero) that rhetoric is not defined by the telos of persuasion, but is
aiming at bene dicere.
18
J.L. Austin: How to Do Things with Words, 2nd edition by J. Urmson/M. Sbis, Cam-
bridge 1975 (first publ. 1962), p. 3 introduces the notion of constatives in order to
cover descriptive as well as non-descriptive statements; Austin (p. 1) argues that not a
few statements, when scrutinized with more care, turn out to be strictly nonsense, de-
spite an unexceptionable grammatical form; that It was for too long the assumption
of philosophers that the business of a statement can only be to describe some state
of affairs, or to state some facts, which it must do either truly or falsely (p. 1); the
continual discovery of fresh types of nonsense ... has done on the whole nothing but
good (p. 2); cf. on Ayer and Austin Cavell (n. 13), p. 16-9; ibid. p. 176, Cavell sees
in both a zeal to detect the use of metaphysical or other false profundities to avoid
ones ordinary commitments.
19
That statements can go wrong is not just a matter of the proposition involved (p. 52).
Distinctive criteria like true/false for constatives, and happy/unhappy for performa-
tives do fail (p. 54) as well as simple criteria derived from grammar (p. 5f.). That the
same sentence may be used in performative and in constative ways, makes it hope-
less to find a criterion just by describing utterances as they stand (p. 67). Even
though the use of explicit performative markers may be a move towards clarification
and precision (p. 72), it is wrong to consider the constative use as primary in the sense
of simply uttering something whose sole pretension is to be true or false (ibid.).
The use of to argue, to conclude, to infer, to admit, as well as to state and
to maintain is not different from performative uses (p. 85; 90f.). All speech acts
have conditions of unhappiness, and all of them have relations to facts.
20
Austin (n. 18), p. 139.
knowledge at the time of utterance.21 We are dealing with a general dimension

of being a right or proper thing to say as opposed to a wrong thing, in these cir-
cumstances, to this audience, for these purposes and with these intentions (p.
145), and (ibid.): The truth or falsity of a statement depends not merely on the
meanings of words but on what act you were performing in what circum-
stances.22 In order to describe the meaning of a statement, it is a necessary con-
sequence of Austins inquiry that we understand the speech acts meaning to be
determined by the speakers illocutionary intentions, in contrast to the meaning
of a sentence, which is determined by the rules of the language of which the
sentence is a part.23
Understanding that statements are complex speech acts allows us to study the
questions of how an utterance is to be taken and how what is said is to be
understood as part of the given sentence.24 This means that we are able to (and
have to) understand a statement as a speech act that involves a speaker, his/her
attitude towards a proposition, and the proposition itself. Literal meaning is not
confined to the words expressed in the sentence we study. The important disjunc-
tion is (to repeat it): Stating and asserting are acts, but propositions are not acts.
A proposition is what is asserted in the act of asserting ... and an assertion is a
(very special kind of) commitment to the truth of a proposition.25 Propositions
are to be treated, whatever the form of their grammatical appearance may be, as
being that-clauses, which can not but be embedded in a speech act and always
21
P. 144; Austin (n. 18), p. 140 denies that is true is simply equivalent to saying that
someone endorses what s/he expresses. Nevertheless, several types of performatives
overlap with statements, as is indicated by the use of such adverbs as rightly,
wrongly, correctly, and incorrectly (ibid. p. 141).
22
Constatives minimize the expression of the illocutionary in order to simplify the
notion of correspondence with the facts, and the task of speech act analysis is there-
fore to establish with respect to each kind of illocutionary act warnings, estimates,
verdicts, statements, and descriptions what if any is the specific way in which they
are intended, first to be in order or not in order, and second, to be right or wrong;
what terms of appraisal or disappraisal are used for each and what they mean (p.
145-7).
23
Cf. Searle (n. 9), p. 646f. and 651. J.R. Searle: A Classification of Illocutionary Acts,
in: Language in Society 5,1 (1976), p. 1-23, here p. 14 affirms the success of Austins
enterprise: it is saying certain things that constitutes making a statement (suppos-
edly a constative); and (ibid.): Making a statement is as much performing an illo-
cutionary act as making a promise, a bet, a warning or what you have. Any utterance
will consist in performing one or more illocutionary acts.
24
Austin (n. 18), p. 69; 73. Katz (n. 3) denied that Austin and Searle, working in the
tradition of the meaning as use theories, succeeded in substituting the logical ap-
proach and stated the necessity of a theory of performative logical structure as well
as constative logical structure (ibid. p. 232).
25
J.R. Searle: Speech Acts. An Essay in the Philosophy of Language, Cambridge 1969,
p. 29; cf. ibid. p. 26 on the related concept of predication.
are part of the utterance of a speaker.26 The I x that clauses are not to be con-
fused with oratio obliqua, and I x is not merely a description of what follows:
adding a hereby helps to understand that I x is what makes the utterance a
speech act: it is neither report nor description, therefore neither true nor false.27
Stating and asserting share all features of other speech acts, such as the necessity
of a background of knowledge, conditions of happiness, the existence of consti-
tutive rules, conventions, or the independence of the actual syntactical form.28 As
a class of illocutionary acts, constatives (or, in Searles terminology, representa-
tives and declaratives) are characterized by the speakers commitment to the
truth of the proposition, which s/he performs by saying that something is the
case.29 As Searle puts it, it is part of the definition of an assertion that it is a
commitment to truth, and the analysis of statements and assertions shows that
... one can be committed to the truth of a proposition without having any inten-
tional state whatsoever with that proposition as content.30
As the brief summary makes clear, Austin and Searle have detected a number
of neglected features of sentences that were commonly understood as being plain
and simple assessments of facts.31 Besides the general structure of speech acts, it
26
Cf. Searle (n. 25), p. 29: When a proposition is expressed it is always expressed in
the performance of an illocutionary act, and: in the utterance of the sentence, the
speaker expresses a proposition.
27
Austin (n. 18) 69-71.
28
Cf. Searle (n. 5), p. 152: For the expression of any reasonably complex speech act,
such as ... describing the history of the Roman Empire, some system of representation
of a conventional kind is necessary ...
29
On representatives and declaratives see Searle (n. 23), p. 10-6. J.D.B. Walker, State-
ments and Performatives, in: American Philosophical Quarterly 6,3 (1969), p. 217-25
defends the distinction of constatives from performatives by arguing that Austin failed
to give a convincing definition of performatives (ibid. p. 217), and that (ibid. p. 219):
... what cannot be said (asserted, believed) depends on the truth-values of what is
said, and not the other way round. He maintains that statements are categorically dif-
ferent from e.g. promises, because (ibid. p. 220) it is not that one utters the proposi-
tion but what one utters, the proposition itself, that entails some further proposition,
which means that while two statements (p and not-p) cannot both be true, there is no
sense in which saying not-p is inconsistent with saying p.
30
Searle (n. 5), p. 146; J.R. Searle: The Rediscovery of the Mind, Cambridge 1992, p.
185.
31
M. Black: Austin on Performatives, in: Philosophy 38 (1963), p. 217-26, here 225 is
reluctant to agree with Austins general aim. Black (ibid. p. 219) first proposes to say
of an utterance that it is performative when used in specified circumstances, if and
only if its being so used counts as a case of the speakers doing something other than,
or something more than, saying something true or false. An utterance that is not per-
formative is called constative. Regretting that Austin fused performatives and consta-
tives, Black (ibid. p. 220) looks for a new description: An utterance of the form I X
is the notion of a commitment to truth, performed by the speaker in uttering a

statement, that will be of particular relevance in our further considerations. It is
related to Searles observation that constatives (or: representatives) are per-
formed by speakers whose psychological state is one of belief.32 Both notions,
the commitment to truth and the psychological state of belief, are necessary ele-
ments of a correct description of statements, and we see immediately how, on the
one hand, this affects our treatment (and use) of statements which we encounter
in a text we study, and how, on the other hand, these notions connect speech act
analysis with rhetoric. If a statement, no matter how plain, clear, impartial,
and matter-of-fact it may appear, necessarily involves the speakers commit-
ment to the truth of a proposition, the acknowledgment of this commitment is
part of what is intended to be conveyed to the hearer. The speakers authority
endorses the statements authority, and the same is true of linguistic choices such
as a plain style, which not only strengthens the readers impression that the
statement is reliable, but also induces her/him to believe in the speakers belief in
what s/he states (the proposition). Reliability and impartiality are part of what a
speaker intends to convey to the speaker in order to make a statement recogniz-
able as such. In conclusion, we may note that these features amount to a some-
how paradoxical nature of constatives. Their success as privileged speech acts in
academic discourse (and many other areas of communication) is based on their
seemingly direct relation to facts, which in turn is based on the hearers recogni-
tion of expressive and affective elements, namely reliability and belief.33 Expres-
sive and affective elements are fundamental for a speech act that by definition
tends (in most forms) to be represented as being free from such elements. This
makes speech act analysis of statements particularly interesting for rhetoricians
(when dealing with arguments derived from ethos), but also for philosophers
who try to integrate speech act analysis into a general theory of discourse: by
stating something the speaker declares her/his willingness to commit her/himself
in front of all possible partners in a dialogue.34
[such-and-such] is said to be performative, if and only if its so being used counts as a

case of the speakers thereby X-ing.
32
Searle (n. 23), p. 4.
33
Black (n. 31), p. 223 suggests that we should understand performative and constative
as aspects of utterances, rather than mutually exclusive classes of utterances.
34
Cf. Apel (n. 6), p. 304, who argues that constatives are important precisely because
they are border cases. An assertion of the type I hereby assert with regard to every
potential partner in a dialogue that ... marks the transition between a communication
aiming at action and a theoretical discourse aiming at a consensus of all members of
an argumentative community (den bergang von der handlungsbezogenen Kommu-
nikation zum theoretischen Diskurs der Konsensbildung in einer prinzipiell unbe-
grenzten Argumentationsgemeinschaft).
3. Second thoughts about constatives in Latin criticism
Austins and Searles investigations of statements as speech acts open up a vast

field of questions which shall be sketched in the following chapters. As we are
looking for possible connections between rhetoric, speech act analysis and Latin
criticism, we will concentrate on two areas, which are (more or less) related to
problems of inference (in sections 3-9) and problems of reference (in sections
10-14). Inference will be considered as a relation between sentences which we
find in (Latin) texts and sentences we produce about those sentences, and refer-
ence will be considered as a relation between sentences we study or produce and
the facts those sentences are about. Both areas will be viewed mainly from the
perspective that rhetoricians propose in their analysis of speech acts, namely the
audiences or recipients perspective. Let us start by considering the following
sentences:
(1) Every Technical Proof consists of Signs, Arguments, or Examples (inst.

5,9,1).
(2) Horaces odes are organized into four book units.
(3) I have to admit that I now hold a somewhat different opinion from that which
I held in the past (inst. 3,6,63).
(4) Quintilian changed his mind.
(5) It was a widely shared perception among Roman intellectuals of the second
half of the first century AD that ...35
Commenting on, paraphrasing, or analyzing a sentence taken from an ancient

text means commenting on, paraphrasing, or analyzing an utterance in a particu-
lar situation under particular circumstances. The cases we want to consider here
are those where a (scholars) statement is inferred from another statement (found
in a Latin text). Unfortunately, rules for such inferences are not conventionally
agreed upon by Latin scholars, and in most cases scholars work with the idea that
a reader will (somehow) understand that a comment on a statement (found in a
Latin text) is connected to the statement it purports to comment on. If (2) was
offered as a comment on (1), we would not (immediately) see such a connection,
despite the fact that (2) is probably offering a true proposition; the connection of
(4) to (3) seems more obvious. But there are several ways by which we could
arrive at the conclusion that (4) does not maintain what (3) does. Quintilian is
notoriously ambiguous, as it could e.g. denote the biologically definable being
who was born, lived, and died (according to Umberto Eco the only relevant
things to know about an author), or it could denote speaker in the institutio ora-
toria; it could also be used as an equivalent to saying in chapter 3,6 we read that
there was a change of mind. Another problem arises if (4) is meant to be a para-
phrase of (3): this would be wrong, as we know from the investigations of Austin
35
Winterbottom/Reinhardt (n. 17), p. xxxiv.
and Searle sketched in the last section, because (4) actually is only a (question-
able) rephrasing of parts of (3). In order to see that, we have to rewrite (3) and
(4) as full speech acts.
(6) I assert: I have to admit that I now hold a somewhat different opinion from
that which I held in the past (inst. 3,6,63).
(7) I assert: Quintilian changed his mind.
The supplement in (6) is tentative, as we could also think of I declare, I state,

I maintain or entirely different verbs marking different speech acts. But the
important point is that I have to admit is a part of another speech act, not the
act itself. The critic who paraphrases (3) by uttering (4) performs an assertion (7)
about another assertion (6), but s/he fails to consider both the illocutionary act
(of asserting) and the propositional content. Someone stating (4) performs the
speech act of (7), and it is a critics task to back up this assertion by evidence
which would have to be derived from facts about the psychological state of the
biological being named Quintilian at a particular point in the past. A critic who
says Quintilian wrote that (7) has no problem in providing evidence, because
her/his assertion refers to a text, not to a psychological (or historical) event of the
past. Inference, obviously, is conditioned by the possibility to provide evidence
for ones statements, and someone stating (4) will not be able to provide such
evidence.
Let us take an example that takes us a step further into the difficulties of in-
ference in connection with speech acts. When Quintilian states a matter of fact
such as
Just as there are three divisions of Time, so the order of events is made up of three
stages: everything has a beginning, a development, and a culmination: quarrel,
then brawl, then murder,36
the reader is supposed to agree because of her/his normal perception of a time

structure, wherefrom the three stages of events are inferred, and s/he is supposed
to understand the argumentative structure of the statement which infers a propo-
sition from sense perception and backs it up by an example (in this case the quar-
rel). The speakers intention is to convince the reader by using the readers inten-
tional and unintentional knowledge of (or acquaintance with) such things as
linguistic representations of arguments, the argumentative force of examples, the
role of sense perception as evidence etc. One could infer that Quintilians
speaker believes that real events follow a structure of beginning, development,
and culmination, which means that one states ones belief that the speaker be-
36
Quint. inst. 5,10,71: ut sunt autem tria tempora, ita ordo rerum tribus momentis con-
sertus est: habent enim omnia initium, incrementum, summam, ut iurgium, rixa,
deinde caedes.
lieves in what he states, which apparently is different from stating that the
speaker wants the hearer to understand that his psychological state is one of
belief (see above section 2). Therefore, we should infer something else: the
speaker understands that the audience usually perceives events as following a
structure of beginning, development, and culmination. It is improbable that the
speaker doubted that the time structure existed or that it was inherent to events,
but the second approach, which works without presupposing that time structure
exists, can in principle account for the case that there were actually reasonable
doubts, e.g. that the speaker belongs to a school of scepticists who deny the exis-
tence of time structure. Therefore, it is a more cautious reading that may prove
relevant in other cases.37 We should not confuse the reason for agreeing to the
proposition with the reason for mentioning the point in a rhetorical treatise. The
only reason to include the mention is that the rhetorician thinks time structure to
be believed in by audiences, and therefore the orator is meant to produce argu-
ments by using the audiences belief in time structure. If it was (ontologically)
true, and if it was a brilliant method to produce arguments, but the audience did
not share the belief in the existence of time structure, the point would be useless,
and a good rhetorician would either not mention it or warn against its use. What
we believe in as being true or evident is not a reason for a speaker, but only for
us.
Our discussion has been imbued with notions common both in rhetoric and
speech act analysis, and we have used them to discuss the possible connection
between a sentence found in an ancient text and sentences we produce in order to
comment on that sentence. As we have seen before, there are sentences that pur-
port to comment on another sentence, but actually fail to do so, even if the
proposition they contain may be true.38 In order to be able to function as a com-
ment, the proposition of that comment has to be connected with the proposition
of and the illocutionary act performed in the sentence which it purports to com-
ment on. Asserting the truth of a proposition presupposes the availability of evi-
dence and an account of its relation to the speech act which encloses the proposi-
tion. The elements of a text determine the responses we can give to that text, and
obviously these responses can be numerous (though perhaps not infinite), de-
pending on the rules of inference we accept and on the elements we detect within
the text.39 Rules are meant to enable the participants of a discourse to understand
37
Cf. J.R. Searle: Literal Meaning, in: Erkenntnis 13,1 (1978), p. 207-224, here 220 on
meaning being tied to our notions of truth conditions, entailment, inconsistency, un-
derstanding, and a host of other semantic and mental notions.
38
Adducing and compiling are activities which are not related to inferring and analyz-
ing.
39
S. Fish: Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities,
Cambridge etc. 1980, offers clear-cut advice (p. 172): ... meanings are not extracted
but made. On the usual polemics against the arbitrariness of ones opponent (usu-
ally a modernist) see ibid. p. 140.
one another, and one rule for comments on sentences may be: a sentence aiming
at and qualifying for being a comment is one whose propositional content can
potentially (on demand) be backed-up by (potentially) available evidence (on
demand).40 We will come back to this rule when discussing the nature of literary
speech acts, which helps to distinguish reliable statements from statements that
lack evidence and therefore should be avoided.
4. The pale plants of literature Serious and etiolated uses of language
We have tried to circumscribe some consequences of speech act theorists per-

spectives on statements with regard to how literary critics comment on sen-
tences. Before continuing the discussion, we have to look (briefly) at the relation
of speech act analysis to literature, as John Austin, in a most elegant passage,
excluded literary texts from the scope of his investigation.41 While it seems at-
tractive to try and develop a doctrine of the etiolations of language, it is obvi-
ously problematic to distinguish between serious and parasitical uses of
language, and it is astonishing to find not a few critics (implicitly) working with
this model of literary language as deviation.42 One obiection against the notion of
40
Quint. inst. 2,3,2 uses an educational notion we may be familiar with from Platos
Republic, stating that there is no good in telling false stories to children because we
cannot get them corrected later on. To take an example, the OCD 3rd editions entries
on Latin authors and works tend to show an advanced conceptual awareness, the
corresponding entries in the New Pauly tend to qualify as fiction.
41
Austin (n. 18), p. 22: I mean, for example, the following: a performative utterance
will, for example, be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage,
or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy. This applies in a similar manner to
any and every utterance a sea-change in special circumstances. Language in such
circumstances is in special ways intelligibly used not seriously, but in ways para-
sitic upon its normal use ways which fall under the doctrine of the etiolations of
language. All this we are excluding from consideration [italics by Austin].
42
Among the numerous comments on the passage see Fish (n. 39), p. 233; with regard
to the debate between Searle and Derrida on serious versus parasitical, cf. J.
Culler: Convention and Meaning, Derrida and Austin, in: New Literary History 13,1
(1981), p. 15-30, here 18-22; in classics see Wood in C. Gill/T. Wiseman (eds.): Lies
and fiction in the ancient world, Exeter 1993, p. xviii: To call literature an etiolation
of language seems even worse than calling it an infelicity, however particular and
pragmatic the point of view may be in context. But Austin can be seen as back-
handedly sketching a region where a cultural theory of fiction may develop. He pro-
poses to approach the interrogation of truthful and untruthful lies ... as among the
deepest and most necessary habits of a culture. And: Fiction would not be a hin-
drance to doctrine but a major element in the expansion of it; not an etiolation of lan-
guage but an aspect of what Wittgenstein would call a grammar of truth. A (fierce)
polemic against the misuse of speech act analysis in literary studies is offered by D.
serious utterances is epistemological: A sentence is never not in a context. We

are never not in a situation.43
But the problem becomes more obvious if we relate seriousness to truth-
seeking uses of language,44 or to utterances whose speaker is understood as
really meaning it. My contention is that even if a staged promise may not, at
first sight, bring immediate changes about, in the relation between speaker and
hearer or in the relation between speaker and world, we are supposed to assess
the seriousness of the very act of staging that promise. The simple opposition of
serious and non-serious uses of language confuses two different levels of, to take
an example, literary discourse, namely the staged speech acts as represented
within the text, and the speech act the writer performs in working with language
in the way s/he does. Someone staging a speech act (in a play, a novel, a poem)
really means it, and it is this level that deserves attention. The staged or para-
sitical utterance is meant to be taken seriously as such, and a promise given by a
character in a play or novel is meant to be treated as serious inasmuch as it
brings changes about in the relation with other characters or the world projected
by the play or novel. We are, then, dealing with a serious use of parasitical uses
of language, and it will be the aim of the following section to develop an ade-
quate model of this kind of speech acts. As the notion of seriousness is one that
is also connected to certain assumptions about what reality is supposed to be, and
how speech acts work upon facts, we also have a first indication of how our later
concerns about reference and facts are already present in the discussion of speech
acts (see sections 10-13 below).
To put this in still another way, again taking up the rhetoricians perspective,
we could subscribe to Austins distinction instead of contradicting it. By exclud-
ing the ordinary from their investigation, just as Austin does with the literary,
rhetoricians (implicitly) acknowledge the distinction, but decide to look for seri-
ous uses of language on the other side of the fence. The performance of speech
acts implies considerations of its appropriateness, its conditions, and its conse-
quences.45 The parasitic use of language entails more than ordinary uses which
Gorman,: The Use and Abuse of Speech-Act Theory in Criticism, in: Poetics Today
20,1 (1999), p. 93-119.
43
Fish (n. 39), p. 284.
44
D. Davidson: Truth, Language, and History, Oxford 2005 (= Collected Essays, Vol.
5), p. 167.
45
Despite obvious exaggerations, Fish (n. 39) is important for the engagement with
speech act analysis. He contends that the standard model of deviation, as in the dis-
tinction between ordinary or serious and parasitic uses of language, is impov-
erishing both the norm and its (supposed) deviation (p. 97). The normative assump-
tion of what can count as ordinary and what consequently should be seen as devia-
tion, trivializes the normal uses of language (p. 101) and always ends up by impos-
ing criteria of taste to develop notions of literature as message-plus or message-
minus (p. 103-5).
constitute the material the parasitic uses presuppose, as it departs from the con-
straints of immediate communication and allows for a use of language as medita-
tion upon this use, a self-referential exploration of what the ordinary language is
not able to perform because it lacks sophistication. While Austin and Searle
privilege simple forms of communication, rhetoricians consider the oratorical
approach to truth as more promising.46
Before following this up, we may briefly note two further approaches to the
problem. Rhetoricians are not interested in separating ordinary from oratorical
(or literary) speech, because their opposition is between, say, spontaneous and
meditated, between careless and careful, or even illiterate, brute and educated,
rational. The fact that neither Quintilian nor e.g. Cicero do talk much about
spontaneous or careless uses of language in everyday communication is pro-
grammatic inasmuch as both conceive of oratory as a way of becoming a human
being, reaching the telos of humanity. Furthermore, rhetoric conceives of ordi-
nary language in stylistic terms, not in Austins sense of being related to serious
communication. The sermo cottidianus, as a particular stylistic model (summis-
sus, humilis, consuetudinem imitans), is not meant to make facts prevail over
linguistic representation, but a highly artistic use of language. Quintilian gives an
interesting example of ancient discussions about the relation between style and
facts in inst. 4,2,37-38, where he argues against people who mistrust the persua-
sive power of simply stating the fact (rem indicare). The effects of ordinary
language (sermo cottidianus) are hard to achieve, because the hearers are meant
to get the impression that what was said was true (vera) and not just well spoken
(bona). Agreement is dependent on the impression that every hearer could be
able to speak in the same way (se dicturos fuisse putant), and stating and assert-
ing in a simple manner therefore is a challenge to oratorical skills; the aim is not
to present facts, but to convince the audience that the orator expressed true things
(cum videtur vera dicere).47 Unlike some (modern) attempts to link reliability
and truthfulness of propositions to certain stylistic features and speech acts like
constatives, granting them the privilege of serious communication (cf. section 2
above), rhetoricians do not expect their readers to expect the speaker to be impar-
tial, and correctly so: impartiality is attributed to linguistic utterances by hearers,
it is a matter of perception, not one of property.48
46
Put into a more excited mood by Fish (n. 39), p. 108: No longer is the choice one of
separating literature from life or reintegrating it with the impoverished notion of life
that follows necessarily from an impoverished notion of language.
47
The same argument is to be found e.g. in Cic. orat. 76; on the concept of an ideal
orator being able to adapt style to matter cf. orat. 100f.
48
On narrative cf. Booth (n. 11), p. 71: ... However impersonal he [sc. the author] may
try to be, his reader will inevitably construct a picture of the official scribe who writes
in this manner and of course that official scribe will never be neutral toward all val-
ues. Rhetoricians may agree with Fish (n. 39), p. 167: The choice is never between
objectivity and interpretation but between an interpretation that is unacknowledged as
Finally, among other options for relating different uses of language to one
another without relying on a hierarchy of primary serious and secondary parasitic
uses, we may mention the one proposed by Stierle, because his focus is on ana-
lyzing the literary text as action, thereby examining another aspect of Austins
subject: writing may be seen as a substitution for the loss of immediacy of an
utterance, but it is at the same time a necessary constitution of an intermediate
symbolic situation, where the aesthetic dimensions originate that allow for the
reception of a text without situation.49 That Austin (perhaps even more atten-
tively than some of his recent critics) preserved a space for aesthetic as well as
ethical (in the Roman sense) analysis, can be learned from Stanley Cavells stud-
ies.50
5. The structure of a literary speech act A proposal
We have seen how speech act analysis complicates our view of statements, both
of those we find in texts and those we perform in commenting on texts. The
following two sections will try to show how we may deal with this complication.
The illocutionary act is a fundamental part of a linguistic utterance, and if a
speaker performs an illocutionary act with a propositional content, s/he ex-
presses some attitude, state, etc., to that propositional content.51 Searle proposes
to symbolize the speech act as consisting of an illocutionary force of an utterance
and its propositional content by
F (p)
The functional interdependence between sentence meaning and the illocutionary

act does not allow us to describe the propositional meaning as isolated from the
such and an interpretation that is at least aware of itself, merely replacing the alterna-
tives by a convincing interpretation and an interpretation which fails.
49
See K. Stierle: sthetische Rationalitt. Kunstwerk und Werkbegriff, Mnchen 1997,
p. 196-7: Sie [sc. die Rezeption] mu aus der Fixierung der Schrift den Vollzug der
Rede in seiner Dynamik erst wiedergewinnen. And: Als Werk lt sich genau jener
Text bestimmen, der in seiner Komposition der durch die Schriftlichkeit des Textes
vorgegebenen Rezeptionssituation selbst konsequent Rechnung trgt. ... Der Leser
mu den Text als Werk allererst in einen Text als Vollzug und genauer in einen Text
als Handlung bersetzen.
50
Cavell (n. 13), p. 185: From the root of speech ... two paths spring: that of the re-
sponsibilities of implication; and that of the rights of desire. Both, according to Cav-
ell, are apt objects for philosophical studies (and, we may add, for literary studies
too).
51
Cf. Searle (n. 23), p. 1: ... the basic unit of human linguistic communication is the
illocutionary act; ibid. p. 4.
illocutionary force of the utterance.52 Furthermore, the necessity of a distinction

between propositional and illocutionary elements of a speech act can be related
(1) to the traditional distinction between representative and communicative func-
tions of language, and (2) to what Apel distinguished as the linguistic conditions
of an interpretative constitution of objects and the validity reflecting commu-
nication about the sense and truth of utterances.53 Both relations (or expansions)
are of interest to any literary critic.
Now, Austin has already observed that illocutionary forces are not always
expressed, indeed are, in their majority, passed over in silence. I propose to
enlarge the formula given for the speech act by Searle, in order to account for the
difficulties in explaining a literary speech act. The formula is a mere structure,
and it contains no semantic determinations of the literary. It is:
Fl (F [p])
Fl denotes the speech act performed by the author in presenting a speech act
performed by an internal speaker and directed to one or more (intended) internal
audiences. I intend Fl to be a necessary part of the understanding of the nature of
a literary speech act, but it is not, at least not entirely, an actual object of study.
The speaker of Fl is the author as the individual who intended to write and who
did so in producing (F [p]). Fl is a necessary condition of the existence of (F
[p]), but its own conditions are not accessible through (F [p]), which is the only
evidence we have of Fl. Or, to be more cautious, the knowledge of the conditions
of Fl is no necessary condition for studying (F [p]). Knowledge of the conditions
that rule Fl would comprise the intentions of the author when writing a work, his
intentional state towards what he writes (beliefs, desires, wishes etc.), or the set
of background assumptions. These are all inaccessible. The conditions (of happi-
ness, of truth, of success) of Fl are different from those of the embedded speech
act (F [p]), because Fl is not subject to the distinction of true or false, nor to the
distinction of sincere or insincere. If we take Fl as an imperative, it is not sincere
or deceptive in the way statements, assertions, promises or descriptions can be.
But, additionally, it cannot be not sincere, and it cannot be not true. Fl is in a
certain sense always successful, because it stands regardless of the readers as-
sessment e.g. of the aesthetic value, or the actual success in finding an audi-
ence, or the proof of its not showing what it pretends to do.54
52
Apel (n. 6), p. 337: ... die merkwrdige These nmlich, ... da man also nach den
Wahrheitsbedingungen der ausgedrckten Proposition fragen knne, ohne den Sinn
oder die illokutionre Rolle der uerung eines Satzes zu bercksichtigen. Da diese
These falsch sein mu, zeigt ....
53
Apel (n. 6), p. 303: interpretative Gegenstandskonstitution and geltungsreflexi-
ve Verstndigung ber Sinn und Wahrheit von Aussagen respectively.
54
Fl precedes the beginning of a text, in the sense that it is a condition of the utterance
which is not expressed, but implied and understood as such by the reader familiar with
The illocutionary act expresses the attitude of the speaker towards the pro-
positional content, and both are part of the text. The speaker (or narrator) in any
text commits her/himself to the truth of a proposition when stating something,
his purported psychological state is one of belief (see section 2 above). Any
sentence within a literary text is to be understood as a full speech act exposed to
the reader. Literary speech acts, being textual entities that are exposed to readers,
are reflecting upon, not imitating concepts of the world, of knowledge, or life, or
morals.55 The act of exposing is itself part of the meaning of the sentence, and in
terms of hermeneutics we have to distinguish the act of exposing at the time of
the (first?) utterance from the times of later actualizations.56 Apel argues that a
description of the illocutionary has to consider the conditions of satisfaction and
fulfilment, but it also has to give an account of understanding and evaluation of
the claims of validity and correctness, which is true for our own account of
methods in literary criticism as well as for a full assessment of concepts we try to
explain using ancient texts.57
Literary speech acts are not representations of one speech act performed by
writing, but occasions for performing a speech act whenever a reader takes up
the position of the hearer. The absence of the author, who left all capacities for
performance to the speaker as implicit in the text, is necessary to maintain the
written performance in the state of potentiality, and not to actualize it.58 Defining
the conditions of literary utterances. It is helpful to frame a complete text (a play, a

novel, a poem) by quotation marks at beginning and end, and add an imperative such
as Imagine the following: [...] or Suppose the following: [...], Imagine that
someone invokes the gods as follows! or Suppose a speaker S with the qualities Q
invoked the gods in the following way! The literary speech act as tentatively de-
scribed above bears some features of the class of declarations in Searle (n. 23), p. 14,
inasmuch as they bring about alternation in the status or condition of the referred-to
object or objects solely in virtue of the fact that the declaration has been successfully
performed. It is the only class in Searles taxonomy which has both directions of fit,
world-to-words and words-to-world (ibid. p. 15), which is, again, also true of literary
speech acts.
55
Cf. Fish (n. 39), p. 109 (on speech act analysis): What characterizes literature then is
not formal properties, but an attitude ... toward properties that belong by constitutive
rights to language.
56
By adding the time marker t, Skinner (n. 13), p. 136 tries to cope with the problem of
method that an application of familiar concepts and conventions may actually be
self-defeating if the project is the understanding of the past. Speech acts are conven-
tional in relation to a specific time and place of the utterance; translation is a way to
distinguish conventions in the use of a concept at time t2 and those active at t1. This is,
I think, actually done by those scholars who, on the basis of conceptual awareness
(see section 1 above), do not try to assess the past on its own terms.
57
Apel (n. 6), p. 18.
58
But cf. Searle (n. 9), p. 656: from the fact that effects of a text on its readers are not
always determined by literal meaning or the speakers intentions, it does not follow
a literary text by using the formula Fl (F [p]) may also help to overcome the
effects of message plus programs.59 The concentration on propositional knowl-
edge misses the elements represented by Fl (F [p]) and F [p], and, additionally,
propositional knowledge is neither the only nor the central form of knowledge by
which we may connect with reality.60 Finally, the model of the literary speech
act can help us to assess the relevance of the tentative rule for critical statements
which we proposed above (see section 3): a sentence aiming at and qualifying for
being a comment is one whose propositional content can potentially (on demand)
be backed-up by (potentially) available evidence (on demand). Evidence is avail-
able exclusively for statements referring to elements of the literary speech act,
which do not include psychological or historical speculation about mental states
of the author.61 Writing is an intentional act that makes the writer an author of a
text, but the object of our study is the intentional states entailed in the perform-
ance of a first person singular as a speaker of the act (F [p]) which is entirely
inherent in the text.62
that, for example, texts, facts, authors, and intentions have their source in interpreta-
tions.
59
On message plus (mis)conceptions of literature see e.g. Fish (n. 39), p. 103; 233 and
passim; A. Arweiler: Rmische Literaturen und die Grenzen der Lateinischen Philo-
logie, in: S. Winko/F. Jannidis/G. Lauer (Hg.): Grenzen der Literatur. Zu Begriff und
Phnomen des Literarischen (= Revisionen 2), Berlin/New York 2009, p. 545-83,
here 566-73; cf. Booth (n. 11), p. 73 on reductionist uses of theme or meaning,
which mislead because they almost inevitably come to seem like purposes for which
the works exist.
60
Cf. R. Nozick: Philosophical Explanations, Cambridge/Mass. 1981, p. 288.
61
Some further examples: Instead of asking Did the author commit himself to the truth
of the proposition? the literary scholars task is to ask: What does it mean that the
speaker commits himself to the truth of the proposition? Instead of reacting to I
asked Caesar a favour by asking Did it really happen?, we can ask What is the
functional context of the speech act the speaker performs by stating that he asked
Caesar a favour? We are not able to answer questions of the type Did s/he really
mean it?. As usual, there is no way of reasonably transgressing the epistemological
(and in this case also ontological) border between textual and physical; these things
are all well-known: analytic philosopher Peter Strawson, to take another example,
pointed to the necessity of acknowledging story-relative identification: The identi-
fication is within a certain story told by a certain speaker. It is identification within his
story; but not identification within history (quoted by Fish [n. 39], p. 238f. from P.
Strawson: Individuals, New York 1963, p. 5).
62
Austin (n. 18) 61 noted that in a written performative utterance the I can be simply
referred to by appending ones signature.
6. The structure of a literary speech act in practice
If, for a moment, we accept the model Fl (F [p]) as helpful in describing the
literary speech act, we are confronted with some losses and some gains in the
everyday business of producing sentences about Latin sentences. Sentences in
texts represent full speech acts. Take the sentence: Caesar is greater than the
sun. Its structure as a speech act is: X states: Caesar is greater than the sun.
What the sentence represents is a speaker doing something (probably stating) and
an object affected by that doing (the sentence uttered). When we encounter this
representation of a full speech act within, say, a poem or a historiographical
work, we have to enlarge the rescription accordingly: Y writes (X states: Caesar
is greater than the sun). It is wrong to say Y states: Caesar ..., because this
confuses the speaker of the statement with the writer of the speakers statement.
In contrast to speech acts in everyday communication, the identity of the speaker
is part of the question a reader has to answer.63 Speakers are identified by their
choices of words, moods, syntactical and semantic elements, themes, motifs,
rhythm etc., and they change in the course of texts, so that every sentence can be
examined as being a speech act uttered by a particular speaker (the same speaker
in another mood, pursuing a different aim, taking a different perspective etc.).64
Apparently, the structure of speech acts raises questions treated, for example,
in the criticism of narratives as presented by Wayne Booth in his classic Rhetoric
of Fiction (1961). Rhetoric helped to rediscover the fundamental relation be-
tween a speaker and an audience within the structure of a literary text.65 Speakers
adapt what they say and how they say it to the audience they are addressing, and
63
One of the first and most substantial treatments of the questions concerning the per-
sona is N. Rudd: Lines of Enquiry. Studies in Latin Poetry, Cambridge 1976, p. 145-
81. That some people continue to confuse Y and X, may be explained psychologi-
cally: Fish (n. 39), p. 171-3 argued that stability and variety of interpretations is not a
matter of the texts, but of their readers being part of interpretative communities.
These communities do not only stabilize their own strategies, but also adhere to (once
learned) strategies in order to maintain themselves.
64
Identification of what linguistic signs refer to (a concept, a mental image) with an
extra-linguistic entity (an individual, an event, a state of affairs) is to cross ontological
borders, which needs independent evidence (an interpreters personal natural under-
standing not counting as evidence). Correspondence of linguistic signs to extralin-
guistic facts is to be confirmed or refuted by a historian. Coherence with other speech
acts and their respective meanings is to be analyzed by a literary scholar. The former
needs further evidence, the latter does not. Speakers are textual entities within the lit-
erary construction, authors are empiric entities within the physical world.
65
On generalizations in criticism and their consequences see Booth (n. 11), p. 29-39 (the
quote ibid. 20); on audience and authenticity ibid. 89-116. In an afterword to the 2nd
edition (1983), he argues that the scene of literary scholarship has professedly
changed direction, but the makers of abstract rules still ride triumphant through the
land.
adapt, both intentionally and unintentionally, to norms, conventions, and forms

regularly obeyed when participating in a particular language game within a par-
ticular situation.66 Personification (prosopopoiia) has often been treated as a
means within the text, but Quintilian (inst. 3,8,49-53) takes it as a condition of
the text, labelling it by far the most difficult thing to do (3,8,49 longe difficil-
limae), but most useful to learn for future orators, poets, and historiographers.
Quintilian refers to Isocrates and Cicero who supposedly spoke in the manner
their clients would have done if they had not lacked their patrons talent and
knowledge; an orator is supposed to think differently, to assume different per-
sonalities, and to express different images of himself by speaking.67 This condi-
tion is to be taken as essential in any literary speech act. The criteria used for
assessing the truthfulness of a speakers assertions are not to be sought from
outside the rhetorical situation, but from the expectations of the audience, the
purpose of the speech, and the intention to make the speech coherent in itself.
The speech acts, including statements and assertions, are not meant to have a
meaning in general and context-free, but only within the chosen context, which
is the perspective of a constructed character. The adaptation is not to the real
characters, but to what the audience expects the characters speeches to be like,
including vocabulary, style, composition, preferences, and habits. The image
expressed by the orator through linguistic performance is to correspond with the
audiences perceptions of the exemplar of that image (the construction matches
another construction).68
66
The metaphor of a game (rhetoric as a language game) points to the significance of
constitutive and regulative rules, and at the same time to the constitutive role single
speech acts may have within the game; cf. Apel (n. 6), p. 371-8 on constitutive rules
and the metaphor of games as seen from the perspective of transcendental pragmat-
ics.
67
Inst. 3,8,50f.; note esp. the vocabulary denoting adaptation (aptare, accommodari,
convenire), the switch of perspective (personam induere, imaginem exprimere) and
the expression veritatis fidem servare faithfully maintaining realism (Russell).
68
In a way, we could compare the incompatibility of the conceptual world of Roman
rhetoricians with the conceptual world of some of their later readers, to the situation
that Rorty (n. 2), p. 132f. describes, commenting on the incompatibility of concepts in
Derrida on Searle on Derrida on Austin. While Searle had stated that if Derrida
wanted to criticize Austin, he had to play Austins language game, otherwise he could
not criticize him, Derrida, on the other hand, insisted on being allowed to play the
language game of la grande poque, not accepting conventional limitations:
Whereas it would be pretty crude to ask Proust whether we should read his novel as
social history or as a study of sexual obsession, or ask Yeats whether he really be-
lieved all that guff about phases of the moon, philosophers are traditionally supposed
to answer this sort of question (ibid. p. 133).
7. Further qualifications: More than one
In the previous sections we have complemented the initial picture of statements

by perspectives and questions raised by literary critics and rhetoricians. Before
taking up some of the key terms that have been used without further explanation,
namely intentionality, meaning, and reference, some further qualifications of the
situation within which a speech act takes place will help us to prepare the ground
for further investigation. A speech act can involve more than one meaning, more
than one illocutionary act, more than one audience. The same speaker can have
different intentions, perform different speech acts, and address different audi-
ences with one and the same utterance. Different parts of the audience or differ-
ent audiences (such as actual, potential, future readerships of Ciceronian court
speeches) are meant to understand different things, and the same is true of differ-
ent levels of sophistication in poetry, historiography or anything else. The limita-
tions of speech act analysis in giving an account of these differentiations, caused
by concentrating on straightforward synchronic situations, have been discussed
in an important article by Quentin Skinner, whose recognition of more than one
audience, and more than one moment in time, we shall briefly note here.69 As
with rhetoric, Skinner considers oblique communication, mixed types of speak-
ing to different audiences, one present, one absent (e.g. future readers), and the
regular situation Latin scholars find themselves in, namely that the speakers they
want to understand did not intend to speak to them.70 Rhetoricians consider the
existence of multiple audiences by distinguishing between fellow orators, rival
rhetoricians, philosophers, ignorant crowds, irresponsible politicians etc. Cicero,
slightly shifting the point, reports a story about a flute player who encouraged his
69
See Skinner (n. 13), p. 133-8; we may compare his rhetorical contention to integrate
particular circumstances and the audience into speech act analysis with the approach
to logic in Stephen Toulmins Uses of argument and with Searles notion of the Back-
ground. Searle (n. 5), p. 180-202 enlarges speech act theory towards conversation the-
ory, again based on his notion of the Background as a set of attitudes, stances, capaci-
ties, and presuppositions that themselves are not intentional.
70
There are cases where a speaker intends to communicate less with A to whom he
utters the utterance, but to a number of perhaps more sophisticated or more sympa-
thetic bystanders (Skinner [n. 13], p. 134). And it may be that S communicates un-
intentionally with N as well as intentionally with A in this way. Skinner transfers this
case to diachronically different audiences (which is the normal case with Latin schol-
arship). Oblique communication is analogous to mixed cases, again a normal case
in Roman literature, where S both intends to communicate with A and yet to modu-
late his tone so that it may appeal at the same time to a future or more remote audi-
ence (ibid.). Skinner mentions e.g. writers of certain sorts of diary and will, the
writers of inscriptions in the ancient world, and the more self-conscious statesmen
and historians. Finally, the Latinists fate: A wants to understand the meaning and
force of a given utterance uttered by S, but in which S did not in fact intend to com-
municate with A (ibid. p. 135).
shy pupil to play for me and the Muses, and adds that Brutus should speak in
the assembly for me and the people, so that the audience may understand,
what is achieved by the speech, while I understand why it is achieved.71
Rhetoricians also consider the fact that a sequence of speech acts alters the
conditions which determine the understanding of a single speech act. Speech
creates beliefs and attitudes in the minds of an audience, and the orator estab-
lishes a state of mind (habitus animi) which is, once established, hard to
change even by the orator himself. Stating or telling a fact carelessly (securus)
makes it impossible to connect it later on with an emotional attitude towards this
fact.72 Two important qualifications of the conditions of success of a speech act
can be inferred from this observation: statements and reports are meant to con-
nect representations of things with certain emotional attitudes towards them, and
earlier speech acts performed successfully by a speaker influence the success of
later speech acts performed by the same speaker. The first shows that, in report-
ing or stating, the propositional content is not only to be stored in the memory of
the hearer as part of the cognitive information, but that it is to be stored in con-
nection with a certain attitude towards it, which may be (provisionally) called
emotional. The second is the integration of a time factor into the scheme of a
speech act. Within a series of speech-acts, with the same person speaking and the
same persons forming the actual audience, an audience A with certain beliefs B1
1 1
... n at a time t may be different from the audience A with different beliefs B1 ... n
2
at a time t . As the expression constituere habitum animi shows, a speech act
may result in constituting a condition for another speech act to follow. Speaker
and hearer can be affected by the performance of a speech act in a way that
forces them to revise their perception of the state of things.73
8. Mental states, meaning, and intention
Some of the key terms used in the previous sections need further clarification,
and we will begin with the problem of intentionality, which is raised by common
71
Brutus 187: quare tibicen Antigenidas dixerit discipulo sane frigenti ad populum:
mihi cane et Musis; ego huic Bruto dicenti, ut solet, apud multitudinem: mihi cane
et populo, mi Brute, dixerim, ut qui audient quid efficiatur, ego etiam cur id efficiatur
intellegam.
72
Inst. 4,2,115: serum est enim aduocare iis rebus adfectum in peroratione quas securus
narraueris: adsueuit illis iudex iamque eas sine motu mentis accipit quibus commotus
nouis non est; et difficile est mutare h a b i t u m animi semel constitutum.
73
This may be called the condition of diachronic change, which complements the condi-
tion of synchronic multiplicity: within a series of speech-acts, with the same person
speaking and the same persons forming the actual audience, the utterance of a sen-
tence can be part of speech-acts SA1 ... n involving different speakers S1 ... n and audi-
ences A1 ... n.
statements about dead authors mental states such as Horace was convinced,
Livy despised, or Vergil was desperate.74 As we have said, it is impossible to
support by evidence the attribution of beliefs, opinions, experiences, or any men-
tal state to a particular individual at a particular point of time in the past. Asser-
tions about an individuals mental state in the past are meaningless (Horace
thought, believed, wished etc.); assertions about the meaning of a corresponding
speech act are not. It is not important if and why and how someone believed,
wished, feared, or desired, but that and why and how s/he says s/he does. A
speakers mental states are part of the representation of a speech act, an authors
mental states are inaccessible. Meaningful sentences can contain propositions
about the speakers mental states, and there is evidence available to back up or
contradict such a statement; sentences containing propositions about an authors
mental states are void (of significance).
As speech act analysis allows description of intentional states in relation to
the illocutionary act, it provides a replacement for those void statements about
the mental states of dead authors. The speakers mental states are part of what is
represented by the literary speech act Fl (F [p]), so that the text itself provides
full access to evidence about them. To say Horace deplored moral decline is to
deliver a void statement, to ascribe grief, anger, or joy to a speaker is to deliver a
statement the proposition of which has a truth value, that is, it can be backed up
by available evidence (on demand). The success (or: happiness) of F in (F [p]) is
guaranteed (by definition) by the performance of Fl, which means that a
speakers deluding or lying about her/his mental states can be accounted for
(e.g.: It is true that the speaker is lying). The literary critic can analyze the
functions and modes of the performance of F, because the speaker S and her/his
mental state m are included in the representation of F. Therefore, passionate
utterances remain a prominent field of literary studies, except that pseudo-
historical accounts are replaced by accounts based on the textual evidence.75
Searles work on intentionality is helpful to open up the field of possible
questions:76
74
Note the past tense! It marks a historical reference which is not necessarily involved
in Vergil is desperate.
75
An innovative improvement of Austin on the utterances of passion is Cavell (n. 13),
p. 18f.
76
There are several treatments of the subject by Searle, cf. e.g. the short version in
Searle (n. 5), p. 34f.; Karl-Otto Apel (n. 6), who is particularly successful in develop-
ing speech act analysis within a broader approach of transcendental pragmatics,
criticizes (p. 17) a change in Searles thinking between Speech acts (1969) and Inten-
tionality (1983), but we cannot discuss this or (the considerable amount of) other re-
proaches against Searles account of intentionality. A different approach to literary
texts as intentional unities (in contrast to a sum of isolated speech acts) is taken by
Stierle (n. 49), p. 193.
Intentionality is that feature of certain mental states and events that consists in
their (in a special sense of these words) being directed at, being about, being of,
or representing certain other entities and states of affairs.
If somebody believes that Vergil is a poet, then this belief is an intentional state,
because it is directed at, is about, is of, or represents Vergil, and the state of
affairs that he is a poet. Vergil is the intentional object, his being a poet is the
condition of satisfaction. If there is not anything that a belief is about, then it
does not have an intentional object; and if the state of affairs it represents does
not obtain, it is not satisfied.77 But if I state that Vergil saw that Octavian was
in the senate, I do not only report the visual experience, but also say that Octa-
vian actually was in the senate; the sentence also reports that it is satisfied.78
Intentions in the common sense are only one group of intentional states: desires,
for example, are another one.79 We can describe these intentional mental states as
states of affairs, and, obviously, we are moving towards an account of acting
upon such states of affairs that are not covered by some reductionist notions of
facts.80
One of the categories applied in Searles theory of speech acts as well as in
his theory of intention is direction of fit, which he uses to distinguish speech
acts and intentional states as either working in the direction world-to-mind
(intentions) and world-to-words (speech acts) or in the direction of mind-to-
world and words-to-world. So desires and intentions work to get the world to
fit the mind, while perception, memory, and belief work to get the mind to fit the
world.81 Of considerable impact on rhetorical studies is the relation of intentional
77
Searle (n. 5), p. 77 (I changed the example from Ronald Reagan to Vergil, just for
reasons of taste).
78
Searle (n. 5), p. 78; cf. ibid. on the notion of intrinsic: Both beliefs and visual ex-
periences are intrinsic intentional phenomena in the minds/brains of agents. To say
that they are intrinsic is just to say that the states and events really exist in the
minds/brains of the agents; ...
79
Cf. Searle (n. 5), p. 85 on differences: a desire can be satisfied even if it does not
cause the conditions of its satisfaction; whereas an intention can be satisfied only if it
causes the rest of its own conditions of satisfaction; and: Intentions ... are causally
self-referential in the sense that they can only be satisfied if they cause the very action
they represent.
80
See on intentional causation Searle (n. 5), p. 133: Intentional mental states such as
desires and intentions represent certain sorts of states of affairs, and intentional causa-
tion is that form of causation by which mental states are causally related to the very
states of affairs that they represent.
81
Cf. Searle (n. 23), p. 3. Direction of fit is meant to describe the illocutionary point
as either to get the words (more strictly their propositional content) to match the
world or to get the world to match the words. On cases of volition and cases of
cognition see Searle (n. 5), p. 86; on direction-of-fit also Searle (n. 5), p. 37-9. It has
not yet been recognized that literary texts do not only imagine the tendency to fulfil-
states to rationality, and the account Searle gives may be a good point to start: as
the constraints of rationality are not an extra faculty in addition to intentionality
and language and Once you have intentionality and language, you already have
phenomena that internally and constitutively possess the constraints of rational-
ity, we can account for something rhetoricians may have had an eye for: De-
sires are inclinations towards states of affairs (possible, actual, or impossible)
under aspects. There is no necessary irrationality involved in the fact that one can
be inclined and disinclined to the same state of affairs under the same aspect.82
9. Further notes on Meaning
In the last section we have seen how a richer notion of intentionality helps to
avoid confusion between statements about elements of a speech act and state-
ments about mental states of an author. The next field, which is interconnected
with intention, is meaning, and again, a short (eclectic) list of related questions
may show how an enlarged conceptual awareness furthers our understanding of
statements.
Meaning is not a simple concept.83 The standard meaning, or intention, is
quite often just the meaning a reader has created for her/his own position in time,
and therefore it ignores conventions of an earlier time.84 One possible distinction
ment, but actually produce a situation within which the intention is fulfilled. A poets
expression of her/his desire to be acclaimed may then cause the desires fulfilment by
its being an expression of that desire. Similarly, the statement that something has been
accomplished (as in Ciceros oratory), may contain its conditions of satisfaction so as
to make it accomplished by the very utterance of the statement.
82
Searle (n. 5), p. 23 and 258.
83
Nozick (n. 60), p. 574f. has a helpful list of meanings of meaning, and I note some
of those particularly interesting for our concerns: Meaning as external causal rela-
tionship: as causal consequences, causal antecedents or causal concomitants that serve
as a basis of inference (smoke means fire); II. Meaning as external referential or
semantic relation: synonymy (brother means male sibling), reference, standing for a
fact (a white flag means they surrender) or symbolizing (the meaning of Yeats rough
beast); III. Meaning as intention or purpose: intending an action, purpose (this play
is meant to catch the conscience of the king), or (Gricean) intending to convey or in-
dicate something via anothers recognizing this intention; ... VI. Meaning as objective
meaningfulness: importance, significance, meaning; ...
84
See Skinner (n. 13), p. 137: The consequence is that A at t2 may be betrayed by the
familiarity of the conventions governing his own utterances into understanding Ss
given utterance at t1 as having the force (say) of a revelation, whereas it amounted at
t1 to nothing more than a platitude. (A would thus be failing to see that the illocution-
ary force of the given utterance at t1 could only have been somewhere on the spectrum
of endorsing, ... adhering to, insisting on an accepted attitude or belief.) Or the con-
verse and even more likely misunderstanding might arise. (A would then be failing to
that the analysis of speech acts envisages is the one between meaning inten-
tions and communication intentions, which leads to the understanding that
understanding consists in recognizing meaning intentions.85 It is essential to an
utterances meaning that it is to be recognized by the audience as an utterance
having a meaning,86 so that an utterance (in any text) can be understood as
meaning to induce a belief by means of the recognition of this intention.87 It
is a feature of ordinary speech acts that speakers attempt to produce effects on
hearers by getting the hearers to recognize their attempt to produce those ef-
fects. In rhetoric, this dimension is implicit in the general assumption that an
audience is meant to recognize the speakers intention of demonstrating the reli-
ability of his speech and character, an assumption which in turn is clearly relat-
able to Grices observation that the effects the speaker tries to achieve are de-
pendent on what the audience recognizes as a reason to react in the manner ex-
pected by the speaker: the intended effect must be something which in some
sense is within the control of the audience, or that in some sense of reason the
recognition of the intention behind y is for the audience a reason and not merely
a cause.88 Not only is the audiences participation indispensable for intentions to
work, but we also find a complex interdependence between different intentions
which are relevant for a sentence to have a meaning;89 both rhetoricians and
speech act theorists acknowledge the fact that even simple speech acts are not
reducible to one intention a time or to one meaning, and it seems that the impact
of these observations is not yet fully realized in Latin scholarship, especially not
in the case of statements in prose literature which some still tend to take at face-
value. Skinners description of more than one intention in cases such as flattery,
patronizing, or insulting (all, by the way, of considerable interest to literary
scholars) is paradigmatic:90 the speaker S has a primary intention (i1, intending to
see that whereas the utterance of Ss utterance at t2 would be a platitude, it could only
have been intended at t1 with the illocutionary force of criticizing, rejecting, refuting,
repudiating or denouncing an accepted attitude or belief.)
85
Searle (n. 5), p. 148.
86
Cf. P. Grice: Meaning, in: The Philosophical Review 66,3 (1957), p. 377-88, here 383:
A must intend to induce by x a belief in an audience, and he must also intend his ut-
terance to be recognized as so intended.
87
See Grice (n. 86), p. 384, referring to what he calls non-natural meaning, a replace-
ment of conventional meaning, cf. ibid. p. 379.
88
Grice (n. 86), p. 385.
89
Grice (n. 86), p. 386 argues that only what I may call the primary intention of an
utterer is relevant to the meaningnn of an utterance, which means that if I want to get
somebody to do something by giving her/him an information, s/he has to recognize
my intention of giving that information, but her/his doing so is not dependent on this
recognition and it cannot be regarded as relevant to the meaningnn of my utterance to
describe what I intend him to do.
90
Skinner (n. 13), p. 125f. (developing the theory of intention which has been proposed
by Strawson).
evoke a particular response), but also the secondary intention (i2, intending that i1
should be recognized). It follows from this, moreover, that S must have the
further required intention (i3) that As recognition of his primary intention (i1)
should certainly function as part at least of the reason for As response. If the
audience fails to understand the primary intention, which happens, then (i3) is
also frustrated. Finally, Skinner concludes, (i4) is the intention of S to have all his
intentions recognized.
The meaning of a sentence can be described by analyzing its components and
the rules according to which these components are combined; additionally, we
have to distinguish between statements we make concerning (1) what a sentence
means, and (2) what a speaker means by uttering this sentence.91 Instead of rely-
ing on the notion of a context-free literal meaning, we may, following Searle,
recognize literal meaning as being determined by a set of Background notions,
which means that the truth conditions of the sentence will vary with variations
in these background assumptions and the sentence may determine different
truth conditions relative to different assumptions; these assumptions are so
fundamental and pervasive as to be generally overlooked.92 If, then, we want to
describe literal meaning, we cannot focus on propositions or actual wording, but
have to consider the full speech act, the assumptions conditioning the success of
the utterance, and the significance of the audiences recognition of a self-
referential element of the utterance.93
Finally, we may add a short note on Searles notion of the Background (with
capital B), a succinct account of which is to be found e.g. in The rediscovery of
91
Cf. e.g. Searle (n. 37), p. 207f. with a helpful synthesis of the opinio communis.
92
Searle (n. 37), p. 207; 210; 214; 221. For two criticisms of Searles account of literal
meaning, from quite opposed perspectives, cf. Fish (n. 39), p. 277; 280; 285-91 and
Katz (n. 3), p. 203 who defends the notion of contextually independent sentence
meaning which can be accounted for purely grammatically as a compositional func-
tion of the meanings of component words and syntactic structure.
93
Searle (n. 37), p. 218: Just as the literal meaning of a sentence will determine differ-
ent truth or obedience conditions relative to different sets of assumptions, so a belief
or expectation will have different conditions of satisfaction relative to different sets of
assumptions. For a different approach see Katz (n. 3); he argues that meaning is
sharply distinguished from reference, and meaningfulness depends exclusively on in-
trasentential sense relations (ibid. p. 219). If a sentence does not satisfy the truth
conditions, it is not ipso facto false: it will have no truth value in the case in which
the objects it is about do not exist (p. 220). He refutes Searles integration of extra-
linguistic assumptions (the Background) as a conflation of what the language users
utterance of a sentence means in speech with the quite distinct matter of what the sen-
tence used means in the language (p. 222). On auto-referentiality cf. among many
others Stierle (n. 49), p. 314f.: Die Relevanzfigur des fiktionalen Textes wird erst
dann ausgeschpft, wenn sie in autoreferentieller Blickwendung auf die Textkonstitu-
tion selbst und ihre Ebene erfat wird.
the mind (1992).94 It is a set of capacities, abilities, and general know-how that
enable these mental states (i.e. consciousness and intentionality) to function on
the other (p. 175). All intentional states function because of this non-intentional
Background, as becomes clear from the analysis of literal meaning where we can
see that all representation, whether in language, thought, or experience, only
succeeds in representing given a set of nonrepresentational capacities (ibid.).
The importance of the concept for literary studies is obvious: literal meaning
determines different conditions of satisfaction relative to different Background
presuppositions (p. 178), and this not only applies to the use of words and se-
mantic variety, but also to the relevance of systematic oppositions such as
male/female or north/south (p. 185f.). The Background is operative in utterances
we encounter in a text as well as in our own utterances, e.g. when commenting
upon the first. If we presuppose them to be the same, or confuse them with inten-
tions or interpretations, a banalization of our reading of a text is likely to occur.95
10. Speech acting upon words, and perceptions, and facts
The Background is one of the notions that connect rhetoric and speech act analy-
sis most neatly, and it allows for a shift towards the last part of the paper. Phi-
losophy of language can duly be seen as asking how words relate to the world.96
The same question is central to rhetoric, and the last sections of this paper will
consider the relations between facts, the commitment to truth, and the role of
belief (see section 2 above).
At first sight, speech act analysis seems to be engaged in stating and proving
that speaking is acting. But it is more about doing something by saying some-
thing, or acting by saying, than about the trivial idea that speaking is an activ-
ity. Austins use of the notion for purposes of linguistic analysis evidently was
not trivial, but perhaps sometimes trivialized, partly because his distinctions
94
Searle (n. 30), p. 175-96. On similar approaches in Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, or
Bourdieu see ibid. p. 177.
95
Despite my (obvious) interest in using Searle and others to undermine the self-
righteousness of some literalists (Fish [n. 39], p. 285-91, esp. 287 and 291, is a re-
freshing polemic against the claims of literalists to have a privileged access to mean-
ing), it may not be out of place to quote the following (Searle [n. 30], p. 192): From
the fact that whenever one understands something, one understands it in a certain way
and not in other ways, and from the fact that alternative interpretations are always
possible, it simply does not follow that in all discourse one is engaged in constant
acts of interpretation. Ones immediate, normal instantaneous understanding of ut-
terances is always possible only relative to a Background, but it does not follow from
that that there is some separate logical step, some separate act of interpretation in-
volved in normal understanding.
96
Cf. Searle (n. 25), p. 3.
between doing and saying are not always clear.97 As Stierle has pointed out,
the non-metaphorical use of the notion text as action, and, consequently, a
pragmatist approach to literary texts, is part of the hermeneutical tradition of
classics, and it was (for a long time) common to understand speaking as a means
of organisation.98 It seems helpful to concentrate on one aspect of the problem:
What is it that speech acts upon? Let us start with a simple example from rhe-
torical writing. The praise of speech as a civilizing power in Cicero, De legibus
1,62f., treating speech as an action and a cause of other actions, is commented on
by the character Atticus who states that it was a technically successful piece of
laudatory oratory (laudata quidem a te grauiter et uere)99. Atticus expresses his
consent to the propositions by confirming that what was said was the right or
proper thing to say (vere), he acknowledges that it was done in an appropriate
style (graviter), and he acknowledges the intention of the speaker not just to
speak, but to give an example of the laudatory type of speech (laudata est). Ob-
viously, in stating what has been done, Atticus is himself classifying, asserting,
informing (the reader), and praising the praise of eloquence as delivered in the
dialogue. He is acting upon words. To use a word or an expression is to confirm,
modify, or contradict its past uses, and it is not just a use of something which
exists independently, but a use that takes active part in confirming or altering its
meaning, and therefore its place within the signifying system that a language
provides. Not only do the elements of a sentence constitute its meaning, but the
sentence, as the form in which the utterance takes place, influences its elements
as possibly new or different (or worn out) candidates for future syntactical struc-
tures. Quintilian is at the same time a text that constitutes the conditions of its
own reception and a text dealing with the conditions of successful constitution.
We may add in passing three more, perhaps more ordinary, notions of doing
something by speaking. In order to define how to become a citizen, Cicero
97
Cf. Black (n. 31), p. 219: Similarly, action, as it occurs in Austins explanation,
must be understood to mean at least doing something other than saying something
true or false, for it is certainly not wrong to think of a man who makes an assertion as
doing something, uiz. asserting; cf. Walker (n. 29), p. 223 on the vagueness of the
idea of doing something, an action. In rhetorical treatises, the technical way of
speaking in order to fulfil an intention of a particular kind is often expressed by verbs
that denote the actions themselves, e.g. inst. 5,8,2: isdem laudamus incusamus auge-
mus minuimus describimus deterremus querimur consolamur hortamur.
98
Stierle (n. 49), p. 191-3; ibid. p. 192: Sprechen als Handeln heit mehr als informie-
ren, es bedeutet, Zuordnungen innerhalb gesetzter Horizonte zu schaffen.
99
For the (conventional) definition of speech as action and a cause of actions see leg.
1,62f.: ... perpetua oratione, qua regat populos, qua stabiliat leges, qua castiget im-
probos, qua tueatur bonos, qua laudet claros uiros, qua praecepta salutis et laudis
apte ad persuadendum edat suis ciuibus, qua hortari ad decus, reuocare a flagitio,
consolari possit adflictos, factaque et consulta fortium et sapientium cum improborum
ignominia sempiternis monumentis prodere.
makes the character Crassus transfer a Homeric coinage about the hero Achilles
to the ideal orator (de orat. 3,57 oratorem verborum actoremque rerum). All four
words have technical uses in rhetoric (orator, actor, res, verba), and the expres-
sion inextricably connects reasoning, speaking and acting in the public sphere.
Acting with and upon words, and acting with or upon other matter constitutes the
existence of a citizen: a citizen who is invisible because he does not speak in
public and does not perform public duties is inexistent.100 A related notion is
provided by the praises of eloquence where the eloquence is regularly presented
as an agent and a cause of action in the civilization and the life of communi-
ties.101 These passages, like the one from Ciceros De legibus quoted above, are
striking not so much for the originality of the arguments, but simply for illustrat-
ing how awkward it is to oppose speaking to acting.102 No wonder, then, that in
discussing praises of eloquence (inst. 2,16), Quintilian frames a standard list of
actions performed by speaking defending friends, leading the senate and the
peoples assembly, commanding the troops with a praeteritio while focussing
on a quite different argument (see below). Opponents of rhetoric gather examples
of where words served to disorganize and subvert communities, but thereby
subscribe to their normal function of acting and causing actions (inst. 2,16,4).
Finally, a third notion is related to acting upon words, but the purpose is an aes-
thetic one. Quintilian shifts to the particular experience a successful product
provides its creator with (2,16,19):
Is it not already beautiful (pulchrum) in itself ...? Is there not a splendour in the
very fact of using our common understanding and the words that all use to achieve
such praise and glory that you seem not just to be speaking or pleading, but, like
Pericles, to lighten and thunder?103
The orator is still being persuasive when pursuing the aim of beautiful speech.
To have said the proper thing to say is convincing for its own sake, and a rea-
son for agreement, or pleasure.104 This may be true of the purposes of literary
speech acts as well: the act of describing, to take an example, necessarily in-
volves the speakers intention that the audience understands him describing
100
Students of ancient rhetoric could have been attracted by the original title of John
Austins lectures (Words and Deeds), which recalls this educational concept (and the
name of a corresponding literary genre), and the later title How to do things with
words obviously makes a great title for a book on rhetoric, see Booth (n. 12), p. 67.
101
On laudes eloquentiae see e.g. Reinhardt/Winterbottom (n. 17). p. 279-81.
102
Austin (n. 18), p. 92 lists common oppositions of saying and acting.
103
Inst. 2,16,19: nonne pulchrum uel hoc ipsum est, ex communi intellectu uerbisque
quibus utuntur omnes tantum adsequi laudis et gloriae ut non loqui et orare, sed,
quod Pericli contigit, fulgere ac tonare uidearis?
104
Searle (n. 23), p. 3 argues that many illocutionary acts are not by definition attempts
to produce effects in hearers.
something, and at the same time it involves her/his intention to describe in a

successful, or pleasant way in order to convince the audience to have attended a
reliable description.105
11. True to the facts which facts?
Only hopeless materialists will use the terms facts and reality without further
qualification.106 It is through various systems of knowledge (such as physics,
biology, history) that otherwise inaccessible phenomena become significant as
facts, and their use is to be assessed before we are able to speculate about possi-
ble counterparts (such as fiction).107 Regarding textual sciences, a dualistic ap-
proach leads many people to presuppose that (1) reality and texts are mutually
exclusive notions, and that (2) distinguishing between real and fictitious, or true
and false, is a principal task of literary scholarship. Both presuppositions are
wrong, which is not to deny the existence of differences.108 Rhetoricians do not
follow a dualistic approach, and it is not helpful to treat texts as only reflecting
realities or truths derived by other methods; for: if we think of reality as con-
sisting of any fact about the world, including how we feel about it and how
we react to it, it is clear that rhetoric makes a vast part of our realities.109 A
similar path is taken by Searle who develops a notion of social facts or insti-
tutional facts as distinct from brute facts, which comprises any social thing
that can only exist if people believe it exists, such as money, elections, pri-
vate property, wars, voting, promises, marriages, buying and selling, political
offices, and so on.110 Such facts can be denied or disrespected by individuals,
but they do not cease to exist;111 their significance may be said to be conven-
105
Cf. the difference in point of purpose Searle (n. 23), p. 3 makes between order and
description. A rhetoricians definition of a descriptive utterance would be (somehow)
more complicated (e.g. an utterance meant to convince the hearer of its being a reli-
able description, using the recognized words and devices, is apt to circumstances and
context, and shows the ability of the speaker to perform a description successfully).
106
Cf. Booth (n. 12), p. 13 on different sorts of realities.
107
Fish (n. 39), p. 239 argues that we cannot distinguish facts and fiction, but different
systems of discourse conventions (two stories), and as our knowledge is confined to
such stories about the world (p. 243), methods and approaches (such as speech act
analysis) are not interpretative keys, but themselves interpretations (p. 244f.).
108
It is too simple, therefore, to state with Fish (n. 39), p. 238: In short, the rules and
conventions under which speakers and hearers normally operate dont demand that
language be faithful to the facts; ...
109
Booth (n. 12), p. 12.
110
Searle (n. 5), p. 136. A famous point of depart is G.E.M. Anscombe: On Brute Facts,
in: Analysis 18,3 (1958), p. 69-72.
111
Cf. Searle (n. 5), p. 140.
tional, but it is not up to the individual to change them (one can burn money, but
cannot pay bills with newspaper scraps). Searle has been working on the idea
since first mentioning it in Speech acts, and he recently listed six basic elements
of social facts: self-referentiality, the existence of constitutive rules, collective
intentionality, linguistic permeation of the facts, systematic interrelationships
among social facts, and the primacy of acts over objects.112 Most of these ele-
ments qualify literary texts to be approached as facts, e.g. self-referentiality (all
elements and the significance given to them by participants and observers refer
to the ensemble which is created, such as a game or a poem) and constitutive
rules, which do not regulate previously existing forms of behaviour, but bring
their object about, constituting a form of activity of its own.113 Collective inten-
tionality and cooperative behaviour may be fruitfully referred to the institu-
tional features of the production and reception of literature, and even linguistic
permeation is not tautological if we use the notion to describe how constitutive
rules may be communicated through the literary utterances themselves, or to
show how features of a literary text work to make it recognizable as such.
It is obvious that we are dealing with a notion of institutional facts whenever
we establish the meaning of a linguistic utterance by pointing to convention,
rules, and deviation from those rules.114 No word or linguistic unit is not related
to its (non-)existence in utterances of the past, and a speaker cannot prevent
hearers from relating an utterance to previous linguistic experiences, whether it
be a poet abandoning an established verse form or an orator using a particular
device.115 Latinists are familiar with the phenomenon that linguistic utterances
are conditioned by particular traditions, but seem less willing to acknowledge
that these can determine the meaning of an utterance at the expense of the truth-
value of the proposition. As in our example (3) above,
I have to admit that I now hold a somewhat different opinion from that which I
held in the past (inst. 3,6,63).
112
Searle (n. 5), p. 138-40.
113
For a different, but compatible approach to self-referentiality of literary texts (as
efficiency) see Arweiler (n. 59), p. 549-54 and 579. Searle (n. 5), p. 147 explains his
notion of self-referentiality with the example of an order to do something: The condi-
tions of satisfaction of the order are not only that the thing ordered should be done,
but rather that it should be done because it was so ordered. And that is just another
way of saying that the conditions of satisfaction of the order are self-referential to the
very order itself for what the order orders is its own obedience.
114
Speech act theorists seem to pay little attention to the traditions of semiotics and
linguistics, such as de Saussures work, where these problems are prominent; on rela-
tions between speech act analysis, de Saussures notion of langue and parole and
Chomskian approaches, see Apel (n. 6), p. 357-71.
115
Cf. Cavell (n. 13), p. 57 on Austins philosophizing, which does not assume that
my actions are exactly and always mine and, for strong reasons, both affirms and de-
nies that saying something is always and exactly doing something ...
the context makes clear that the speaker is arguing within the locus of author-
ity,116 which shifts the attention from giving information to self-referentially
showing the function of giving this information: the line of argument is itself
intended to be recognized as a successful application of the theory which the
speaker is explaining in his work.117 The hermeneutic relevance of the notion of
institutional facts is that in order to understand them we need an understanding
of what particular normative factors are implied in order to make them relevant
to those who acknowledge their existence, and we need an understanding of what
the conventions imply for those acting upon these facts.118 In the case of reading
our example (3), we could transform this observation on institutional facts into a
methodological claim that the significance of (3) is determined by its reference to
and its origin in facts that are not covered by descriptions of physical or histori-
cal facts.
Institutionality and convention have sometimes been misunderstood as being
an obstacle to relating to the real facts, and rhetoricians have consequently
been censored for unduly focussing on the perlocutionary in order to please the
audience (see section 1 above). A more promising approach to these features is
provided by the traditions of philosophy of language. Wilhelm von Humboldt
considered the variety of languages and the different uses of language within one
and the same community not as an obstacle to understanding, but rather as part
of the constitutive significance of language in developing human understand-
ing.119 In communication, speaker and hearer do not (and do not have to) think of
the same thing when using a particular word, but they have entsprechende Vor-
stellungen and they understand it in a creative manner (umgestaltend).120 The
hearer, then, does not receive objects which are meant to produce effects, as a
behavioristic model of stimulus and response would describe it. S/he is no pas-
116
See Quintilians clever move in the following sentence of inst. 3,6,63 where he de-
clares his willingness to sacrifice fame for reliability.
117
On reference through imitation cf. Arweiler (n. 59), p. 551-66. There is some truth in
Rortys account of deconstruction as a mode of recontextualization not limited to
genres and disciplines (n. 2, p. 134): Socrates recontextualized Homer, Augustine re-
contextualized the pagan virtues, turning them into splendid vices, and then Nietzsche
reinverted the hierarchy; Hegel recontextualized Socrates and Augustine in order to
make both into equally aufgehoben[e] predecessors; Proust recontextualized (over and
over again) everybody he met; ...
118
Apel (n. 6), p. 352: ... da man ,institutionelle Fakten im Gegensatz zu ,Naturtat-
sachen nicht empirisch beschreiben kann, ohne sie zugleich zu verstehen, u. d.h.
ohne die normativen Voraussetzungen und Implikationen ihres konventionellen Sinns
mitzuverstehen.
119
For an instructive account of W. von Humboldt on language see Simon (n. 2), p. 48-
61.
120
Simon (n. 2), p. 56f.
sive object of information, but participates in communication by providing

meanings, so that both speaker and hearer can question the standard interpreta-
tions of the world which are built into the already existing formations of lan-
guage.121 Individual intentions and social practices both constitute the meaning
of a linguistic utterance, inasmuch as intention is conditioned by convention and
convention is based upon shared intentions.122
12. Credibility and true things
In the previous section we have started an exploration of reference to facts by

pointing to Searles notion of institutional facts and by proposing to see literary
texts as (partly) belonging to this kind of facts. But we have not yet touched
upon the crucial question of how speech acts relate to what facts, which was part
of the initial problem of constatives. The notions of credibility, probability, and
reliability will help us in developing the picture.
First, we may take a short look at Quintilians negotiations with philosophical
notions of true and false as presented in inst. 2.123 One of the obiections against
rhetoric is that an art can only be built upon insight (perceptio) which is defined
as being necessarily an insight into true things (quae semper vera sit); rhetoric
agrees with false opinions (falsis adsentiri opinionibus) which makes it impossi-
ble for it to count as an art (2,17,18). Quintilian refutes this argument by saying
that (1) false opinions are not created, but found by rhetoricians, and that (2)
false opinions are used by the orator, not shared by him: both Cicero and a
painter of illusionistic art do alter the sight of their audiences, but their own vis-
ual perception remains intact (2,17,21: ... nec nihil ipse vidit ... ea plana esse non
nescit).124 Another refutation is based upon the (stoicising) contrast between the
wise man and a wicked world (2,17,26-29), contending that mistaken minds
cannot be brought to hold correct beliefs if not (sometimes) confronted with
121
See Simon (n. 2), p. 59f. for a refutation of an idealistic misunderstanding of Hum-
boldts concept.
122
On the two strands in speech act theory see Searle (n. 5), p. 142; obviously, speaker
intention is suspect to Culler (n. 42), p. 23, cf. Searle (n. 5), p. 79-84 (defending inten-
tionality). Skinner (n. 13), p. 132f. states that the intentions a speaker wants her/his
audience to understand have to be socially conventionalized intentions which must
fall, that is, within a given and established range of acts which can be conventionally
grasped as being cases of that intention. Cf. the important article by P.F. Strawson:
Intention and Convention in Speech Acts, in: The Philosophical Review 73,4 (1964),
p. 439-60.
123
Cf. Booth (n. 12), p. 30-2 on modern attempts to deny that rhetoric has an access to
truth.
124
The frequency of words denoting fallacy is high (ut alii [sc. quid] videatur efficere,
fefellit, falsam opinionem alicui praebere, alium fallere).
equally mistaken contentions, which in sum (minus minus = plus) result in cor-
rect beliefs.125 Still another argument is that even if there is a state of affairs
(veritas), it may serve the common good (communis utilitas) if the orator says
things which are not the case.126
The refutations seem weak, and Quintilian seems more interested in avoiding
than in giving answers. The reason may be that the conceptual apparatus of phi-
losophers attacking rhetoric for its lack of truthfulness is incompatible with the
rhetoricians interest in the coherence of perceptions and sentences with other
perceptions and sentences. It follows that the reproach of manipulating the facts
does not quite stand up.127 According to Quintilian speech is not about facts,
but about facts and things-perceived-as-facts, about things true or seeming to
be true, done or seeming to be done, and things happened or deemed to have
happened.128 Furthermore, the words vera and falsa serve to denote things
deemed to be true/false, and consequently often stand for statements about
things deemed to be true or false. The point of reference is not the things the
linguistic signs stand for, but linguistic signs, propositions, and opinions held to
be true or false. The doctrines on false narratives (falsae expositiones) and on
color (4,2,88-100) are based upon notions of coherence (congruere, cohaerere,
consentire), but this coherence is not one between signs and facts, but one either
between ones false propositions, or between such propositions and others which
are generally accepted to be true.129
Now, rhetoricians conceive of truth as something that needs help to be recog-
nized and made a reason for acting. Quintilian is particularly clear about this idea
in the way he uses the notions of vera as things happened or things being the
case, veri similia as things believable to have happened or to be the case, and
credibilia as things worthy of belief:130
No one should think there is anything reprehensible in my suggestion that a Nar-

rative which is wholly in our favour should be plausible (veri similem), when it is
in fact true. There are many true things that are not very credible, and false things
125
See Quint. inst. 2,17,27 and 17,29.
126
Quint. inst. 2,17,36: non semper autem ei, etiamsi frequentissime, tuenda veritas erit,
sed aliquando exigit communis utilitas ut etiam falsa defendat.
127
For an interesting account of the notions of natural object and realism as used by
literary critics to debase the role of the audience and of rhetoric alike, see Booth (n.
11), p. 97-116 and 120f.
128
Cf. inst. 4,2,31: rei factae aut ut factae; 5,8,3: in rebus aut certis aut de quibus tam-
quam certis loquimur; 5,10,12: quod aut sit uerum aut uideatur.
129
Cf. inst. 4,2,89f.: verae alicui rei cohaereat ... ne qua inter se pugnent ... in summam
non consentiunt ... ne eis, quae vera esse constabit, adversa sint.
130
Inst, 4,2,34: nec quisquam reprensione dignum putet quod proposuerim eam quae sit
tota pro nobis debere esse ueri similem cum uera sit. sunt enim plurima uera quidem,
sed parum credibilia, sicut falsa quoque frequenter ueri similia. quare non minus la-
borandum est ut iudex quae uere dicimus quam quae fingimus credat.
are frequently plausible (veri similia). We must therefore make just as much effort
to make the judge believe the true things we say as to make him believe what we
invent.
Quintilian does not express ontological or epistemological doubts about the exis-
tence or knowability of things that are the case (vera), but the observation that
people build trust upon their attitudes towards things, and not to the things them-
selves, causes him to found argumentation on a distinction between credible and
incredible representations of things.131 Credibility is granted if a proposition and
its linguistic representation are understood as being appropriate (aptum), which
itself is a relation not definable by abstract rules. A thing said is the proper
thing to say if the audience conceives of the inference as appropriate, which is
commonly understood as having a belief in the things said. A speech is meant to
bring about a congruence between the audiences beliefs in and attitudes towards
facts, and the orators representations of these beliefs. An actual correspon-
dence between facts and representations may occur, but is not aimed at. State-
ments and propositions are to match other statements or representations of state-
ments. Explaining the meaning of a part of the sentence is, then, to explain the
conditions which made the speaker think that this was the proper thing to say in
that particular situation under these particular circumstances etc.132
Another example which backs up the contentions made above is provided by
Quintilians account of Narrative. He recommends Vividness (enargeia, eviden-
tia) when a truth requires not only to be told but in a sense to be presented to
the sight.133 Lucidity is, according to Quintilian, not dependent on the truth-
value of statements proposed in the course of narration, since anyone who
wants to obscure something is presenting false statements as true, and needs to
strive in his Narrative to make them seem as vivid as possible.134 When Quin-
tilian recommends to supplement the facts (vera) by a plausible picture of what
happened (credibilis imago rerum), the notion of credibilis serves a double func-
tion.135 First, it underlines the necessity of creating an attitude towards the cogni-
tive knowledge provided by the narration, assuming that it is the attitude towards
facts, not the facts themselves, that makes people act in certain ways. Secondly,
it shows that invention (fingi) is understood as a method of making explicit what
131
Cf. e.g. Searle (n. 5), p. 55f.: ontological subjectivity does not necessarily imply
epistemic subjectivity.
132
Remember that this was one of Austins interpretations of is true (see section 2
above).
133
Inst. 4,2,64: cum quid veri non dicendum sed quodammodo etiam ostendendum est.
134
Inst. 4,2,65: nam qui obscurare vult narrat falsa pro veris, et in iis quae narrat debet
laborare ut videantur quam evidentissima.
135
Inst. 4,2,123f.: multum confert adiecta ueris credibilis rerum imago, quae uelut in rem
praesentem perducere audientis uidetur ... nihil his neque credibilius fingi neque ue-
hementius exprobrari neque manifestius ostendi potest.
is implied in the perception of things. Ciceros portrayal of the drunken Antony,

which is quoted by Quintilian, is not an addition, but an extract from what can
plausibly be held to be already there, implied in (the audiences) concept of
drunkenness as well as in the concept of Antony. Vividness shows what the
things are really like, by making them credible in much the same way in which
some propositions are neither necessarily true nor merely not contradictory.136
As we have seen when dealing with reliability, or impartiality and related no-
tions, credibility is not an independent property of statements (and propositions),
but it is an attribution made by the hearer. Credibility is granted on the basis of
the hearers assumptions about correct representation and correct inference. If
the speaker assesses her/his hearers assumptions correctly, the hearers will at-
tribute credibility or probability to what has been stated. What results from this
exchange is an affective attitude towards the representation, which is belief. The
actual utterance we find in a written text is to be imagined as resulting from a
virtual conversation with the audience, whose virtual reactions initiated a process
of constant rearrangement of things and words (res atque verba). Instead of
asking the questions Is this a fact? or Did this happen? or Did he mean it?,
which all presuppose that we can give extra-linguistic evidence, we may ask then
(1) which concepts were negotiated in the virtual conversation preceding the
utterance we encounter as the final one, and (2) what made the author stop his
speakers efforts at this very point of the (potentially) infinite process of rework-
ing the speech act.
13. Belief
Our view of what such seemingly simple speech acts as statements are and what
they refer to has considerably changed during the course of our exploration.
Following Austin and the rhetoricians, we have seen how a speakers commit-
ment to truth and the participation of the audience in recognizing and developing
states of belief determine the relation of statements to facts. By referring to per-
ceptions and mental states in the hearers mind, speakers appear to be relating
representations of facts to other representations of facts, which both are regularly
expressed by sentences. As we have already touched upon the intersections be-
tween our concerns here and the analysis of literary narratives, we will now
briefly look at related passages from Quintilian before concluding with an out-
look on language and perception. Rhetorical Narrative and Probation both work
on beliefs and the creation of beliefs as a mode of organizing as well as altering
the attitude of speakers and hearers to the world. It is Belief that defines the
world of oratory, and, as contended already, it is that mode of connecting with
136
Cf. the three types of probationes in inst. 5,8,4-7: probationes ... necessariae ... credi-
biles ... non repugnantes (we may think of Aristotelian endoxa).
the world through thought and speech that in rhetorical doctrine takes the place
of a distinction between facts and fiction. Among the expressions used to denote
the aim of speech is fidem facere bring about belief (in us, in what we
say).137 Quintilian uses it rarely, but we find it in the introduction to his treat-
ment of argumentation, which is presented as central to rhetoric but neglected by
many rhetors who were afraid of argumentation and preferred to occupy them-
selves with less demanding fields of oratory.138 Quintilians universal assessment
of how argumentation works is of particular relevance for helping us to connect
our interest in inference (from propositions) with the interest in reference (to
facts and things deemed to be facts) (inst. 5,10,11-13):
Ergo cum sit a r g u m e n t u m r a t i o p r o b a t i o n e m p r a e s t a n s , q u a c o l l i g i -

tur aliud per aliud, et quae quod est dubium per id quod dubium
n o n e s t c o n f i r m a t , necesse est esse aliquid in causa quod probatione non
egeat. (12) Alioqui nihil erit quo probemus, nisi fuerit quod a u t s i t u e r u m a u t
u i d e a t u r , ex quo dubiis fides fiat. Pro c e r t i s autem habemus primum quae
s e n s i b u s p e r c i p i u n t u r , ut quae uidemus audimus, qualia sunt signa, deinde
ea [in] quae c o m m u n i o p i n i o n e c o n s e n s u m est: (13) deos esse,
praestandam pietatem parentibus, praeterea quae l e g i b u s c a u t a sunt, quae
persuasione etiam si non omnium hominum, eius tamen ciuitatis aut gentis in qua
res agitur i n m o r e s r e c e p t a sunt, ut pleraque in iure non legibus sed moribus
constant: si quid inter utramque partem conuenit, si quid probatum est, denique
cuicumque aduersarius non contradicit.
This concise picture of how an argument is to be developed is a key passage in

Quintilians thought on rhetoric. All statements about things that are uncertain
(dubia) have to be derived from certain beliefs (certa), which are derived from
sense perception, common sense (convention), the laws and habits, as part of the
ius held by a people or community. The certain beliefs are represented by propo-
sitions such as gods exist (deos esse), and the orator infers from these proposi-
tions in order to create statements. Now, Quintilians account of narration is, like
Ciceros, connected to argumentation in a particularly tight manner, which
makes acts of reporting or narrating almost equal to acts of reasoning, argumen-
tation, and probation. A narrative is an exposition, designed to be persuasive, of
an action done or deemed to be done.139 Between the sequence of sentences
meant to provide reasons for an opinion defended or refuted and a sequence of
sentences meant to report events, differences tend to disappear, as the former is a
presentation of arguments using the patterns of extension in time (continua),
while the latter is a presentation of arguments fitting (congruens) the structure of
137
Cf. e.g. for narration and fides Cic. top. 98; for a typical example of connecting mor-
als with appearance cf. Cic. off. 2,33: fides autem ut habeatur duabus rebus effici
potest si existimabimur adepti coniunctam cum iustitia prudentiam.
138
See Quint. inst. 5,8,1; 5,10,11; 6,2,18.
139
Inst. 4,2,31: narratio est rei factae aut ut factae utilis ad persuadendum expositio.
the former.140 Both accounts, probation and narration, are based upon the notion
that coherence between propositions is decisive in producing the effects of prob-
ability of, belief in, and (consequently) agreement to ones point of view. Lan-
guage then not only represents things, but organizes propositions (and percep-
tions) in order to make them a significant reason in decision-making and acting
upon decisions. The notion of coherence is, so to speak, entirely intra-textual, or
intra-linguistic: the meaning of a sentence is dependent on its relation to other
sentences, a proposition is dependent on other propositions, a statement on an-
other statement. A theory of action therefore seems interconnected with a theory
of the understanding of linguistic utterances, as both refer to perception (or:
imagination) as the ultimate reason of acting.
14. Perception and its formation through oratory
Finally, we will take up the notion that perception and imagination are reasons
for acting, and ask for the significance of linguistic representations within the
perspectives sketched above. As readers are familiar with thinking of language as
a tool to express something, we are almost inevitably lead to the dualist and
ornamentalist misunderstandings mentioned above. Donald Davidsons view of
language seems much more compatible with what we find in rhetoric:141
What matters, for present purposes, is that once in place, language is not an ordi-
nary learned skill; it is, or has become, a mode of perception. However, speech is
not just one more organ; it is essential to the other senses if they are to yield pro-
positional knowledge. Language is the organ of propositional perception. Seeing
sights and hearing sounds does not require thought with propositional content;
perceiving how things are does, and this ability develops along with language.142
Perceiving through language means having words and concepts at hand which
make perceptions significant and give them (tentatively) a place within an exist-
ing order. The notion of language and the use of concepts as connected with
perception may be compared to an interesting shift in Quintilians way of de-
scribing the trained orators knowledge of words and things. The doctrine of
inventing what to say (and how to say it) starts with the idea of a cognitive
140
Inst. 4,2,79: aut quid inter probationem et narrationem interest nisi quod narratio est
probationis continua propositio, rursus probatio narrationi congruens confirmatio?
141
According to Rorty (n. 2), p. 10, Davidson breaks with the notion that language is a
medium a medium either of representation or of expression and supplements the
idea (ibid. p. 16): The idea that language has a purpose goes once the idea of lan-
guage as medium goes.
142
D. Davidson: Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, 2nd edition, Oxford 2001 (=
Collected Essays, Vol. 2), p. 135.
knowledge of a complex ensemble of search categories (loci) which make it

possible either to place a phenomenon in one of them or to find associated things
together, to scrutinize them by disintegration and to understand what their differ-
ent aspects relate to in order to form an argument. The categories provide a sys-
tematized access to phenomena as potential arguments, and it provides a system
of inferring arguments from thought about phenomena. Through constant train-
ing, the knowledge of these categories is to inform the mind of the orator to such
an extent that it becomes an internalized mode of perceiving things (cf.
5,10,122f.).143 The effect of training is a habitus, which is comparable to the
ability of a musician to play the lyre without thinking about how and when to put
his fingers on which place to produce a tone:144
... so this variety and abundance of Arguments does nothing to obstruct the ora-
tors train of thought, but rather offers and presents itself to the mind, as it were,
and follows his speech automatically, just as letters and syllables demand no con-
scious thought from the writer.
During the process of the orators formation, the functional model is reversed.
Cognition and imagination change from being agents in an actively conducted
search for words and arguments to a mode of perception to which things present
themselves as apt or inept for a particular thought or sentence. Perception now
works by immediately applying the notions of credibility and probability, and its
place is no longer fixed to the position and perspective of the individual, but
allows the orator, to put it simply, to choose a point of view, and to perceive
those aspects of things that are relevant. It is easy to see why rhetoricians who
imagined this reversal of roles to be the aim of education were not as bothered
about the sheer amount and complexity of the loci as we may be.145 The loci, the
material ones as well as the formal ones, are best understood as dispositions
usually activated when producing representations in the mind. They belong to
what Searle calls the Background assumptions.
143
The same is said for example about finding the apt dispositio: training leads to usus,
an understanding of the order of things (ordo) and their inner connection (copulatio)
in a particular case, which then indicates the way to the particular composition which
fits the case (inst. 7,10,8).
144
Inst. 5,10,125: ut, quem ad modum illorum artificum, etiam si alio spectant, manus
tamen ipsa consuetudine ad grauis, acutos, mediosque horum sonos fertur, sic ora-
toris cogitationem nihil moretur haec uarietas argumentorum et copia, sed q u a s i
o f f e r a t s e e t o c c u r r a t , et, ut litterae syllabaeque s c r i b e n t i u m c o g i t a -
t i o n e m n o n e x i g u n t , sic orationem s p o n t e quadam sequantur.
145
Cf. Searle (n. 30), p. 187: memory is not as a storehouse of propositions and images,
as a kind of big library or filing cabinet of representations. But we should think of
memory rather as a mechanism for generating current performance, including con-
scious thoughts and actions, based on past experience.
The exclusion of facts as they are from the process of reasoning the rhetori-
cians envisage, is, again, interestingly supported by contemporary analysis of the
relation between perception, sense data, and beliefs. Donald Davidson has ar-
gued, that sensations, percepts, and sense data do not provide reasons for they
have to be geared conceptually to what they are reasons for. We need a pro-
positional content and a belief in it in order to have other beliefs: ... nothing can
supply a reason for a belief except another (or many another) belief.146 As
Robert Nozick remarks, our belief capabilities are more supple than our percep-
tual ones we can believe what we do not perceive, and we can disbelieve the
evidence of our senses.147 This provides a convincing basis for contextualizing
Quintilians distinction between a belief in and an understanding of a proposi-
tion, on the one hand, from its mere recognition, on the other. When discussing
the utility of defining words and concepts, he sets its use in academic debate
apart and states that persuasion is successful if the judge does not silently dis-
agree, which may be the case if he was overwhelmed by the sophisticated use of
dialectical definitions (verbis devictus), but did not get deeply acquainted (ac-
cesserit) with the thing (res).148 The thing here denotes the content of the ar-
gument, which the judge may grasp, but towards which he does not have an
attitude of belief. His silent disagreement shows that he is unable to contradict,
but still has no understanding in a way that could make him act upon the belief.
This knowledge is not relevant in making decisions and acting upon them, be-
cause its holder lacks a favourable attitude towards it.
Let us abstract some possible outlines from the observations made so far. I con-
tended that rhetoric theorizes about features that can count as probable condi-
tions of literary utterances in general. The use of words and the construction of
meaning through proposing propositional knowledge and representing speech
acts are both ways of organizing perceptions of the world.149 The reference of
terms involved and concepts used is not the world as conceived of in brute
facts, but the hearers perceptions of the world and the linguistic representa-
tions of these perceptions.150 From the choice of words, which entails a choice of
146
Davidson (n. 44), p. 136.
147
Nozick (n. 60), p. 284.
148
Inst. 7,3,15: persuadendum enim iudici est, qui, etiam si uerbis deuictus [devinctus
codd.] est, tamen nisi ipsi rei accesserit tacitus dissentiet.
149
Perception itself can be understood as a primary form of intentionality (Searle [n.
37], p. 222).
150
The criticism e.g. of Katz (n. 3), p. 206f. that some contemporary theories of meaning
push boundaries of semantics of language in everyday manners and morals, psychol-
ogy and sociology, and so on is actually a good description of a rhetoricians ap-
concepts, to the disposition of arguments and syntactical devices, elements of a

speech act (or a sequence of speech acts such as an oratorical speech) are used to
operate on a (hitherto disorganized, or supposedly disorganized) bundle of per-
ceptions in the mind of the hearer (which may be identical with the speakers
mind if we consider soliloquy). Words are not used to comment upon something
which is already there, but serve to organize perceptions which may or may not
have true references in a state of affairs as defined by physics, or biology, or
politics or anything else. Rhetoric is concerned with the world of representations
of realities, and therefore rhetoricians feel no obligation to mediate between a
world of facts and a world of representations of facts; they argue from the per-
spective of the representation of the information in the minds of the language
users.151 Speech acts upon representations, because the supposed theory of ac-
tion is based on the assumption that it is representations of facts, and not facts,
that make people act. The coherence rhetoricians look for is one between repre-
sentations and sentences about representations. What is supposed to match one
another are sentences, or beliefs expressed in sentences, or conditions of the
utterance of sentences.
The reality which is considered relevant for making decisions and acting ap-
propriately is one of perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes which are liable to be
confirmed or changed by other perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes. Mimesis of
and comment on true facts as conceived by philosophers are, from the rhetorical
point of view, the least interesting speech acts.152 Selection and combination of
words and thoughts according to an inquiry into peoples perceptions is meant to
create a consistent view of the things at stake which then leads them to decide
proach. It may be asked who is unduly pushing and who is unduly narrowing bounda-
ries.
151
This is how Katz (n. 3), p. 230 describes the approach of Searle, denying (from a
logicians perspective) that representations in the hearers minds have an impact on
literal sentence meaning.
152
It may not be out of place to quote one of the early attacks on the use of true and
truth in philosophy, in order to illustrate how helpful it is to start asking why we
should be so interested in first establishing a reductionist concept of truth, and then
define its discovery as principal aim of study. A.J. Ayer: Language, Truth, and Logic,
London 2001 (first publ. 1936), p. 85: we find that in all sentences of the form p is
true, the phrase is true is logically superfluous; p. 86: Thus, to say that a proposi-
tion is true is just to assert it, and to say it is false is just to assert its contradictory.
And this indicates that the terms true and false connote nothing, but function in
sentences simply as marks of assertion and denial. Therefore Ayer reformulates the
question of truth as one not regarding a supposed real quality or the real relation,
but one asking what makes a proposition true or false, which is a loose way of ex-
pressing the question With regard to any proposition p, what are the conditions in
which p (is true) and what are the conditions in which not-p? (ibid. p. 87). This, Ayer
states, is simply asking how propositions are validated.
and believe what the orator has proposed to decide or believe.153 The main crite-
rion for selection and combination is that the representation created has to fit into
the world as it is represented in the audiences minds. What precedes the idea of
selecting and combining words and thoughts is a concept of the social world as
conditioned by the existence of different views and different audiences at one
time and under the same circumstances. Rhetoricians conceive of the social
world not as unified, but as inhabited by people holding different world views
according to their different approaches to and uses of language (systems,
games).154 The orator is meant to be able to mediate between different assump-
tions, and to find and surf on paths he has created.
In conclusion, we may take up the initial methodological concerns. Speech
act analysis helps in understanding that we do not deal with simple propositions
when reading and producing statements. If some of the connections I proposed to
see between speech act analysis and rhetoric deserve further attention, we may
find that many simple assertions about facts in literature as well as in (Roman)
culture and history cannot be backed up by evidence, which is not due to a loss
of information, but to a lack of interest in notions of inference (from sentences)
and reference (to different sorts of facts). The notions of appropriateness and
coherence point towards a concept of (literary) texts that is based upon internal
relations between linguistic representations and thoughts, which makes it ques-
tionable that these texts were meant to be measured against or commented on by
pointing to external phenomena. Future research into ordinary language terms as
used by literary scholars may help to develop a conceptual awareness that in turn
helps to reinstate ancient rhetoricians views on language and action in ordinary
literary criticism.
153
Cf. Booth (n. 12), p. 67 paraphrasing Austin: ... or, in my terms, it (sc. ordinary
language) remakes reality, rather than merely reflecting or distorting it.
154
Cf. Simon (n. 2), p. 51f. on Wilhelm von Humboldt on the variety of empiric langua-
ges and the specific use of language within the same communities: Verschieden sind
sie, insofern sie umgekehrt die sie Sprechenden im Denken, Erkennen und Handeln in
ihren eigenen Bahnen halten und dadurch die Verschiedenheit von ,Weltansichten
bewirken.

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ALEXANDER ARWEILER (Mnster)

What is a literary speech act? Quintilian, John Searle, and

1. Analyzing concepts and looking for methods

ence.5 Actually, we should neither underestimate the success of such working

To be looking for a conceptual analysis of a given expression E is to be in a posi-

times considered irrelevant to a theoretical investigation.13 But it is not the his-

2. The first contact Constatives in Austin and Searle

Austin used constatives to name a class of utterances which comprises state-

knowledge at the time of utterance.21 We are dealing with a general dimension

is the notion of a commitment to truth, performed by the speaker in uttering a

[such-and-such] is said to be performative, if and only if its so being used counts as a

3. Second thoughts about constatives in Latin criticism

Austins and Searles investigations of statements as speech acts open up a vast

(1) Every Technical Proof consists of Signs, Arguments, or Examples (inst.

Commenting on, paraphrasing, or analyzing a sentence taken from an ancient

The supplement in (6) is tentative, as we could also think of I declare, I state,

the reader is supposed to agree because of her/his normal perception of a time

4. The pale plants of literature Serious and etiolated uses of language

We have tried to circumscribe some consequences of speech act theorists per-

serious utterances is epistemological: A sentence is never not in a context. We

5. The structure of a literary speech act A proposal

The functional interdependence between sentence meaning and the illocutionary

illocutionary force of the utterance.52 Furthermore, the necessity of a distinction

the conditions of literary utterances. It is helpful to frame a complete text (a play, a

6. The structure of a literary speech act in practice

adapt, both intentionally and unintentionally, to norms, conventions, and forms

7. Further qualifications: More than one

In the previous sections we have complemented the initial picture of statements

8. Mental states, meaning, and intention

9. Further notes on Meaning

10. Speech acting upon words, and perceptions, and facts

something, and at the same time it involves her/his intention to describe in a

11. True to the facts which facts?

sive object of information, but participates in communication by providing

12. Credibility and true things

In the previous section we have started an exploration of reference to facts by

No one should think there is anything reprehensible in my suggestion that a Nar-

is implied in the perception of things. Ciceros portrayal of the drunken Antony,

Ergo cum sit a r g u m e n t u m r a t i o p r o b a t i o n e m p r a e s t a n s , q u a c o l l i g i -

This concise picture of how an argument is to be developed is a key passage in

14. Perception and its formation through oratory

knowledge of a complex ensemble of search categories (loci) which make it

concepts, to the disposition of arguments and syntactical devices, elements of a

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