John Searle's Speech Acts
John R. Searle’s Speech Acts is a foundational work in twentieth century philosophy of language, written as both a continuation and a critical refinement of J. L. Austin’s pioneering idea that speaking is a form of doing. Searle aims to show that language is not merely a system for describing facts but a set of rule governed actions carried out within social contexts. The book is both analytic and constructive: it clarifies key concepts, repairs gaps in Austin’s theory, and offers a systematic account of how utterances function as meaningful and effective actions.
Searle begins by revisiting Austin’s distinction between utterances that merely describe and utterances that perform. Austin had shown that certain statements, such as promising, warning, or declaring, do not simply report something but bring about a new social situation through the act of being spoken. Searle finds this insight powerful but in need of a more rigorous theoretical structure. He believes that in order to understand how speech acts work, one must understand the underlying rules that make such acts possible and intelligible.
Searle then lays out a basic premise: speaking a language is engaging in rule governed behavior, the rules of which speakers have mastered. Some rules are regulative, meaning they govern an activity that exists independently of the rules. Others are constitutive, meaning that they create the possibility of the activity itself. For Searle, speech acts depend on constitutive rules. A promise is not a mere label for a psychological state but a conventional act enabled by shared social rules that define what counts as promising.
After establishing this framework, Searle turns to the anatomy of an utterance. Every speech act, he argues, involves at least three aspects. The first is the utterance act, which is simply the physical production of sounds or written marks. The second is the propositional act, which expresses a content that can be true or false. The third is the illocutionary act, which is the heart of the matter: the action performed by means of the utterance, such as asserting, ordering, questioning, requesting, or promising. The illocutionary act reflects the intention of the speaker and is governed by rules that define what must be the case for the act to be successfully performed.
A major contribution of the book is Searle’s analysis of the conditions necessary for the success of different kinds of speech acts. For example, when analyzing promises, he specifies several conditions: the speaker must express an intention to do a future act; the speaker must believe the hearer prefers that act be done; the speaker must undertake an obligation; and the norms of the situation must support the act as a legitimate promise. In this way Searle introduces the idea of felicity conditions, which are the background rules and expectations that must be satisfied for a speech act to count as successful. These conditions include the speaker’s intention, the social context, the appropriateness of the utterance, and the understanding of both speaker and hearer.
Searle also classifies illocutionary acts into broad categories. Assertives commit the speaker to the truth of a proposition. Directives attempt to get the hearer to do something. Commissives commit the speaker to a future course of action. Expressives convey the speaker’s psychological state. Declaratives bring about a change in the world by being uttered in the correct circumstances. This taxonomy is meant not as an exhaustive list but as a way of understanding the variety of actions language makes possible.
Throughout the book, Searle insists that meaning is inseparable from intention. The meaning of an utterance is not just its literal content but the intention with which it is produced and the conventions that allow others to interpret that intention. He rejects purely behaviorist accounts that explain language through observable stimuli and responses, arguing instead for a theory rooted in intentionality and rule governed competence. Language, in his view, is a system of conventions that allow mental states to be publicly expressed and socially recognized.
Another theme Searle explores is the distinction between speaking literally and speaking indirectly. Some utterances perform their illocutionary act overtly, as when someone says, I promise to pay you back tomorrow. Others perform an act indirectly, as when someone asks, Can you pass the salt, which functions not as a request for information but as a polite request to hand over the salt. Searle explains how shared rules and expectations allow hearers to infer the intended act even when the literal meaning differs from the pragmatic force.
Searle closes the book by defending the broader philosophical significance of speech act theory. To understand language as action is to view communication as a structured and meaningful form of behavior embedded in social practices. It shows how linguistic meaning, social reality, and human intentions interlock, and it provides a way to analyze everything from legal contracts to everyday conversations. For Searle, speech act theory is not an isolated branch of philosophy but part of a larger inquiry into mind, society, and the nature of meaning.
In the decades since its publication, Speech Acts has reshaped fields as diverse as linguistics, legal theory, artificial intelligence, and literary criticism. It helped to solidify the view that language is something we do rather than something we merely use to describe, and it clarified the intricate network of rules and intentions that make communication possible. Through careful argument and clear structure, Searle offers a unified account of how speaking counts as acting, and how that insight changes the way we understand meaning, truth, and social life