Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language

by John Rogers Searle

Written in an outstandingly clear and lively style, this 1969 book provokes its readers to rethink issues they may have regarded as long since settled.

Genres: Philosophy, Linguistics, Language, Nonfiction, Essays, Academic, Theory

226 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

John Rogers Searle (born July 31, 1932 in Denver, Colorado) is an American philosopher and was the Slusser Professor of Philosophy and Mills Professor of Philosophy of Mind and Language at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley). Widely noted for his contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and social philosophy, he was the first tenured professor to join the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley. He received the Jean Nicod Prize in 2000, and the National Humanities Medal in 2004.

Reviews

[Jenny Webb · Rating 2 out of 5]

I ended this pretty frustrated with Searle. I disagree with his commitment to intentionality—he seems to want to posit all speech acts (words with illocutionary force / performative) as taking place within a specific intentional frame, and the implications for human subjectivity / agency in this frame are problematic. He seems to reject Austin's notion of locutionary acts based off of the fact that he (Searle) sees the locutionary as taking place in the pre-linguistic work of the proposition and thus cannot be an act, and that reading of / relationship to Austin is odd (and frankly misreads Austin's locutionary). That's not to say that Searle's not useful to read, especially in understanding the development of speech act theory, but this was one of those reads I ended up disagreeing with or at least not trusting at a fair number of points.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

As with most things, I started out entirely confused about what, exactly, Searle was even saying. Around a hundred pages later, I checked Wikipedia and the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and viola! Suddenly life is better. You always like a book better once you get what it's saying. I wish I knew more about the theories of Wittengenstein and Russell to which he's alluding, and I do think that he's a bit of a naive realist (and I like Realists), and he certainly isn't, as one book review claimed, "lively and clear," but he is doing an incredible thing claiming that all communication is action and that the performance (with an intentional agent) of a speech act is the fundamental unit of communication and all of the constitutive rules and sub-rules and fallacies. I like analytic philosophy because it's so organized and proceeds little bit by little bit, but it can be exhausting, especially when, like Searle, they aren't afraid to delve into propositional logic diagrams.

[Andrew Allison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Do NOT read page 156!

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE FIRST PART OF A “TRILOGY” BY THE FAMED ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHER

John Rogers Searle (born 1932) is an American philosopher at UC Berkeley. He explains in the first chapter of this 1969 book, “I distinguish between the philosophy of language and linguistic philosophy. Linguistic philosophy is the attempt to solve particular philosophical problems by attending to the ordinary use of particular words or other elements in a particular language. The philosophy of language is the attempt to give philosophically illuminating descriptions of certain general features of language, such as reference, truth, meaning, and necessity… this book is an essay in the philosophy of language, not in linguistic philosophy.” (Pg. 3-4)

He observes, “As a native speaker of English I know that ‘oculist’ is exactly synonymous with ‘eye doctor’… Yet I have no operational criteria for synonymy, ambiguity, nounhood, meaningfulness, or sentencehood. Furthermore, any criterion for any one of these concepts has to be consistent with my (our) knowledge or must be abandoned as inadequate. The starting point, then, for this study is that one knows such facts about language independently of any ability to provide criteria of the preferred kinds for such knowledge.” (Pg. 11)

He summarizes: “the methodology of this book must seem extremely simple. I am a native speaker of a language. I wish to offer certain characteristics and explanations of my use of elements of that language. The hypothesis of which I am proceeding is that my use of linguistic elements is underlain by certain rules. I shall therefore offer linguistic characterizations and then explain the data in those characterizations by formulating the underlying rules.” (Pg. 15)

He explains, “the hypothesis of this book is that speaking a language is performing acts according to rules. The form this hypothesis will take is that the semantic structure of a language may be regarded as a conventional realization of a series of sets of underlying constitutive rules, and that speech acts are acts characteristically performed by uttering expressions in accordance with these sets of constitutive rules.” (Pg. 36-37)

He points out, “The reader should bear in mind that in a natural language like English particular rules will either attach to elements in the deep structure of the sentence or more likely to some product of the combinatorial operations of the semantic component. There is, incidentally, a certain amount of syntactical evidence to indicate that in the deep structure of English sentences noun phrases are not as diverse as the surface structure makes them seem. In particular, some recent research tends to suggest that all English pronouns are forms of the definite article in the deep structure of sentences.” (Pg. 95-96)

He states, “philosophers since the publication of Wittgenstein’s ‘Tractatus’ have often said that tautological utterances like ‘Either it’s raining or it’s not raining’ do not say anything or are empty. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is a vast difference between saying of a politician ‘Either he is a fascist or he isn’t’ and saying of him ‘Either he is a Communist or he isn’t.’ Both of these are tautological assertions but the difference between them is to be explained by the difference in predication. The first raises the question of his being a Fascist, the second raises the question of his being a Communist.” (Pg. 124)

He cautions, “As I am about to make some criticisms of contemporary linguistic philosophy, perhaps this is a good place to remark that I regard the contribution made by this kind of philosophy as truly remarkable. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that it has produced a revolution in philosophy, a revolution of which this book is but one small consequence. The effort I am about to make to correct a few errors should not be taken as a rejection of linguistic philosophy.” (Pg. 131)

He clarifies, “my remarks here are not intended to offer any general account of the conditions of applicability of these concepts. I am not saying that ‘voluntary,’ ‘free will,’ etc., have no presuppositions, that any action at all can intelligibly be characterized as voluntary. On the contrary, I think that action-modifying concepts have a rather complicated network of presuppositions. Furthermore, some of these concepts are, in my view, excluders. ‘Voluntary,’ in particular, seems to be an excluder. It gets its meaning by contrast with ‘under duress,’ ‘forced,’ ‘compelled,’ etc.” (Pg. 150)

He suggests, “Perhaps the best examples of the distinction between meaning … and use are provided by English obscenities. Obscenities … have the same meaning as, their clinical equivalents. Indeed, the point or one of the points of having the clinical equivalent is to have a polite synonym. But of course the use of obscenities is quite different from their use as polite synonyms. So a person may be quite willing to assert a proposition using the clinical euphemism and yet quite unwilling to assert the same… proposition using the obscene word.” (Pg. 155)

This is one of Searle’s most important books, and will be “must reading” for anyone seriously studying his thought, or contemporary analytic philosophy.

[Colm Gillis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quite a short book but Searle packed a lot in. What was really delightful was the logic and the analysis. It might be a bit of a jump into the deep end (as it was for me) if you are not a language theorist. Nonetheless it certainly gives you food for thought and definitely would inspire you to learn more about subjects, predicates, etc ... and all the other components of speech we take for granted.

[Will Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Still the benchmark of speech act theory. More accurately, this book marks the transition of speech act theory from the speculative observations of Austin and others to the rigorous field it's since become.

[Ilana Diamant · Rating 4 out of 5]

I apologize but I'm not sorry.

[Alonzo Caudillo · Rating 3 out of 5]

La premisa del libro implica que hay reglas de uso del lenguaje de las que deben seguirse una correcta forma de enunciar los compromisos y las promesas, las cuales Searle recupera en forma de tautologías y de una combinación entre argumentos gramaticales y filosofía del lenguaje. Éste es un punto a favor dentro de su obra, pero olvida las posturas teóricas de la lingüística para hablar del consenso y función perlocutiva en el uso de las reglas entre instituciones culturales. Ahí es donde Searle no me convence. Sin embargo, sus críticas y exposiciones son esclarecedoras en la historia de la filosofía analítica y dentro de mis lecturas (escasas) dentro del campo. Espero pronto leer su pelea con Derrida.

[Montse · Rating 2 out of 5]

Me leí lo que me importaba, que eran los tres primeros capítulos. Ya seguiré, en otro momento, con la lectura del resto, pero ahora mismo el capítulo de la referencialidad estaba siendo matador. Le pongo dos estrellas porque creo que la traducción tiene algunas lagunas y, sobre todo, porque la edición las tiene muy graves.

[Helena]

gracias por nada searle

[bag · Rating 4 out of 5]

sonlara doğru ya konu dağıldı ya da ben

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Searle’s ‘Speech Acts’ is one of those books that doesn’t simply explain language; it reorganises the way the mind holds the concept of meaning. It begins with an austere philosophical tone, almost severe in its analytical clarity, and yet, progressively, it reveals itself to be far more than a treatise on linguistic theory.

The book becomes a meditation on how humans create reality together—not through force, not through instinct, but through the deeply structured act of speaking. Reading it feels like peeling back the ordinary and discovering the mechanisms that hold the social world upright.

Searle takes J.L. Austin’s foundational idea—that to speak is to do—and moves it from a provocative intuition into a systematic architecture. He wants not just to show that language can perform actions, but to explain precisely how it does so.

In the process, language stops appearing as a passive system of rules and symbols and begins to appear as a procedural, rule-based framework in which intentional agents coordinate action. Meaning does not merely describe the world; it helps build it.

One of the most striking aspects of the book is the way Searle insists that meaning is impossible to understand without intentionality. For him, utterances are not signals that convey meaning the way electrical impulses carry information. They are acts performed by a mind with purpose, structured by conventions that allow a hearer to recognise not just the words, but the intention behind them.

When someone says “I promise,” the utterance is not a report of an internal commitment—it is the commitment itself. The statement enacts a change: before the utterance there is no obligation, after it one exists. Language here is not representational but constitutive. It does not mirror reality; it shapes it.

This leads Searle to differentiate between two kinds of rules: those that regulate activities already possible, and those that create the possibility of an activity. The example is elegant and memorable: the rules of etiquette regulate behaviour that could occur without them, but the rules of chess ‘constitute’ the game itself; without the rules the game ceases to exist.

Speech acts, Searle argues, belong firmly in the second category. They are not regulated behaviour—they are constituted by the rules that define what counts as promising, ordering, apologising, declaring, or asking.

To make this argument rigorous, Searle constructs a framework that distinguishes utterance acts, propositional acts, illocutionary acts, and perlocutionary effects. The illocutionary act—the doing achieved through speaking—is the centrepiece. Everything else radiates outward from this point.

A perlocution, such as persuading or frightening, depends on context and consequence. An illocution, such as asserting, commanding, or promising, does not depend on the effect but on the conventions and intentions involved. This is one of the profound conceptual contributions of the book: the separation of what language ‘‘is meant to do’’ from what it ‘‘happens to do’’.

Part of the intellectual pleasure of the book lies in Searle’s relentless specificity. His extended analysis of promising—long, detailed, and occasionally overwhelming—serves as a laboratory case through which he tests his entire system. A promise requires a future-oriented propositional content, a sincerity condition involving genuine intention, contextual conditions in which a promise is felicitous, and crucially, the mutual recognition of the rules governing promising.

If any component is missing, the utterance does not become a promise at all. A false promise is not a corrupted promise but a failure of the act to occur under its defining conditions. In this sense, meaning is less like a phenomenon that merely emerges and more like a game move that must satisfy structural requirements.

Searle’s taxonomy of illocutionary acts remains one of the most cited frameworks in pragmatics: assertives commit the speaker to the truth of a proposition, directives attempt to get the listener to act, commissives bind the speaker to future action, expressives articulate psychological states, and declarations perform institutional change by their utterance alone. To recognise this taxonomy is to recognise that speech acts do not float in a neutral semantic field—they operate within histories, institutions, and social systems.

This, perhaps, is where the book begins to exceed its original disciplinary boundaries. Legal scholars adopt it to explain the power of verdicts and contracts. Anthropologists use it to study ritual.

Conversation analysts test its limits in spontaneous speech. Computational linguists incorporate its logic into early models of dialogue processing. Even philosophy of mind draws from it, recognising that intentionality is not merely a private property of cognition but something negotiated within shared symbolic structures.

Yet the book has generated criticism as well as influence. For some, particularly those aligned with conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, Searle’s theory seems too idealised and removed from the messy improvisation of real interaction. For others, such as feminist theorists and poststructuralists, the framework appears indifferent to the asymmetries of power that shape who may declare, promise, command, or refuse.

And for relevance theorists, the reliance on explicit conventional rules seems too rigid to accommodate the inferential fluidity with which meaning is constructed in actual communication.

Still, almost all critique happens on the intellectual terrain Searle maps—proof of the theory’s gravitational pull.

Stylistically, ‘Speech Acts’ demands patience. There are few rhetorical flourishes, few moments where the prose relaxes. Arguments unfold slowly, methodically, as if every claim must be exhaustive or not made at all. Yet there is a certain austere beauty in this precision. You feel, while reading, that you are watching a cathedral built stone by stone—not decorative, not ornate, but enduring and computational in its clarity.

And then something strange happens when the book finally sinks in: everyday speech begins to look different. A wedding vow becomes not an emotional utterance but an ontological pivot. An apology becomes a ritual vehicle for restoring ruptured social order.

A request becomes a negotiation of authority and obligation. Even the mundane—“Can you pass the salt?”—suddenly reveals itself as a complex cooperative act in which literal meaning, intent, and shared conventions intertwine. The world does not change, but the structure beneath it becomes visible.

There is a quiet shock in realising how much of social life depends on linguistic architecture. Money, marriage, citizenship, academic degrees, law, religion, identity—these are not physical facts but linguistic institutions sustained by collective intentionality and rule-bound speech acts.

We inhabit worlds that language continuously maintains. Searle does not merely describe this; he exposes its mechanics.

And eventually—slowly, almost imperceptibly—the book becomes not just theory but reflection. You begin to recognise that speech acts reveal a deeply human impulse: the desire to coordinate meaning, to synchronise intention, to build shared reality through utterances. Language here is not merely utilitarian.

It is ritual, contract, negotiation, performance, and sometimes, creation. To speak is to participate in a civilisation’s invisible architecture.

Searle’s book remains difficult, occasionally frustrating, but profoundly transforming. When the final page is turned, what lingers is not the taxonomy, nor even the formal structure of rules, but a subtle shift in perception. One begins to hear the world differently—not as noise shaped into sentences, but as action shaped into meaning. Speaking becomes a way of shaping the world and of being shaped by it.

In the end, ‘Speech Acts’ earns its place as a foundational text not because it closes inquiry but because it opens it. It offers a framework strong enough to support further thought, generous enough to invite disagreement, and deep enough to alter how one understands language, society, and self.

And after reading it, one returns to ordinary conversation with a quiet awareness that every utterance, no matter how simple, is part of the ongoing human project of constructing reality together—one act of speech at a time.

A perpetual tome. Most commended.

[Joseph Dionysus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really a thought provoking work by Searle. It makes us to study language from use and context. Searle invites us to reconsider certain problems in Philosophy of language that we just ignored. Speech act theory is clearly explained in the first part. The second part is all about applications and clarifications. I found part one more interesting. Searle is not very difficult to understand. Dionysus.

[Paul Thiem · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had the privilege of taking Philosophy of Mind with Prof. Searle as an undergrad at Cal. This was required reading for the class.

A classic work in the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. Well written and thorough, and fairly accessible. Some background in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind is necessary for a full understanding of this book though.

[Macalester Linguistics]

M 14.0

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having graduated from a masters program that focused more on cognitive, generative, and sociolinguistics, this booked helped me understand my gaps in pragmatics.

[Jeffrey Green · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a classic in relatively recent philosophy of language, and it isn't an easy read for a person like me, who lacks a lot of the relevant background. I decided to begin to acquire that some of background by reading in philosophy, so that at least I have a good idea of what the issues are. I expect I'll grapple with Stanley Cavell next. (One of my regrets is that I never audited any of his classes when I was a graduate student at Harvard).
Searle is a clear and lively writer, and in general his presentations are not obscure, though they often demand very close reading and rereading.
By focusing on speech acts, the ways people use language, Searle cuts through a lot of what he shows to be erroneous philosophical discussions of language, doing battle with many of the major figures of modern analytical philosophy.
I'm not sure how much I'm left with after reading this book carefully, underlining passages as if I were a student once again, and writing comments in the margins, but I'm convinced that the effort was worthwhile.

[Andrew Noselli · Rating 3 out of 5]

Speech acts pro Wittgenstein's Tractatus: Searle demonstrates that the original sin is the attempt to read real or what is imagined to be real features of language into the world.  Speech acts contra Wittgenstein's Tractatus: Searle demonstrates that the example of a person saying 'Either it's raining or it isn't raining', which W classifies as meaningless, is less than meaningless as in the form of 'Either he's a Communist or he isn't a Communist'.  I applaud Searle for suggesting the distinction between predicating and referring use-values is critical for the ability to read a world where distinctions between facts and values are obscured in a digitized non-grammatical postmodern world of continuous warfare.

[Eric Dovigi]

I've been reading a lot of language philosophy and linguistics lately but I'm still fresh enough to not know quiet what to write about some of these books. I'm not familiar enough with the conversation to know how other scholars reacted to Speech Acts. Was his proof that you can get an evaluative statement out of a descriptive statement generally accepted by the community? What were the rebuttals after the book was published? I certainly found it interesting and at times very funny. I'll fill in the blanks as I keep reading other books in this genre. Also, too bad he was a pervert or I'd try more of his works.

[Dimitrii Ivanov · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reads rather easy but for me, of less practical use than Austin's "How to Do Things" which this develops into a more logical direction. The author is I guess now classed alongside Althusser and Lukács, and the common-sensical examples he uses are quite of its time.

[Emilia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Capítulo viii
"Derivación de «debe» a partir de «es» "

[Bia Zaffani]

I honestly don’t know why I read this, but it was very much fun and kind of trippy because I had no idea what was going on

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Searle writes like someone committed a priori to straightforwardness as a value; in other words, like someone completely out of place in the philosophical academy. He shoulda bin a lumberjack.
The book is dated very clearly by the frequent obeisances, risible to the C21 eye, to the early-stage stars of the Chomskyan paradigm of blessed memory.
So strange that someone so determinedly anti-nuance, such a galumpher of thought, should take the mantle of disciple of Austin and defender of same against Derrida (against whom no defence was needed, needless to say). Could anyone be iller-equipped for such roles?
Is it any good? Not really. If it has a merit, it is in setting out a glaringly untenable theory with all its frailties floodlit for the world to see. (Austin had the decorum, in 'How to do things with words', to spend most of its space drawing attention to the weak points in his own - much more illuminating and worthwhile - postulations.)
Still, Searle's essay, sophomoric though it be, is immortalised by association, written for better or worse into the history of the philosophy of language. To be fair, in this he has plenty of company.

[Chant · Rating 3 out of 5]

Searle expands on J.L. Austin's theory on speech acts and it is fairly clear on most things. Personally, I'm more of a philosophy of mind type of guy, but this book helped fleshing out what Searle expounds on in his later writings on intentionality and his view on the mind works in terms of language/communication.

I had some issues with Searle's view on proper names, as later Kripke (at least to my knowledge(?)), explained them and their usage in "Naming and Necessity", which I personally agree more with Kripke on this matter than Searle.

I like Searle mostly for his philosophy of mind and perception, but this is a good book to add to your philosophy of language collection, as Searle has a real gift for making dusty philosophical issues come to life!

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

I rated this a 4 and not a 5 because I'm not sure what all I actually understood. But from what I did understand, I found fascinating. I read this book for my class on the Rhetoric of Style and talked about what Searle had to say on speech acts, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts. This is one that I'll keep on my book shelf for the rest of my life and come back to from time to time.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

On the faculty at Berkeley. I think he stole the idea for "Intentionalism" from one of my papers. ;^)

[Su Sandar · Rating 3 out of 5]

this book is really effective for me as I am second year MA english.

[Lise · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good book about speech acts