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Wednesday Headway's schoolday |
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In something of a change of plan, this week's Wed-Head will not, after all, dissect the various election communications that I - and presumably you, too - have received from the five candidates standing for the four regional council seats up for grabs on 5th May. Instead, I will set the stage for that forthcoming analysis by describing the Austin-Searle theory of actions of speech. (Yes, really.) First, though, I have some... |
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PLANTATION NEWS |
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I like being the bearer of good news, so here is some: there is much reason to hope that Kinlochleven's newest regional councillor, Ms Sarah Fanet (SNP), will be a very worthy successor to the robust and effective Mr Andrew Baxter (Cons), despite their greatly divergent political outlooks. Here's why:- |
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By way of introduction amounting, too, to more good news, readers of tomorrow's Lochaber Times will not suffer the aesthetic insult of seeing my face among the excellent volunteers, including many youngsters, who turned out for the 'Big Spring Clean-up' in Plantation on Thursday 14th April. That's because I was waylaid at my own behest by virtue of being engaged in conversation with Ms Fanet. It was one of those curious conversations which begins as a simple greeting and you think it's only going to last half a minute but in the out-turn lasts a dozen times longer because one or other of you keeps thinking of more things really worth saying. Ms Fanet increasingly strikes me as an impressive individual with some very noble preoccupations and concerns. No doubt she and I will have to agree to disagree about plenty of things as and when we continue to work more closely together - which I am very keen to do - but, nevertheless, there will also be a good deal of common ground. Important ground, too. |
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One issue - and a very important one - about which we might have to a agree to differ, at least to some extent, is over the vexed and unfailingly controversial question of Scottish Independence. Now, of course this question is basically irrelevant to the council election on 5th May, but I mention it here because, as I argued at some length in my Wed-Head of 18th August '21 (see <https://draytonmark.substack.com/p/wed-head-xxiii> ), you cannot with consistency be a passionate Nationalist and yet be lukewarm about community empowerment. I don't particularly want to waste Cllr Fanet's time by pressing her about a campaign non-issue, but at the same time, and even if we reach quite different conclusions, I'd very much like to hear her opinion of my Wed-Head XXIII about Independence at because (a) almost everybody cares about it and (b) most of what I have to say about it is, or ought to be, more-or-less common ground on both sides of the argument - always assuming that there IS an argument amounting to something more than simple patriotism (on either side) which is, of course, no argument at all**. |
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[[ **I don't deliberately try to sound tiresomely rational - but I am, so that's very often how it comes across, alas. ]] |
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Ms Fanet has also pledged to meet me to walk-and-talk Plantation during her campaign, although she hasn't chosen a date yet. One candidate who HAS chosen a date - this Friday, in fact - is Fiona Fawcett (Con), who will meet me and any other (decorous) constituent-to-be** at Pinegrove Court in two days time at eleven o'clock. As things stand she will thereby become the first candidate to accept and fulfill my 'challenge' to all five candidates to tour Plantation with me; one-and-a-half candidates have done the former but not the latter, sadly (see <https://draytonmark.substack.com/p/news-release-4>, filed exactly a week after <https://draytonmark.substack.com/p/news-release-1> which first documented my 'challenge'.) |
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[[ **at least, if <https://ballotbox.scot/> are to be believed; they have Mr MacDonald squaring-off against Mr MacLennan for fourth place next month. ]] |
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There is yet more Plantation News in the postscript, below. |
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Not entirely coincidentally, the foregoing Plantation News provides a handy case-in-point with respect to the following brief introduction to Austin-Searle speech-act theory. 'Speech Acts' is the title of the first substantive book by US philosopher and speech-act theorist John Rogers Searle**, a Rhodes scholar tutored at Oxford by a British one, John Langshaw Austin. Austin tried and failed to draw a sharp line between two kinds of utterance (=the word linguists use for anything said). Austin hoped to be able cleanly to separate those utterances that are 'performative' from those that are merely 'constative'. The idea was that performatives change the world whereas constatives leave it unmolested, ie constant. This didn't work because, as Austin was eventually forced to concede, pretty much every utterance turns out to be performative in SOME way - with the possible exception of instances of soliloquy (although even that is debatable: indeed, I'm sceptical myself because eg pep-talking oneself 'up' does indeed make a difference). |
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Unlike, say, sports(wo)men - many of whom incidentally (eg tennis players) can regularly be seen to pep-talk themselves into excelling - philosophers tend to be more inspired by failure than success. Inspired by his mentor's failure, by the late 1960s John Searle had arguably succeeded in exhibiting a comprehensive and satisfactory five-fold distinction between different acts of speech. Rather than bamboozle the reader with a blizzard of terminology from the get-go (although it's coming, alas), I'll start with an example of each. Here goes:- |
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"We're married." |
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"Get married!" |
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"Of course I'll marry you." |
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"I'm glad I married you." |
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"I declare you husband and wife." |
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Searle also inherited a second distinction from Austin, a more satisfactory one that distinguishes the 'force' of an utterance from its content. The content of the foregoing five utterances is basically the same, more or less. The five forces (to anticipate: assertive, directive, commissive, expressive, and declarative) differ in really quite radical ways, however. The last class is particularly special, and "I declare you husband and wife" - very much the textbook example of a declaration - illustrates, arguably, a big part of what Austin was trying to capture with his failed constative/performative distinction. |
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For the others, assertives are easily dealt with because they're so familiar: the vast majority of the sentences in this very article assert facts, truths, etc. They make claims that can be right or wrong and in large part they can be proven or disproven. Enough said. |
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Directives and commissives are the most closely related of the five forces so, instead, I'll get expressives out of the way first - not least because if Searle's classification has an Achilles heel, it's that separating expressives from assertives turns out to be anything but straightforward. Searle's idea is that expressions of feeling ("Aaargh! Fuck! Ow, ow, ow: my fucking thumb!") are not as such true-or-false, right or wrong. On the other hand, they can be sincere or insincere: stage actors, for example, are paid to be insincere night after night. Unfortunately these are deep waters philosophically, harking back to an old dispute between Bertrand Russell and Peter Strawson who advanced competing theories of 'descriptions' and 'presuppositions' respectively. The interested reader will do well to research Strawson's theory online; for the present purpose, suffice it to say that when Searle writes that he knows of no satisfactory account of presupposition, he is of course implicitly conceding that he doesn't have one himself. |
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The logical structure of directives like "Get married!" and commissives like "Of course I'll marry you" are very similar - the (crucial) only difference being whether it is the speaker or the listener(s) who has/have to, in the jargon, fulfill the content to satisfy the force of the utterance. In English, directives CAN use the imperative voice (eg the Nike slogan "Just do it," with or without an exclamation mark) but outside the armed forces the inquisitive voice is far more commonly used because it's much more polite to say, for example, "Please could you turn that down?" than "Turn that down!" So directives capture requests as well as orders. |
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Directives direct (politely or otherwise) whereas commissives commit. Commissive utterances create commitments and examples abound: promises, agreements, arrangements, contracts etc etc. They very clearly have a significant performative effect because they transform the world from one in which the speaker was not (or, at least, may not have been) under the stated obligation into a world in which they certainly are under that obligation. If you make a promise you ought to keep it, about which see my <https://DraytonMark.SubStack.com/p/wed-head-xxii>. |
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Searle's bold claim that all human languages are limited to exactly these five (ie at the most) classes of utterance caused a certain amount of uproar in the academic linguistic community at the time, much if not most of it misconceived: an even older philosophical distinction is made between empiricism (experimenting to find out) and rationalism (thinking/reasoning to work it out), and many of Searle's critics misinterpreted his claim as being an empirical one, which it was not. Interpreted empirically, Searle would have been claiming to have sufficient understanding of every language in the world to apply his classification to each and pronounce it satisfactory. But of course Searle did nothing of the kind: he just sat down and worked out the logical possbilities: what are all the possible ways in which some content, a speaker, a listener, and the world they share can relate to each other? What are the possible logical structures? |
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The reader will be relieved to learn that I have no intention of getting far enough out in the weeds to answer that - at least, not today. Instead, it will be sufficient for me to introduce the reader to another fruitful classification due to Austin, of different 'directions of fit'. Pleasingly, I will be able to conclude this week's Wed-Head with a celebrated example of fit direction that we owe to surely the greatest philosopher of her sex from the inter-war period and probably for many years after, Elizabeth Anscombe. Before that, though, I had better make explicit a distinction implicit in the foregoing: that between sincerity and fulfillment. Briefly, pretty much every utterance has a sincerity condition ("Is it meant?") and a fulfillment or satisfaction condition ("Is it so?"). Notice too, by the way, how close the latter parenthetic question is to Jean Luc Picard's famous catchphrase ("Make it so.") - a directive, of course. |
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Violating the sincerity condition of an assertive utterance is so bloody common that it has it's own verb, employed to great effect by US comedian Al Franken in the title of his satirical 2003 bestseller, 'Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them'. It's debatable whether there's a verb for being sincere yet mistaken ('to err'?) which amounts to violating not the sincerity condition but the satisfaction condition of an assertive. It is, I suppose, misleading to speak of fulfillment conditions in respect of assertives; fortunately 'truth condition' was already available to do duty for Searle in this case. |
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Given enough time the intelligent reader will have little real difficulty in extrapolating the sincerity and satisfaction conditions for the other four utterance types. It's interesting to note, however, that authority is more-or-less intrinsic to the both the sincerity and fulfillment conditions of most declarations but few if any directives. One can very easily cite examples of stage plays that culminate in marriages and there might even be one in which all five utterances in my list of examples above occur in the script. Performed, none will be sincere because none will be meant. But notice that, to fulfill the sincerity condition of a declarative utterance, you have at least to believe that you have the authority to make that declaration (even if you are mistaken about that) whereas, although a conscript might well be very, very unwise to order his Drill Instructor to go fuck himself, he may yet be - and probably is - sincere. |
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Changing the subject, and to digress a little, the opening paragraph of Duncan Richter 2001 obituary of Elizabeth Anscombe records a colourful figure, known for "smoking cigars, wearing a monocle, and staunchly defending implausible ideas." Richter went on to say that "[Anscombe's] unfashionable views on ethics reflected her strong Christian faith, and her often counterintuitive philosophical work was strongly influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein**, her friend and teacher. That said, the originality of her mind is undeniable." |
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[[ **I think it's fair to say that I wrote most of <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Certainty>, as well as, indeed, much of <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Searle#Intentionality_and_the_background>. ]] |
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One product of that mind is the next paragraph. After noting that the term "direction of fit" does not occur in Anscombe's writings, Wikipedia (in <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direction_of_fit>) correctly states that "[John] Searle has strongly argued that the following passage from her work 'Intention' was, by far, "the best illustration" of the distinction between the tasks of "[getting] the words (more strictly their propositional content) to match the world… [and that of getting] the world to match the words," viz: |
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"Let us consider a man going round a town with a shopping list in his hand. Now it is clear that the relation of this list to the things he actually buys is one and the same whether his wife gave him the list or it is his own list; and that there is a different relation where a list is made by a detective following him about. If he made the list itself, it was an expression of intention; if his wife gave it him, it has the role of an order. What then is the identical relation to what happens, in the order and the intention, which is not shared by the record? It is precisely this: if the list and the things that the man actually buys do not agree, and if this and this alone constitutes a mistake, then the mistake is not in the list but in the man's performance (if his wife were to say: “Look, it says butter and you have bought margarine”, he would hardly reply: “What a mistake! we must put that right” and alter the word on the list to “margarine”); whereas if the detective's record and what the man actually buys do not agree, then the mistake is in the record." |
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Searle's own version of this sketch has the detective going home and suddenly realising he has recorded a wrong item on his list. The crucial point is that the detective can fix the problem merely by correcting his list - assuming he hasn't, say, left the list at the office, he doesn't even have to leave the house. But the hapless husband who buys his long-suffering wife the wrong ingredients for her recipe will soon be putting his coat back on; unlike the detective, he cannot fix the problem with his pen, still less by saying "That's OK, honey - just cross butter off the list and add margarine to the end." |
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The significance of fit direction (on balance, I think "onus of fit" would have been clearer, but "direction of fit" is what we have) will very easily be grasped when the truth condition of a statement is compared with the fulfillment condition of a promise and, by way of conclusion, I shall do exactly that in this week's second installment of... |
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PS: |
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(MORE) PLANTATION NEWS |
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One of my pet hates** is what speech-act theorists (see above) refer to as "violating the fulfillment condition of a commissive utterance" and the rest of us call promise-breaking. For some reason it annoys me far, far more than being lied to. (I'm sorely tempted to elaborate about the difference but, instead, I'll stick to the subject.) |
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[[ **hatred is a bright, fierce emotion and I try not to indulge it - I missed the meeting where we decided stoicism was no longer to be numbered among the virtues. Besides, and famously, revenge is a dish best served cold. Nevertheless, 'pet hate' is the idiom we have, unfortunately. ]] |
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A week ago last Monday (11th April) I devised my "challenge" (for want of a better word) to all five regional council candidates to visit Plantation. Getting the word out to all five has not been straightforward, but Dr Kate Willis of the Scottish Green Party was dead easy: I already had her email address because FITCC was consulted about the new e-bike hubs. |
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So, to repeat, on Monday 11th April I emailed my challenge to her. This was at half past one. By quarter to five she'd accepted, suggesting we meet on Friday 15th April, four days later. I, in turn, readily accepted Friday, and by half past eight on Tuesday morning we'd fixed the remaining details. So far so good. |
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Also on Tuesday I drafted the aforementioned <https://draytonmark.substack.com/p/news-release-1> for my NoseyPARCA colleague Jennifer Seitz which went out the next day. Then, at nine o'clock on the Thursday, I received this: |
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On 4/14/22, Kate Willis <kate@higreens.org> wrote: |
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> Hi Mark |
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> |
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> Unfortunately, I am unable to visit the Plantation with you tomorrow |
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> afternoon. |
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> I apologise for the inconvenience, and thank you for the invitation to join |
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> you. |
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> I can assure you that if I am elected, I will work hard for the residents |
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> and communities in the ward as their representative on Highland Council. |
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> |
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> Kind Regards |
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> Kate |
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> |
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(Here, for the speech-act fans among you, is where fit direction comes in: if you mistakenly write something false, you can correct the falsehood by writing the truth and, presumably, apologising for the mistake. But if you make a promise, you cannot unmake the promise by, say, making an unpromise. There is no such thing as a unpromise. You can correct a falsehood by fixing your words, but that doesn't work for promises because the fit direction goes the other way.) |
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Notice that, although this email does contain an apology (an expressive utterance, btw), it does not contain an explanation. Customarily, if you announce your intention to violate the fulfillment condition of a commissive, you say why. So I asked why. But answer came there none. For which reason I was irritated enough to draft the aforementioned <https://draytonmark.substack.com/p/news-release-4> for Nosey. Enjoy. |
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Revision as of 17:16, 20 April 2022
NoseyPARCA is an online newsfeed about Plantation, Fort William
Nosey press releases are typically issued by Jennifer Seitz and published on EMD's (=Mark Drayton's) eponymous 'Download' on SubStack - see link (in subheading) below. Most releases are drafted by Mark and edited by Jennifer. Nosey house style is basically Mark's, and other contributors are encouraged to adapt theirs to his, within reason.
Archive (NB: This is usually updated first)
April 2022
<#1> (11th April), <#2> (13th April), <#3> (17th April), <#4> (18th April).
END of archive
NB: Occasionally, entries are added to the above list a day or so in advance of the scheduled publication of a release.
Style and process
Nosey house style for press releases is, first, to refer to them as 'press releases' rather than 'news releases' because that's the vernacular. However, 'NEWS RELEASE' is used in the heading of the release itself because it is more accurate and editors are familiar with both terms.
Each draft release begins with:
/*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ DRAFT ONLY - NEWS RELEASE - DRAFT ONLY /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/
Each issued release begins with:
/*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ NEWS RELEASE - NEWS RELEASE - NEWS RELEASE /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/
A typical release generally continues with something along the lines of:
NEWS RELEASE Community councillor announces new initiative to [...] DD MONTH YYYY FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
As yet, Nosey have never needed to embargo a press release (but you never know, right?).
A typical release generally concludes with with something along the lines of:
Entirely predictably, Mr Drayton couldn't resist further adding that, ideally, residents should join the <https://NextDoor.co.uk> social-networking platform/app rather than relying on Facebook, say. "I don't trust that censorship-loving [Mark] Zuckerberg bastard any further than I could comfortably excrete him," Mr Drayton has previously explained. "Fuck that cunt." As we reported six days ago, Mr Drayton's views regarding Mr Zuckerberg are all-too-well known to readers of his 'Wednesday Headway' SubStack columns, part of his so-called 'Drayton Download': on 8th & 15th September 2021 Mr Drayton re-posted a long article by British-born science journalist Nicholas Wade defending the 'lab-leak' hypothesis of Covid-19's origin; Mr Drayton's brief introduction (at <https://draytonmark.substack.com/p/wed-head-xxv-pt1>) forthrightly condemned Facebook for censoring discussion of the theory. Mr Zuckerberg remains unavailable for comment. END NOTE FOR EDITORS Further information about this release can be obtained from the following: (for NoseyPARCA DOT WordPress DOT com) Jennifer Seitz (Secretary) that.tiresome.rationalist AT gmail DOT com (as a member of Fort William, Inverlochy, and Torlundy Community Council) Mark Drayton EddieMDrayton AT gmail DOT com /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/
The "Fuck that cunt" quotation is sometimes included, sometimes omitted. Kind of depends on whether it's my time of the month. -Jx
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For office use only:-
Drafting Area
News Release #5
<https://NoseyPARCA.WordPress.com> news release #5 - 19th April 2022
/*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/
DRAFT ONLY - NEWS RELEASE - DRAFT ONLY
/*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/
NEWS RELEASE
Community councillor to [..]
19 APRIL 2022 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
[..] He confirmed that his SubStack (at <https://DraytonMark.SubStack.com>) would be the "centre of operations" for this, but also that other social network platforms would be "drawn into the circle," enabling questions to be posed publically (as comments below the master copy of this very news release at <https://DraytonMark.SubStack.com/p/news-release-4>, or privately by email, NextDoor message, or even SMS (to 07933 760031).
Entirely predictably, Mr Drayton couldn't resist further adding that, ideally, residents should join the <https://NextDoor.co.uk> social-networking platform/app rather than relying on Facebook, say. "I don't trust that censorship-loving [Mark] Zuckerberg bastard any further than I could comfortably excrete him," Mr Drayton has previously explained.
As we reported exactly a week ago, Mr Drayton's views regarding Mr Zuckerberg are all-too-well known to readers of his 'Wednesday Headway' SubStack columns, part of his so-called 'Drayton Download': on 8th & 15th September 2021 Mr Drayton re-posted a long article by British-born science journalist Nicholas Wade defending the 'lab-leak' hypothesis of Covid-19's origin; Mr Drayton's brief introduction (at <https://draytonmark.substack.com/p/wed-head-xxv-pt1>) forthrightly condemned Facebook for censoring discussion of the theory.
Mr Zuckerberg remains unavailable for comment.
END
NOTE FOR EDITORS Further information about this release can be obtained from the following: (for NoseyPARCA DOT WordPress DOT com)
Jennifer Seitz (Secretary) that.tiresome.rationalist AT gmail DOT com
(as a member of Fort William, Inverlochy, and Torlundy Community Council)
Mark Drayton EddieMDrayton AT gmail DOT com
/*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/
--
Wednesday Headway's schoolday
In something of a change of plan, this week's Wed-Head will not, after all, dissect the various election communications that I - and presumably you, too - have received from the five candidates standing for the four regional council seats up for grabs on 5th May. Instead, I will set the stage for that forthcoming analysis by describing the Austin-Searle theory of actions of speech. (Yes, really.) First, though, I have some...
PLANTATION NEWS
I like being the bearer of good news, so here is some: there is much reason to hope that Kinlochleven's newest regional councillor, Ms Sarah Fanet (SNP), will be a very worthy successor to the robust and effective Mr Andrew Baxter (Cons), despite their greatly divergent political outlooks. Here's why:-
By way of introduction amounting, too, to more good news, readers of tomorrow's Lochaber Times will not suffer the aesthetic insult of seeing my face among the excellent volunteers, including many youngsters, who turned out for the 'Big Spring Clean-up' in Plantation on Thursday 14th April. That's because I was waylaid at my own behest by virtue of being engaged in conversation with Ms Fanet. It was one of those curious conversations which begins as a simple greeting and you think it's only going to last half a minute but in the out-turn lasts a dozen times longer because one or other of you keeps thinking of more things really worth saying. Ms Fanet increasingly strikes me as an impressive individual with some very noble preoccupations and concerns. No doubt she and I will have to agree to disagree about plenty of things as and when we continue to work more closely together - which I am very keen to do - but, nevertheless, there will also be a good deal of common ground. Important ground, too.
One issue - and a very important one - about which we might have to a agree to differ, at least to some extent, is over the vexed and unfailingly controversial question of Scottish Independence. Now, of course this question is basically irrelevant to the council election on 5th May, but I mention it here because, as I argued at some length in my Wed-Head of 18th August '21 (see <https://draytonmark.substack.com/p/wed-head-xxiii> ), you cannot with consistency be a passionate Nationalist and yet be lukewarm about community empowerment. I don't particularly want to waste Cllr Fanet's time by pressing her about a campaign non-issue, but at the same time, and even if we reach quite different conclusions, I'd very much like to hear her opinion of my Wed-Head XXIII about Independence at because (a) almost everybody cares about it and (b) most of what I have to say about it is, or ought to be, more-or-less common ground on both sides of the argument - always assuming that there IS an argument amounting to something more than simple patriotism (on either side) which is, of course, no argument at all**.
Ms Fanet has also pledged to meet me to walk-and-talk Plantation during her campaign, although she hasn't chosen a date yet. One candidate who HAS chosen a date - this Friday, in fact - is Fiona Fawcett (Con), who will meet me and any other (decorous) constituent-to-be** at Pinegrove Court in two days time at eleven o'clock. As things stand she will thereby become the first candidate to accept and fulfill my 'challenge' to all five candidates to tour Plantation with me; one-and-a-half candidates have done the former but not the latter, sadly (see <https://draytonmark.substack.com/p/news-release-4>, filed exactly a week after <https://draytonmark.substack.com/p/news-release-1> which first documented my 'challenge'.)
[[ **at least, if <https://ballotbox.scot/> are to be believed; they have Mr MacDonald squaring-off against Mr MacLennan for fourth place next month. ]]
There is yet more Plantation News in the postscript, below.
Not entirely coincidentally, the foregoing Plantation News provides a handy case-in-point with respect to the following brief introduction to Austin-Searle speech-act theory. 'Speech Acts' is the title of the first substantive book by US philosopher and speech-act theorist John Rogers Searle**, a Rhodes scholar tutored at Oxford by a British one, John Langshaw Austin. Austin tried and failed to draw a sharp line between two kinds of utterance (=the word linguists use for anything said). Austin hoped to be able cleanly to separate those utterances that are 'performative' from those that are merely 'constative'. The idea was that performatives change the world whereas constatives leave it unmolested, ie constant. This didn't work because, as Austin was eventually forced to concede, pretty much every utterance turns out to be performative in SOME way - with the possible exception of instances of soliloquy (although even that is debatable: indeed, I'm sceptical myself because eg pep-talking oneself 'up' does indeed make a difference).
Unlike, say, sports(wo)men - many of whom incidentally (eg tennis players) can regularly be seen to pep-talk themselves into excelling - philosophers tend to be more inspired by failure than success. Inspired by his mentor's failure, by the late 1960s John Searle had arguably succeeded in exhibiting a comprehensive and satisfactory five-fold distinction between different acts of speech. Rather than bamboozle the reader with a blizzard of terminology from the get-go (although it's coming, alas), I'll start with an example of each. Here goes:-
"We're married." "Get married!" "Of course I'll marry you." "I'm glad I married you." "I declare you husband and wife."
Searle also inherited a second distinction from Austin, a more satisfactory one that distinguishes the 'force' of an utterance from its content. The content of the foregoing five utterances is basically the same, more or less. The five forces (to anticipate: assertive, directive, commissive, expressive, and declarative) differ in really quite radical ways, however. The last class is particularly special, and "I declare you husband and wife" - very much the textbook example of a declaration - illustrates, arguably, a big part of what Austin was trying to capture with his failed constative/performative distinction.
For the others, assertives are easily dealt with because they're so familiar: the vast majority of the sentences in this very article assert facts, truths, etc. They make claims that can be right or wrong and in large part they can be proven or disproven. Enough said.
Directives and commissives are the most closely related of the five forces so, instead, I'll get expressives out of the way first - not least because if Searle's classification has an Achilles heel, it's that separating expressives from assertives turns out to be anything but straightforward. Searle's idea is that expressions of feeling ("Aaargh! Fuck! Ow, ow, ow: my fucking thumb!") are not as such true-or-false, right or wrong. On the other hand, they can be sincere or insincere: stage actors, for example, are paid to be insincere night after night. Unfortunately these are deep waters philosophically, harking back to an old dispute between Bertrand Russell and Peter Strawson who advanced competing theories of 'descriptions' and 'presuppositions' respectively. The interested reader will do well to research Strawson's theory online; for the present purpose, suffice it to say that when Searle writes that he knows of no satisfactory account of presupposition, he is of course implicitly conceding that he doesn't have one himself.
The logical structure of directives like "Get married!" and commissives like "Of course I'll marry you" are very similar - the (crucial) only difference being whether it is the speaker or the listener(s) who has/have to, in the jargon, fulfill the content to satisfy the force of the utterance. In English, directives CAN use the imperative voice (eg the Nike slogan "Just do it," with or without an exclamation mark) but outside the armed forces the inquisitive voice is far more commonly used because it's much more polite to say, for example, "Please could you turn that down?" than "Turn that down!" So directives capture requests as well as orders.
Directives direct (politely or otherwise) whereas commissives commit. Commissive utterances create commitments and examples abound: promises, agreements, arrangements, contracts etc etc. They very clearly have a significant performative effect because they transform the world from one in which the speaker was not (or, at least, may not have been) under the stated obligation into a world in which they certainly are under that obligation. If you make a promise you ought to keep it, about which see my <https://DraytonMark.SubStack.com/p/wed-head-xxii>.
Searle's bold claim that all human languages are limited to exactly these five (ie at the most) classes of utterance caused a certain amount of uproar in the academic linguistic community at the time, much if not most of it misconceived: an even older philosophical distinction is made between empiricism (experimenting to find out) and rationalism (thinking/reasoning to work it out), and many of Searle's critics misinterpreted his claim as being an empirical one, which it was not. Interpreted empirically, Searle would have been claiming to have sufficient understanding of every language in the world to apply his classification to each and pronounce it satisfactory. But of course Searle did nothing of the kind: he just sat down and worked out the logical possbilities: what are all the possible ways in which some content, a speaker, a listener, and the world they share can relate to each other? What are the possible logical structures?
The reader will be relieved to learn that I have no intention of getting far enough out in the weeds to answer that - at least, not today. Instead, it will be sufficient for me to introduce the reader to another fruitful classification due to Austin, of different 'directions of fit'. Pleasingly, I will be able to conclude this week's Wed-Head with a celebrated example of fit direction that we owe to surely the greatest philosopher of her sex from the inter-war period and probably for many years after, Elizabeth Anscombe. Before that, though, I had better make explicit a distinction implicit in the foregoing: that between sincerity and fulfillment. Briefly, pretty much every utterance has a sincerity condition ("Is it meant?") and a fulfillment or satisfaction condition ("Is it so?"). Notice too, by the way, how close the latter parenthetic question is to Jean Luc Picard's famous catchphrase ("Make it so.") - a directive, of course.
Violating the sincerity condition of an assertive utterance is so bloody common that it has it's own verb, employed to great effect by US comedian Al Franken in the title of his satirical 2003 bestseller, 'Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them'. It's debatable whether there's a verb for being sincere yet mistaken ('to err'?) which amounts to violating not the sincerity condition but the satisfaction condition of an assertive. It is, I suppose, misleading to speak of fulfillment conditions in respect of assertives; fortunately 'truth condition' was already available to do duty for Searle in this case.
Given enough time the intelligent reader will have little real difficulty in extrapolating the sincerity and satisfaction conditions for the other four utterance types. It's interesting to note, however, that authority is more-or-less intrinsic to the both the sincerity and fulfillment conditions of most declarations but few if any directives. One can very easily cite examples of stage plays that culminate in marriages and there might even be one in which all five utterances in my list of examples above occur in the script. Performed, none will be sincere because none will be meant. But notice that, to fulfill the sincerity condition of a declarative utterance, you have at least to believe that you have the authority to make that declaration (even if you are mistaken about that) whereas, although a conscript might well be very, very unwise to order his Drill Instructor to go fuck himself, he may yet be - and probably is - sincere.
Changing the subject, and to digress a little, the opening paragraph of Duncan Richter 2001 obituary of Elizabeth Anscombe records a colourful figure, known for "smoking cigars, wearing a monocle, and staunchly defending implausible ideas." Richter went on to say that "[Anscombe's] unfashionable views on ethics reflected her strong Christian faith, and her often counterintuitive philosophical work was strongly influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein**, her friend and teacher. That said, the originality of her mind is undeniable."
[[ **I think it's fair to say that I wrote most of <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Certainty>, as well as, indeed, much of <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Searle#Intentionality_and_the_background>. ]]
One product of that mind is the next paragraph. After noting that the term "direction of fit" does not occur in Anscombe's writings, Wikipedia (in <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direction_of_fit>) correctly states that "[John] Searle has strongly argued that the following passage from her work 'Intention' was, by far, "the best illustration" of the distinction between the tasks of "[getting] the words (more strictly their propositional content) to match the world… [and that of getting] the world to match the words," viz:
"Let us consider a man going round a town with a shopping list in his hand. Now it is clear that the relation of this list to the things he actually buys is one and the same whether his wife gave him the list or it is his own list; and that there is a different relation where a list is made by a detective following him about. If he made the list itself, it was an expression of intention; if his wife gave it him, it has the role of an order. What then is the identical relation to what happens, in the order and the intention, which is not shared by the record? It is precisely this: if the list and the things that the man actually buys do not agree, and if this and this alone constitutes a mistake, then the mistake is not in the list but in the man's performance (if his wife were to say: “Look, it says butter and you have bought margarine”, he would hardly reply: “What a mistake! we must put that right” and alter the word on the list to “margarine”); whereas if the detective's record and what the man actually buys do not agree, then the mistake is in the record."
Searle's own version of this sketch has the detective going home and suddenly realising he has recorded a wrong item on his list. The crucial point is that the detective can fix the problem merely by correcting his list - assuming he hasn't, say, left the list at the office, he doesn't even have to leave the house. But the hapless husband who buys his long-suffering wife the wrong ingredients for her recipe will soon be putting his coat back on; unlike the detective, he cannot fix the problem with his pen, still less by saying "That's OK, honey - just cross butter off the list and add margarine to the end."
The significance of fit direction (on balance, I think "onus of fit" would have been clearer, but "direction of fit" is what we have) will very easily be grasped when the truth condition of a statement is compared with the fulfillment condition of a promise and, by way of conclusion, I shall do exactly that in this week's second installment of...
PS: (MORE) PLANTATION NEWS
One of my pet hates** is what speech-act theorists (see above) refer to as "violating the fulfillment condition of a commissive utterance" and the rest of us call promise-breaking. For some reason it annoys me far, far more than being lied to. (I'm sorely tempted to elaborate about the difference but, instead, I'll stick to the subject.)
[[ **hatred is a bright, fierce emotion and I try not to indulge it - I missed the meeting where we decided stoicism was no longer to be numbered among the virtues. Besides, and famously, revenge is a dish best served cold. Nevertheless, 'pet hate' is the idiom we have, unfortunately. ]]
A week ago last Monday (11th April) I devised my "challenge" (for want of a better word) to all five regional council candidates to visit Plantation. Getting the word out to all five has not been straightforward, but Dr Kate Willis of the Scottish Green Party was dead easy: I already had her email address because FITCC was consulted about the new e-bike hubs.
So, to repeat, on Monday 11th April I emailed my challenge to her. This was at half past one. By quarter to five she'd accepted, suggesting we meet on Friday 15th April, four days later. I, in turn, readily accepted Friday, and by half past eight on Tuesday morning we'd fixed the remaining details. So far so good.
Also on Tuesday I drafted the aforementioned <https://draytonmark.substack.com/p/news-release-1> for my NoseyPARCA colleague Jennifer Seitz which went out the next day. Then, at nine o'clock on the Thursday, I received this:
On 4/14/22, Kate Willis <kate@higreens.org> wrote: > Hi Mark > > Unfortunately, I am unable to visit the Plantation with you tomorrow > afternoon. > I apologise for the inconvenience, and thank you for the invitation to join > you. > I can assure you that if I am elected, I will work hard for the residents > and communities in the ward as their representative on Highland Council. > > Kind Regards > Kate >
(Here, for the speech-act fans among you, is where fit direction comes in: if you mistakenly write something false, you can correct the falsehood by writing the truth and, presumably, apologising for the mistake. But if you make a promise, you cannot unmake the promise by, say, making an unpromise. There is no such thing as a unpromise. You can correct a falsehood by fixing your words, but that doesn't work for promises because the fit direction goes the other way.)
Notice that, although this email does contain an apology (an expressive utterance, btw), it does not contain an explanation. Customarily, if you announce your intention to violate the fulfillment condition of a commissive, you say why. So I asked why. But answer came there none. For which reason I was irritated enough to draft the aforementioned <https://draytonmark.substack.com/p/news-release-4> for Nosey. Enjoy.