In the philosophy of language and linguistics, a speech act is something expressed by an individual that not only presents information but performs an action as well.
These are commonly taken to include acts such as apologizing, promising, ordering, answering, requesting, complaining, warning, inviting, refusing, and congratulating.
Wittgenstein believed meaning derives from pragmatic tradition, demonstrating the importance of how language is used to accomplish objectives within specific situations.
[5] The work of J. L. Austin, particularly his How to Do Things with Words, led philosophers to pay more attention to the non-declarative uses of language.
The term 'social act' and some of the theory of this type of linguistic action are to be found in the fifth of Thomas Reid's Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind (1788, chapter VI, Of the Nature of a Contract).
[6] Adolf Reinach (1883–1917)[7] and Stanislav Škrabec (1844–1918)[8] have been both independently credited with a fairly comprehensive account of social acts as performative utterances dating to 1913, long before Austin and Searle.
The first of these opinions is the one held by John L. Austin who coined the term "speech act" in his book How to Do Things with Words published posthumously in 1962.
[1] According to Austin's preliminary informal description, the idea of an "illocutionary act" can be captured by emphasizing that "by saying something, we do something", as when someone issues an order to someone to go by saying "Go!
[citation needed] An even more indirect way of making such a request would be to say, in Peter's presence in the room with the open window, "I'm cold."
[citation needed] Indirect speech acts are commonly used to reject proposals and to make requests.
[16] Speech Acts are commonplace in everyday interactions and are important for communication, as well as present in many different contexts.
[21] Other attempts have been proposed by Per Martin-Löf for a treatment of the concept of assertion inside intuitionistic type theory, and by Carlo Dalla Pozza, with a proposal of a formal pragmatics connecting propositional content (given with classical semantics) and illocutionary force (given by intuitionistic semantics).
Up to now the main basic formal applications of speech act theory are to be found in the field of human–computer interaction in chatboxes and other tools.
[24] Another highly-influential view of Speech Acts has been in the conversation for action developed by Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores in their 1986 text "Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design".
A key part of this analysis is the contention that one dimension of the social domain-tracking the illocutionary status of the transaction (whether individual participants claim that their interests have been met, or not) is very readily conferred to a computer process, regardless of whether the computer has the means to adequately represent the real world issues underlying that claim.
Such a conversation for action can describe a situation in which an external observer (such as a computer or health information system) may be able to track the illocutionary (or speech act) status of negotiations between the patient and physician participants even in the absence of any adequate model of the illness or proposed treatments.
The key insight provided by Winograd and Flores is that the state-transition diagram representing the social (Illocutionary) negotiation of the two parties involved is generally much, much simpler than any model representing the world in which those parties are making claims; in short, the system tracking the status of the conversation for action need not be concerned with modeling all of the realities of the external world.
A conversation for action is critically dependent upon certain stereotypical claims about the status of the world made by the two parties.
Munindar P. Singh has long advocated moving away from the psychological to a social semantics of speech acts—one that would be in tune with Austin's conception.
A recent collection of manifestos by researchers in agent communication reflects a growing recognition in the multiagent systems community of the benefits of a social semantics.
When forming a legal contract, speech acts can be made when people are making or accepting an offer.
In a sociological perspective, Nicolas Brisset adopts the concept of speech act in order to understand how economic models participate in the making and the spreading of representations inside and outside of the scientific field.
Brisset argues that models perform actions in different fields (scientific, academic, practical, and political).