Divine speech acts

Suppose random quantum processes result in deep marks on a stone that spell out:

• Thou shalt not eat goat. – God

What would need to be true for it to be the case that God said (or wrote) that, thereby forbidding us to eat goat?

I assume that God always cooperates with creaturely causation, so divine causation is involved in the above production. However, such divine cooperation with the production of something that looks like an inscription or sounds like an utterance does not suffice to make it be the case that God said the thing. Imagine that a cult leader makes the above inscription. God is still cooperating with the cult leader’s causality, but we don’t want to attribute the inscription to God’s authorship.

One obvious answer is by analogy to our language. A part of what makes a performance a speech act of a particular sort is a certain kind of intention, e.g., that the performance be taken to be that sort of speech act. So maybe it just depends on God’s intentions. If God merely intends cooperation with quantum processes, there is no inscription, just random marks on stone that happen to look like an inscription. But if God intends the marks to be taken to be an inscription, they are an inscription.

This solution, however, is unhelpful given divine simplicity. The intention is a contingent feature of God, and on divine simplicity the contingency of contingent divine features is always grounded in some contingent arrangement of creatures. There cannot be two worlds that are exactly alike in their created aspects but where God has different intentions in the two worlds. So given divine simplicity, there has to be a characterization of what makes the marks a divine command in terms of what creation is like. (My view of divine intentions is, roughly, that God intends F in doing A iff intending F would be a good reason for God to do A. This presupposes divine omnirationality.)

Here is one possibility.

1. Something that looks or sounds like a speech act is a divine speech act if and only if it was directly produced by God without secondary causes.

But this seems mistaken. Imagine that in the sight of a tribe, God created a stone and a stylus ex nihilo, and then miraculously moved the stylus in such a way as to inscribe the prohibition on eating goat. Then, surely, the members of the tribe upon seeing the stylus moving through the air and gouging clear text in the stone would be right to attribute the message to God. But the inscription was not directly produced by God: it was produced by means of a stylus.

Perhaps:

2. Something that looks or sounds like a speech act is a divine speech act if and only if it was a deterministic result of something done by God without secondary causes.

This still seems a bit too restrictive. Imagine that while God used the stylus to inscribe the stone in our previous story, he nonetheless allowed for ordinary quantum randomness in the interaction between the hard stylus and the softer stone, which randomness ensured that there was a tiny probability that no inscription would result—that, say, stylus atoms would quantum tunnel through the stone atoms.

One might replace “deterministic” with “extremely probable”. But just how probable would it have to be?

Here is a different suggestion that seems to me more promising.

3. Something that looks or sounds like a speech act is a divine speech act to humans if and only if a normal human who knew all the metaphysical and physical facts about the production of this act, as well as the human social context of the production, would reasonably take it to be a divine speech act.

This suggestion allows for the possibility that a normal human would be mistaken about whether something is a divine speech act—but the mistake would then be traced back to a mistake about the relevant metaphysical, physical and social facts.

The applicability of (3) is still difficult. Take the initial example where the apparent divine prohibition on eating goat appears from quantum randomness. Would a reasonable and normal human who knew it to have appeared from quantum randomness with ordinary divine cooperation of the sort found in all creaturely causation think it to be a divine speech act? I don’t know. I don’t know that I am a reasonable and normal human, and I don’t actually know what to think about this.

Blurting

It is commonly thought that to engage in a speech of a particular sort—assertion, request, etc.—one needs to intend to do so.

But suppose you ask me a question, and I unintentionally blurt out an answer, even though the matter is confidential. Can you correctly tell people that I answered your question, that I asserted whatever it was that I blurted out?

If yes, then one does not need to intend to engage in a speech act of a particular sort in order for that speech act to occur.

But I suspect the that in unintentionally blurting one does not answer or assert. One reason is that if one was answering or asserting, then it seems that one could also unintentionally blurt out a lie. (Imagine that you have a habit of answering a certain question with a falsehood, and you blurt out a falsehood purely out of habit.) But I don’t think a lie can be unintentional.

Moreover, if someone asserts, then what they say is presented for trust. But what is said unintentionally is not presented for trust.

I am not very confident of the above.

Morality and intention

Some philosophers (Thomson and Rachels, for instance) think that intention does not affect the rightness or wrongness of an act.

This view is quite implausible in the special case of speech acts, where the existence, type and content of a speech act is determined in part by intentions. If I enter a password into a computer by voice, I am not engaging in a speech act, even if I know there is a person near me who may think that I am speaking to them. Whether I am promising or predicting a future action depends in part on my intentions (“If you give me a paper outside of class time, I will lose it” could be a promise when said by a mean professor, but ordinarily is just a prediction). Who “you” refers to depends on the speaker’s intention to address a particular person.

And of course whether a speech act of a particular type and content is being engaged in can be quite relevant to the moral status of what one is doing. For a police officer to assert a racist proposition is wrong, but it need not be wrong for them quote a racist proposition asserted by a suspect or to enter a racist sentence by voice as a password into a suspect’s computer, and in ambiguous contexts the difference can simply be intention.

One might say that speech acts are not a counterexample to the moral irrelevance of intention thesis because here the intention determines the type of act, and the irrelevance of intention thesis only applies when we fix the type of act:

1. Two acts of the same type in the same circumstances have the same moral status, even if the intentions behind them are different.

If this is right, then the moral irrelevance of intention thesis is one that typical action theorists who think intention is morally important can agree with. For they think that intention is crucial to determining the type of act—an intentional killing, for instance, being a different kind of act from a the causing of a foreseen but unintended death.

Perhaps what the advocates of the irrelevance of intention need to do is to combine the moral irrelevance of intention thesis, for acts of fixed type, with the thesis:

2. Many acts other than speech acts do not depend on intention for the identification of their type.

It’s hard to criticize such a squishy thesis. But it’s worth noting that most acts the interact with another person have an expressive component, and expressive acts are like speech acts in having intention as a crucial component. One respects, disrespects, regards or disregards other people in typical interactions, and these things depend in part on intention. This is compatible with (2), but it makes the moral irrelevance of intention thesis much less powerful.

Implicature and lying

Philosophers say things like: "Asserting 'There is no conclusive proof that Smith is a plagiarist' implicates that there is a genuine possibility of Smith's being a plagiarist." (And yet taken literally "There is no conclusive proof that Smith is a plagiarist" is true even if no one ever suspected Smith of plagiarism.) However what one implicates not only has propositional content, but also illocutionary force, and both both the content and the force are implicated. So if we want to be more explicit, we should say something like: "Asserting 'There is no conclusive proof that Smith is a plagiarist' implicates the suggestion (or insinuation or even assertion) that there is a genuine possibility of Smith's being a plagiarist." Which of the forces--suggestion, insinuation or assertion--is the right one to choose is going to be a hard question to determine. Maybe there is vagueness (ugh!) here. In any case, we don't just implicate propositions--we implicate whole speech acts. A question can implicate an assertion and an assertion a question ("It would be really nice if you would tell me whether...").

I used to wonder whether the moral rules governing lying (which I think are very simple, namely that it is always wrong to lie, but I won't be assuming that) extend to false implicature. I now realize that the question is somewhat ill-formed. The moral rules governing lying are tied specifically to assertions, not to requests or commands. One can implicate an assertion, but one can also implicate other kinds of speech acts, and it only makes sense to ask whether the moral rules governing lying extend to false implicature when what is implicated is an assertion or assertion-like.

And I now think there is a very simple answer to the question. The moral rules governing lying do directly extend to implicated assertions. But just as these moral rules do not directly extend to other assertion-like explicit speech acts, such as musing, so too they do not directly extend to other assertion-like implicated speech acts, such as suggesting. The rules governing an implicated suggestion are different from the rules governing an explicit assertion not because the implicated suggestion is implicated, but because the implicate suggestion is a suggestion. If it were an explicit suggestion, it would be governed by the same rules.

That said, there are certain speech acts which are more commonly implicated than made explicitly--suggestion is an example--and there may even be speech acts, like insinuation (Jon Kvanvig has impressed on me the problematic nature of "I insinuate that...") that don't get to be performed explicitly (though I don't know that they can't be; even "I insinuate that..." might turn out to be a very subtle kind of insinuation in some weird context).

I think the distinction between the explicit speech act and the implicated speech act does not mark a real joint in nature. The real joint in nature is not between, say, explicit and implicated assertion, but between, say, assertion and suggestion (regardless of which, if any, is explicit or implicated). Fundamental philosophy of communication does not, I think, need the distinction between the explicit speech act and the implicated speech act. That distinction is for the linguists--it concerns the mechanics of communication (just as the distinction between written and spoken English, or between French and German) rather than its fundamental nature.