CONCEPT
Speech Act Theory
Austin and Searle's framework that language performs actions—promises, requests, declarations—rather than merely transmitting information, revealing what AI's linguistic competence lacks.
Speech act theory, developed by J.L. Austin in the 1950s and systematized by John Searle in the 1960s–70s, holds that utterances are not primarily vehicles for conveying information but performances of social actions. When a manager says 'Can you have this done by Friday?', the utterance is not a question about capability but a request creating commitment, altering relationships, and changing the landscape of obligations. Austin distinguished locutionary acts (producing meaningful utterances), illocutionary acts (performing social actions through those utterances), and perlocutionary acts (producing effects on listeners). Searle formalized the conditions under which illocutionary acts succeed—speaker intention, conventional procedures, appropriate context. Winograd and Flores applied this framework to human-computer interaction, revealing that AI responses have the form of speech acts without illocutionary force.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The theory emerged from ordinary language philosophy's insistence that meaning is use. Austin's 1955 Harvard lectures, published posthumously as How to Do Things with Words (1962), catalogued the variety of actions language performs: promising, warning, betting, marrying, naming ships. Searle's contribution