From Speech Act Theory to Pragmatics:

The aim of this presentation is to offer a very brief survey, both conceptual and historical, of the developments of Pragmatics during the last sixty years (of course many things will be missing and my development will be very schematic compared to what has already been exposed, but the idea is to offer a way of looking at this history). More precisely it will be the story of how Speech Act Theory has become « Pragmatics », and therefore has lost part of its conceptual interest, namely John L. Austin's discovery of the illocutionary aspect of speech – namely the fact that speaking is an action. I will thus try to emphasize the fact that contemporary Pragmatics is not faithful to speech act theory and does not intend to be (at least since Herbert P. Grice), because it does not offer the same kind of analysis, losing sight of what is really done by a speech act, in moving back from a conventionalist point of view to a more “truth-conditional” and “mentalist” one. At the same time, I hope to point to some pervasive conceptions in contemporary philosophy of language that, as you will see, echo, and sometimes duplicate, problems and conceptions occurring in the Middle-Ages Pragmatics. We will fnd out in the twentieth Century the same kind of problems and the same diversity of responses that those we have studied during this conference. A further aim will be to show that certain theories are needed to explain certain pragmatic phenomena.