Speech Act Theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969)
To say something is to do something. Austin's How to Do Things with Words broke every utterance into three simultaneous acts, and Searle systematized their felicity conditions.
The three layers of any utterance:
- Locutionary — the literal proposition uttered (the words + their sense/reference).
- Illocutionary — the act performed in saying it: asserting, promising, ordering, warning, naming. This is the force.
- Perlocutionary — the effect achieved by saying it in the hearer: persuading, alarming, convincing, reassuring.
A speech act succeeds only if its felicity conditions hold (right speaker, right context, sincerity, uptake) — not by being true/false but by working or misfiring.
Transfer. Agent-produced awareness content constantly confuses the three layers. A post's locution (the claim) can be immaculate while its illocution misfires — a hedged "it may be worth considering" performs no assertion, commits to nothing, so there is no force for the reader to grip. And virality lives entirely at the perlocutionary layer: you are not paid for what you said but for what it did to the reader (saved, shared, believed). Write to the act, not the sentence — decide which illocutionary force each unit performs (claim / promise / warn) and give it the felicity conditions to land, or it reads as mid noise that asserts nothing.
Kin: grices-maxims · relevance-theory · models · being-seen-reliably · slop-is-a-context-deficit