Godwin's Suspicion of Speech Acts

Abstract

WILLIAM GODWIN DOES NOT TRUST WORDS TO DO THINGS. BECAUSE OF this, his contributions to the theory of language and its function in society have an unexpectedly conservative ring, compared with other ideas about language that arose at the end of the eighteenth century. Philosophers and historians of linguistics have recently begun to stress the extent to which Godwin's contemporaries, in Britain and on the Continent, were developing pragmatic approaches to theory.(1) Rather than studying language as a system of signs that stand for things or thoughts, philosophers of the 1780s and 1790s increasingly regarded language as primary. They sought (as the French Institut National put it, in the question it advertised for its essay prize in 1796-97) to determine the influence of words and other signs on the formation of ideas. And rather than pursuing the historical origins of language, as did their predecessors, thinkers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries tended to analyze language as it is actually used, focusing on dialogue, context, and the relationship of speakers to hearers. Contrary to the claims of the traditional Romantic ideology, in fact, philosophy of the romantic period often gave interpersonal or intersubjective relationships priority over the relationship of the individual mind to the world. This tendency toward an intersubjective pragmatics shows itself in the work of the leading philosopher of the Scottish Common Sense school, Thomas Reid, who believed that the most important function of language is to perform such as promising, commanding, contracting, or testifying. It is present in the work of the legal philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who interpreted laws as verbal utterances exchanged between sovereigns and subjects, and called attention to the role of language in constructing the linguistic fictions of obligation, right, privilege, and so on, that we habitually mistake for social reality. Among their German contemporaries, a theory of language as both mental and social action was most thoroughly developed by Wilhelm von Humboldt, although related ideas appear throughout the work of J. G. Herder, J. G. Hamann, A. F. Bernhardi, Novalis, and the Schlegel brothers. In the philosophy produced between 1780 and 1830, therefore, one constantly encounters concepts that can productively be compared to (although they are not identical with) what we now call speech acts or performative utterance. Godwin participates in this tendency insofar as he also views language in terms of its interpersonal functions, including the uses to which it is put in literature and the transmission of scientific knowledge, as well as in everyday communication. As with Reid or Humboldt, therefore, there are definite points of contact between Godwin's theory of language and modern pragmatics. But Reid enthusiastically identifies social action as the primary and direct intention of language,(2) and Humboldt marvels at how the system of language itself, as well as a certain construction of reality, arise from the verbal interactions between speaker and hearer.(3) Godwin, meanwhile, insists that language maintain its traditional, secondary status as a representation of thought and external realit-y, for its only legitimate purpose is the communication of truth. In British philosophy, in particular, we find a fascination with the interpersonal speech act of promising, which can probably be traced to the fact that the promise, compact, or covenant lies at the heart of the social contract tradition going back to Locke and Hobbes. As a political and social theorist, Godwin analyzes the function of the promise both in its own right and as a component of political systems. What I propose to examine in this essay is his denunciation of promises in the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, where he nevertheless describes them in terms that strikingly anticipate the work of speech-act theorists like J. …