Saying so makes it so
is one of those in which the saying so makes it so. John Searle remarked once that you cannot fry an egg just by saying that “I hereby fry an egg”, but if you are a minister you can marry a couple by saying that “I hereby declare you husband and wife”; and anyone can make a promise by saying “I hereby promise you to
Some speech acts gain their performative aspect in virtue of rules or conventions at the background which stipulate that A’s saying “S” counts as doing Y in context C. The rules constituting the legality of marriage, for example, stipulate that a minister’s declaration, in the appropriate circumstances, counts as marrying a couple. Or the rules of an institution may stipulate that the chair of a committee can officially adjourn a meeting by declaring that the meeting is adjourned. In such cases the saying so makes it so only because rules or conventions make it the case that the saying so counts as doing a certain kind of act. Elsewhere I called this type of cases institutional performatives.16 Other types of performatives, however, perhaps most, actually, may not require any rules or conventions to enable the performative aspect of the speech act. As Strawson demonstrated a long time ago, one can perform an act of warning simply' by saying, under appropriate circumstances, “The ice over there is very' thin!”17 In saying this one performs an action, beyond that of asserting a proposition, of course, by' way of expressing an intention that the hearer can grasp as the intention it is, namely, of warning you that the ice is thin and you’d better be careful. According to Bach and Harnish, most performatives operate in this way' because most of them express a statement about the attitude of the speaker, and the performative succeeds as such when the hearer recognizes the relevant attitude or intention expressed.18 Let me call these types of cases general performatives. Finally, there are performatives which are not statements at all; they are not truth-apt expressions, but count as actions of certain types by way of making recognizable moves in a conventional practice, such as greeting or thanking. I called them conventional performatives, because these are the kind of expressions that gain their literal meaning as recognizable moves in some conventional social practice or other.19
In short, there are several types of performatives and their felicity conditions might be quite different. However, the types of cases in which the saying so makes it so that I’m interested in here is closely' related, but different. I want to focus on cases in which the saying that “S” in a given context makes it the case that S is true in that context. Now, there is a considerable overlap between performative speech acts and cases in which a statement is rendered true by its expression alone.20 By saying to your friend that she is invited to your dinner party’, for example, you make it true that she is now invited to the party', and this is true only' because you have expressed the invitation. Similarly, by expressing a promise to someone you have made it true that you promise, and you made it true by virtue of saying so. And if you tell your employee, for example, that he is fired, then you make it true that the employee is fired, and it’s true by virtue of your saying so.21 In short, there are countless performatives that express a statement which is rendered true by its expression alone, under the appropriate conditions, of course.
Now consider truth in fiction. Generally speaking, something is true in a given fiction because the fictional text says so. If a fictional text says that “the moon is green”, then it is true, in that fiction, that the moon is green, and it’s true because the fiction says so. (Unless, of course, the fiction also says something else that would make you doubt that it really asserts that the moon is green.) As we noted above, the saying need not be explicit; some content can be incorporated into a fiction by implication. But even incorporated content is a function of saying so; content incorporated into a fiction has to follow from, or be presupposed by, what the fiction says.
Let’s take a step back. There is no fictional story unless the story' has been told by someone. Even a myth or a legend has had to be told by someone at some point; sentences in some natural language have to be expressed, whether written down or voiced. Fiction is an artifact; it has to be created by humans. And it is an artifact created by saying things.22 Let me call these cases expressive artifacts - that is, artifacts created by sayings or, more generally, by use of expressive means of symbolism or communication. To paraphrase Searle again, although you cannot create a chair by saying “I hereby make a chair”, you can create a story' by simply telling it. Generally' speaking, intangible artifacts, such as fiction, poetry', music, myths, religion, etc., are created by means of communication; they' are constituted by' sayings. Intangible artifacts, quite generally, tend to be expressive artifacts, constituted by means of expression.
There is a complex web of connections here, so let me recap briefly. The starting point is to bear in mind that there are countless types of action we can perform by a speech act, beyond the act of asserting a proposition. Some of these actions are made possible by rules or conventions in the background which stipulate that saying “S” in context C counts as doing Y in that context. Other performative speech acts do not rely on any particular conventions or rules in the background (that is, beyond the rules and conventions of the relevant language, of course). Most performative speech acts also exhibit the feature that something is rendered true by' say'ing it. It is often the case that a statement S is rendered true by' uttering S in the normal, appropriate, circumstances. Finally, and most importantly for our purposes, there are expressive intangible artifacts created by performative speech acts. Expressive artifacts belong to domains in which the saying so makes it so in the relevant domain. Both law and fiction, I will argue, are expressive artifacts in this sense. And I will argue that expressive artifacts, at least those in which truth-aptness applies to some degree, are closely' tied to the idea of closed prefixed contexts.
