Universal Prescriptivism

Universal Prescriptivism

It used to be held that there are two types of speech act: descriptive and prescriptive. Descriptive speech acts state facts; prescriptive speech acts recommend acts. The fact-act dichotomy underlies the description-prescription dichotomy. I think this is completely wrong: there is no such thing as a descriptive speech act in the intended sense, and all speech acts are prescriptive. There are prescriptive facts but no facts prescribed (as opposed to acts). The reason there are no descriptive speech acts is that there are no purely fact-stating speech acts: no one merely states a fact, as it were into thin air; an assertion of fact is an act designed to secure a certain audience-directed result. Assertions are communicative not solitary. The aim of assertion is belief creation or knowledge transmission: one states a fact in order to secure that result. It is like a request to believe or a belief recommendation: “Please believe that p”.[1] We need not accept that belief-formation is an intentional act in order to accept this, but it is a kind of quasi-voluntary transition. The illocutionary force of assertion is captured by “Please believe me when I say that p”. We could also paraphrase it as “You should know that p”. You are not just giving voice to a fact but causing belief in that fact in your audience. That is the whole point of the speech act. Thus, the act is prescriptive. Certainly, you can describe something to someone, but your purpose is to instill a belief or item of knowledge; it isn’t purely an exercise in one’s descriptive abilities. What would be the point of that? It isn’t as if facts need you to state them in order to be facts. You aren’t talking to them! If you went round simply stating facts, people would think you insane, not someone with a secure grasp of the practice of assertion.

Thus, it is not distinctive of moral speech acts that they are prescriptive. They may well prescribe bodily acts as well as mental acts, but they don’t differ from assertions in point of their prescriptiveness. The prescription not to steal is a prescription just like the prescription to believe that it’s raining outside; it merely prescribes a different kind of thing. The language-game is always prescriptive; moral recommendations are just a subclass. Questions are requests for information: the speaker is urging the audience to supply a certain piece of information, i.e., prescribing that action. All communicative speech aims for a response of some sort. One speaks to someone in order to secure a certain end concerning that person. In a sense, all communicative speech is pragmatic and social. Prescription is the common factor—not truth-stating or fact-representing. So, speech is not about expressing one’s thoughts in a solipsistic manner; and moral speech is likewise not expressive in the sense typically intended. One is not expressing emotion in a social vacuum; one is recommending something to someone. Often it takes the form of a proscription: Do not steal! That is, the negation of a recommendation. It may be said that one is expressing oneself to someone in order to secure a certain result, but the idea of solitary self-expression is alien to speech as we know it. One may express moral contempt or disgust about something to someone, but not in order to bring about personal nirvana or for artistic purposes. In a sense all speech is normative or evaluative: it would be right to do such-and-such (morally, epistemically). You ought to believe that it’s raining outside and you ought to avoid treading on people’s toes—that sort of thing. No speech is norm-neutral.

There is a kind of use-mention confusion running through these discussions: we should be able to read the linguistic off the metaphysical and vice versa. If there is a metaphysical distinction between facts and values, that should be reflected in the taxonomy of speech acts; so, the speech act can give us a clue to the metaphysics. There should be a principled semantic dichotomy between factual discourse and moral discourse. But this is not true: the world is one thing, language is another. Language has its own nature and purpose; it isn’t a faint copy of reality. Nor is human action somehow isomorphic with the world. All speech is prescriptive because of human purposes, not because its subject matter is somehow objectively prescriptive. Indeed, that is a kind of category mistake—a confusion of words and things. Prescriptivism is not a type of metaphysics but a contribution to anthropology—the anthropology of language. If you want to find out about facts and values, you need to look at the world not at language use.[2]

[1] The Beatles: “Believe me when I tell you, I’ll never do you no harm”.

[2] I don’t like the traditional distinction between facts and values, because it suggests that values are not facts (whatever they are). I prefer to speak of facts of value and facts of non-value. We don’t seem to have a term for the latter kind of facts, so we get horrors like “descriptive facts” and “genuine facts”. It is the non-value facts that seem suspiciously indefinable; the category is probably spurious.