So let’s talk about magic. When you want
to make something happen using just your will,
it helps to know the proper incantations.
Speaking the right syllables at the right
time can transform bachelors into husbands,
students into graduates, and suspects into convicts,
and even change reality as you know
it. As you’ll see, we use magic all the
time. I’m Moti Lieberman, and this is the
Ling Space.
A lot of what we do when we use language is
descriptive. “Quentin washed his hands at
one of the school’s capacious sinks” describes
a scene, and something like “I feel very
nervous about the exam” describes a thought.
But not all utterances are descriptive. How
about something like “You’re under arrest”?
Sure, you could say that describes the situation
of being arrested, but it’s more than that.
By saying “you’re under arrest”, a police
officer is actually affecting the situation.
A person who wasn’t under arrest before
those words, now is.
Expressions like these are known as performative
utterances. Just like a magic spell, they
change the reality that they describe. And
it’s not just arresting somebody that fits
the bill: we use these performative speech
acts for all kinds of important stuff. Like,
when two people get married, saying “I now
pronounce you married” makes it official.
Or saying “I hereby proclaim you King of
Fillory” imbues you with the responsibilities
of a monarch.
Of course, just like in magic, sometimes you
need a special gesture or some material components
to really make the spell stick. Formal speech
acts like wedding vows or declarations of
war often aren’t official with just the
words themselves. In most places today, you
need to back that language up with something
written on paper. So you might become a citizen
of a new country when you swear an oath, but
it’s your passport that really holds the weight.
If you go back in time, though, you reach
a point pretty quick where widespread literacy
isn’t really a thing, or the oral tradition
is core, and that’s where performative language
really takes center stage. Without documentation,
a binding agreement would have to be verbal.
In a lot of cases, this could be accomplished by
swearing to a deity or putting your reputation
on the line.
For instance, in ancient Greece, it wasn’t
unusual when you wanted to promise something
that you’d swear it by one of your favourite
gods of the pantheon, like “By awesome Artemis,
daughter of Zeus”. This sounds kind of grandiose
when we talk about it now, but when you look
at literature from the time, it seems like it was
actually a pretty common conversational practice.
And it was deeper than just a passing promise.
Oaths like these were seen as a contract,
and going back on an oath was breaking social
and moral rules - kind of like lying under
oath in court today is breaking the law. Pulling
the gods in as witnesses to people’s verbal
contracts made it public, and also reminded
whoever was listening that if you broke your
oath, the gods would punish you. It was kind
of a big deal.
And we still use these kinds of expressions
in English - maybe not “By awesome Artemis!”,
but you’ve probably heard expressions like
“I swear to God” or “as God is my witness",
even in casual conversation. It's not always
meant literally, but it's there.
So it’s not just big decisions uttered by
official people that can change the world.
In a way, every time you make a promise, you’re
changing the game. When you say “I promise
I will stay in Fillory until the end”, the people you're
promising that to expect you to stick around indefinitely.
The state of affairs is different after your promise
than it is before.
This may seem like magic, but there’s actually
a lot of theory about what makes it tick.
We already said that sometimes you need written
backup to really make a performative speech
act official. And you might also need the power
to do it: your average
textbook editor can’t cast spells like a
magician can, any more than he can declare war.
Another important element is repetition. Expressions
like “I now pronounce you married” or
“I hereby name this ship the Muntjac”
have power because they’re conventions that
keep being repeated within a particular cultural
context. If you call shotgun when getting
into a car with your college friends in America,
then they’ll probably know that you mean
you want to sit in the front next to the driver.
But if you call shotgun when hopping into
a carriage in a fantasy kingdom, the odds
are the fairy footmen and the talking bunnies
won’t really get it. And you'll probably
get stuck in the back.
But if you really want to understand how saying
can be doing, maybe it’s best to reassess
how you think about language overall. Even
back in the 1950s, philosophers like J.L.
Austin tried to divide the world of sentences
into descriptive and performative acts. So
some things you say just remark on reality,
while other things change it. Philosophers
and researchers have debated lots of ways
to talk about speech acts since, but no matter how
you slice it, one thing is pretty clear: language
has the power to transform.
So how does this work? Well, Austin suggested
that there are three different parts to language,
which work together to make communication
happen. First, there are the words themselves,
which he called “locution”. These mean
something on their own, but when you say them,
they also represent your “illocutionary
force”, so what you mean and what you’re
trying to communicate. Finally, your words
end up having a “perlocutionary effect”
on the person you’re talking to - they end
up doing something to the world outside your own head.
You can apply this three-part structure to
any sentence, so, for example: the locution
“do you have the time’ spoken to a stranger
on the street really has the illocutionary
purpose of asking what time it is, and the
perlocutionary effect hopefully would be the stranger
telling you the time. So from this
perspective, everything you say has some kind
of performative element. The performative
speech acts we were talking about before are
just the ones where the perlocutionary effect
is a pretty notable change in the way people
interact with the world. The idea that words have
power shows up all over the place, from Buddhist
mantras, to incantations of traditional midwives
in Mali, to Adam naming the animals in the Bible.
There’s something to this, but it might
be less supernatural and more subconscious.
Experiments have shown that word choice in
how you talk about something can have a huge
effect on what message the people you’re
talking to take away. For example, two psychologists
in the 70s showed some footage of two cars
getting into an accident to participants in
an experiment. Then, they asked the following: how fast
were the cars going when they verbed each other?
Depending on what verb they used, they got
some clear differences in the reported speed.
With a more neutral verb like “contacted”,
people assumed the cars had been going about
32 miles an hour, but with a much higher-impact,
destructive verb like “smashed”, that
estimate was way higher, over 40 miles an
hour. And this is with the exact same footage.
If the choice of just one word can change
how people remember facts, that’s pretty
powerful. And that has huge implications for
things like how you ask questions of people
who witnessed a crime. Could the things that police officers,
lawyers, or anyone else say to witnesses actually
change the way they remember events?
As a follow-up, the same psychologists ran
a very similar experiment, with a car accident
and guessing the speed. But this time, they
called people back one week later to ask them
a different question: did they see broken
glass in the video?
Well, first of all, the film had no broken
glass. But almost a third of the people who
heard “smash” in the speed-related question
remembered glass, compared to just 14% of
the people where the verb was “hit”, no
different than the control group.
And this is after one
week! One word carefully placed at the virtual
scene of the crime changed the story people
remembered. Abracadabra!
So it looks like there’s a lot about language
that casts a spell on the listener. Whether
it’s the social contract of declarations
or promises, or the memory-altering consequences
of word choice, our utterances can change
the reality in people’s heads. And that’s magical.
So we’ve reached the end of the Ling Space
for this week. If I altered your reality with
my incantations, you learned that performative
utterances change the world they describe;
that our speech acts are made up of three
different parts; and that the words you use
to talk about something can shift your memory
of it.
The Ling Space is produced by me, Moti Lieberman.
It’s directed by Adèle-Elise Prévost,
and it’s written by both of us. Our editor
is Georges Coulombe, our production assistant
is Stephan Hurtubise, our music is by Shane
Turner, and our graphics team is atelierMUSE.
We’re down in the comments below, or you
can bring the discussion back over to our
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And we’ll see you next Wednesday. Sai an
jima!
