Freedom of Speech-Acts Roger A. Shiner

42 FREEDOM OF SPEECH-ACTS
with and as with a certain meaning (sense and reference).
No one will want to deny that King-Farlow's paradigm 'doings'
belong to the first of these categories. The crunch comes wheo we
consider whether aoy of the things that involve speech are subsumable
under the third heading; this is what is needed if this prop
of his argument is not to be knocked away, if 'sayings' are to be
clearly distinct from 'doings' in the way his thesis demands. Austin,
however, claims aod, io my opioion, claims rightly, that the pure
locutiooary act, the pure 'saying,' never occurs (p. 146), that every
instance of saying something in this locutiooary sense is also ao
instance of doing something, whether statiog, iovokiog, praising,
assessing, prooiising, betting, and so on, and so on. In How to Do
Tilings with Worth (pp. 152-62), Austin Ests some 150 of such
doings-with-words, and this is just to give us "a run-around or
rather a flounder-arouod" (p. 150). The point may be strengthened
by considering an unnoticed disparity between two of King-Farlow's
examples of 'sayings,' oamely, "obscene storyteUing," oo p. 40,
and "the bare text of a speech," which appears later on (p. 44).
We may take the text of a speech, and ask, "Does it contain more
true statements than false?" aod here we are oot coocerned with
any exotic speech-acts that the orator might have beeo perforoiing;
we are not concerned with aoy speech-acts at all, not even statiog,
but simply with a piece of laoguage. But if we wish to denounce
someone as a teller of obscene stories, then we are concerned with
a man's activity aod not simply the bare text of a speech. A court
of law, for example, declares that a book is obscene, has a tendency
to deprave and corrupt. There is no reference to any activity on
the part of the author, nor aoy reference to his character; the author
may well be Russell's notorious mookeys. Dubious oight-club
comedians, oo the other hand, are themselves restrained from
further speech-acts. Compare also the diSereoce between graffiti
on a washroom wall and storytelEng io the locker room or 19th
hole.
Consider these cases involviog basic humao freedoms. The
murder of Martin Luther King was clearly achieved by an actioo
which was not a saying — the classification of cases such as this is
not in dispute. Compare, however, incitement to racial violence,
which is, as such, a crime in English law. By virtue of the meaning
of 'indtement,' it cannot be called an action oot involving 'sayings.'
The charge for distributing leaflets would be ooe of uttering
documents which indte racial hatred — here the distributor