serious speech act

is a statement uttered by an expert or some possessor of social status which has serious social consequences.

A term coined by Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982). 'To avoid Foucault's misleading tendency to refer to this atypical subset of statements which interests him simply as statements, let us call these special speech acts serious speech acts. Any speech act can be serious if one sets up the necessary validation procedures, community of experts, and so on. For example, 'It is going to rain' is normally an everyday speech act with only local significance, but it can also be a serious speech act if uttered by a spokesman for the National Weather Service as a consequence of a general meteorological theory. . . Foucault claims that our culture has a tendency to convert more and more of our everyday speech acts into serious ones. This is, according to Foucault, the manifestation of a will to truth, which 'daily grows in strength, in depth and implacability' (DL 219). (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982: 48)

serious speech act, n.Definitions

serious speech act