The Difference between Actual Speech, Speech-Acts, and Expression
The first Amendment of the Constitution of the United States guarantees the individual freedom of speech and expression; however, as Justice Brandeis once famously said, the First Amendment does not protect the individual’s freedom to yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater. There are some instances of speech – like yelling “Fire!” in crowded theaters – that are not protected by the Constitution, and I think it advisable for everyone to understand the differences between these different kinds of speech. Once the difference is understood, it becomes relatively clear why some forms of speech must be regulated while other forms should never be regulated.
The Sleeping Habit of Successful People You may never Hear or Read
Of the three forms of speech – which I will call “actual speech,” “speech-act,” and “expression” – the most general is expression. An expression could be anything from an emotional outburst like yelling “Oh!” when startled, to cursing at the driver who just pulled in front of you. An expression can be anything from Gӧdel’s Incompleteness Theorem to a performance of Swan Lake. All instances of speech are instances of expression, but some instances of expression are not instances of speech. Throwing a punch can also be considered a form of expression, and so it becomes clear that, in some instances, it is necessary to regulate by law certain kinds of expression.
Actual speech, as I call it, is a process of communication in which information, with some specific semantic content, is moved, as it were, from point A to point B (where point A might be the mind of one person and point B the mind of another). It is this kind of speech, actual speech, that the founders intended to protect in the Constitution. More than once the founders spoke of the “free flow of information” which was an idea adopted from John Locke. In actual speech, we are concerned with the communication or transfer of information, and it is this kind of speech the founders felt should not be regulated. (But what about the instructions for building nuclear weapons…?)
The speech-act is the third form of “speech” generally. A speech-act occurs when speech is not meant – or not primarily intended – to communicate information, but rather to do something, to accomplish something; it is as if the words themselves become tools or weapons. An example of a speech-act would be when a clergy-person or judge pronounces a couple “man and wife”; it is the utterance of the right words under the right circumstances that makes it so. This couple is now man and wife. Another example of a speech-act is what has traditionally been called “fighting words,” where a taunt or insult is considered equivalent to throwing a punch. Hate speech falls into this category.
Given this basic distinction between kinds of speech, it should become clear why some of them should be regulated while others are not. Hatred and rage, too, are expressible, typically in violence, and this kind of expression cannot be tolerated. Speech-acts also have the power to inflict harm, as when sentence is passed on someone who has been convicted of a crime. In this case, the harm inflicted by the speech-act is legal and, some would argue, morally permissible. But actual speech is meant to convey information from point to point, from person to person, and such communication was, to the founders, more or less sacred. I take the reason for this, as did the founders, to be self-evident.
*[I beg John Searle’s indulgence, as I have ripped him off terribly. See his book “Speech Acts”; Cambridge University Press, 1969.]
Leave a Reply