Designed Things, Technical Functions, and Speech Act Theory

In his seminal How to Do Things With Words (1962), J. L. Austin claims that utterances are constituted by three components: locutionary content (what an utterance literally means), illocutionary force (what the utterance conventionally achieves by virtue of those conventions governing the power of the utterance), and perlocutionary outcomes (what the utterance actually achieves). Although Austin’s primary concern was linguistic utterances, later theorists have applied Austin’s ‘speech act theory’ to other domains — including, notably, to artworks.
The virtue of applying a speech act approach to artworks is that Austin’s tripartite model provides philosophers with a way of distinguishing between what an artwork literally means (the locution) and the force of that meaning (the illocution). However, developments in this domain have, thus far and for the most part, been narrow. Prevailing accounts focus primarily upon artworks or similar expressions with offensive or explicit locutionary content and/or illocutionary force (pornography, certain examples of public statuary, and so on; cf. Langton 1993, Scarre 2o19, Friedell and Liao 2022, etc.). Nonetheless this scholarship shows, in my view, great promise for application in other philosophical domains: not just philosophy of art, but also philosophy of technology, philosophy of engineering, and philosophy of design.
In light of this conviction, in this paper I will apply post-Austinian speech act theory to these three overlapping philosophical domains. Drawing upon Austin’s tripartite distinction between locutionary content, illocutionary force, and perlocutionary outcomes, I will furnish a novel and plausible account of technical functions, the ways in which the individual or conventional uses of technical artefacts can deviate from those functions, and the cultural and material conditions that circumscribe the relationship between function and use. Furthermore, I will also highlight similarities and differences between this and competing accounts of technical function, in particular the action theory accounts of Houkes, Pols, Vermaas, et al. (cf. Houkes et al. 2002, Vermaas and Houkes 2003, Pols 2015, etc.)