1997, 24), and most writers have adopted the later terminology, thereby
distinguishing what is called ‘‘the illocutionary force’’ of an utterance—
what one does in saying, such as asserting or commanding—from the
propositional content mentioned. In ordinary discourse no distinction is
made between the content mentioned and the belief of the speaker; there
is a conflation of thought with belief. The theory that I wish to advance
is that writing is instrumental in distinguishing thought from belief. The
theory is composed of two claims. The first is that the propositional
content can be isolated from its assertoric or illocutionary force only
when it occurs in the embedded clause of indirect discourse, that is,
through the linguistic device of quotation. Both direct and indirect quota-
tion are means of representing an idea without oneself believing it
or asserting it as true. In quoted speech the thought has become free of
the thinker! The second is that writing is a form of quotation.
One could argue along with Frege that indirect discourse (roughly
quotation of an expression) is what makes conceptual thought possible.
Pure thought is entertaining some content without either asserting
or denying it. Although there are complexities here (Davidson 1984;
Dummett 1981) quotation, indirect quotation, and reported thought all
require that special interpretive procedures be brought to bear on the
quoted expression. What are these special procedures? They are ones that
treat the quoted expression as exempt from the assertoric force
or intention of the original speaker. All of these procedures direct atten-
tion to the linguistic properties of the expression rather than to, or in
addition to, its situational or referential meaning, and in particular, the
assertoric or illocutionary force of the original expression. Stated another
way, speaker’s meaning has been carved off to leave sentence meaning.
Consequently, what quotation does is free an utterance from its original
intention. Phrased yet another way, quoted expressions are mentioned
rather than used; they have been rendered ‘‘off-line’’ and their function
becomes metarepresentational.
What is the link to writing? My conjecture is that written texts inherit
the properties of quoted expressions. As in the expression by Todorov
cited in the epigram to this chapter, we read as if expressions are in
quotation marks. Written texts are written and read as if they were merely
mentioned rather than used. Written texts, like quoted expressions, are
closed in the sense that they are no longer open to updating and revision.
They are a corpse more than a corpus; in philosophical jargon the expres-
sions are opaque. They have a structure more or less independent of what
the speaker or writer meant by them. It requires a reader to reanimate
them. What the reader does is add his or her own assertoric or illocu-
tionary force to the quoted expression. Although texts, on occasion, may
have originated as a simple alternative to speech, once preserved and
fixed, they are read as if in quotation marks, as quoted rather than stated.
Such expressions are overheard rather than heard, to use a distinction
made by J. S. Mill in his article ‘‘What Is Poetry?’’ (cited by Banfield 1993,
394 Epilogue