to Use when Asking them
3.3 Sarcasm and irony
Once sarcasm and irony get into the mix, a speaker pretending to be clueless is knowing and a speaker pretending to be stupid is wise. By wielding open questions and confirmation questions in certain ways, these effects and many others can be achieved. Here are a few cases.
3 . 3 . 1 Ac c u s a t i o n
Suppose, confronting a burglar cracking my safe, I say Are you supposed to be doing that? I have uttered an inverted sentence-token, and uttered it with an intonation characteristic of questions. But have I asked a question? If so, I have asked an open question; presenting myself as considering the question open whether the burglar is supposed to be doing that. By doing so, I misrepresent myself: I am not so dense as to consider the question open whether I should be robbed. But the misrepresentation is calculated: the burglar will surely realize that I am not as dense as I am presenting myself to be, that I do not really consider it to be an open question whether he is supposed to be breaking into my safe. But have I asked a question? The short answer is No, but that is not the end of the matter. For, by saying what I have said, I intend first to be taken as having asked a question and then to be taken as not having asked a question. For, by my being understood to be asking a question, a chain of reasoning is begun that terminates with the conclusion that I should not have been understood to have been asking a question. That is one of the ways of sarcasm.
It is also one of the ways of irony. Saying the question ironically, I again present myself as considering the question open whether the burglar is supposed to be breaking open my safe. And again I misrepresent myself. But if I also present myself in a sharp and aggressive way, the burglar must conclude that I emphatically do not consider it an open question whether he should be robbing me. Again, by being understood to be asking a question, I educe the conclusion that I am not asking a question. That is the way of irony.
But suppose that, in the given circumstance, I had chosen to ask the burglar not an open question but a confirmation question. Suppose I had said You’re supposed to be doing that? Here I might be presenting myself as seeking to confirm my belief that the burglar believes that he is supposed to be doing that, as with the case of the buttermilk. I have, thereby, presented myself as believing that the burglar is a moral ignoramus. And so the effect in this case is to insult. If the belief that I seek to confirm is my own, then I present myself as trying to get the burglar to confirm my belief that he is supposed to be cracking my safe. In this case, I present myself as trying to get it confirmed that I believe something, which, if I did believe it, would indicate that I am some sort of ignoramus. And,
in the ways of irony and sarcasm, the effect is to come off as a wise guy. In either case, I misrepresent myself, and the misrepresentations are calculated to achieve different effects.¹⁰
But what speech-act was I performing? In all of these cases, the burglar knows that I am not asking a question with the goal of receiving an answer as to whether he is supposed to be cracking my safe, and knows that I am not trying to confirm my belief that he is. He understands that I have no doubt on any of that. However, by saying what I did, I did do something else. I confronted the burglar with my belief that he is cracking my safe, thus achieving the effect of accusation. It is easy to see this when considering how the burglar might respond. The response might be Yes, you’re right, you caught me red-handed, where the burglar admits that the accusation is just. But that response is not a literal answer to the original question; it is a response to the speech-act accusation, an accusation that also could have been issued more straightforwardly by uttering You’re burgling my safe! which is not a question at all. And similarly, and for the same reasons, it is in bounds for the burglar to protest his innocence by uttering You’re wrong, I’m just oiling the hinges, again not answering the question, but responding to the accusation.
3 . 3 . 2 Po l i t e n e s s
I have claimed that by saying Would you pass me the salt? a speaker may express a desire, an attitude toward a lack. The object of desire is, in effect, the absence of saturation, revealed by inversion. The speaker is not asking a question, but making a request. When questioning, a speaker indicates that he is not able to complete a sentence-type or to complete a speech-act. In that way, he asks that they be completed. In the case of requests, a speaker indicates an attitude toward an incompleteness, a desire, and in that way requests that the desire be satisfied. Much has been written about the relationship between questions and requests, especially under the rubric of ‘indirect speech-acts’.¹¹ Here I will restrict myself to drawing out the implications of the theory I am advancing.
There are various ‘polite’ forms having different effects. By uttering Could you pass me the salt?, the speaker expresses an attitude toward your not saturating the predicate ‘could pass me the salt’. It is generally agreed that, in many circumstances, this is a politer form of speech than Will you pass me the salt? Expressing a desire concerning a possible future event contrasts with expressing a desire toward a future event. The first desire is less presumptuous. What is the explanation for this? One popular suggestion is that the speaker is asking whether the addressee is able to pass the salt, assuming that the addressee will reason that
¹⁰ The ways of irony and sarcasm are complex, and there is a very large literature concerning them, which I must pass by here. I would only recommend a suggestive, but neglected, tabular comparison of irony, sarcasm, wit, satire, etc. in the ‘humour’ entry of Fowler 1926.
Rhetorical Questions 61 the speaker is not actually asking whether the addressee can do this.¹² Of course the speaker believes that the addressee can do this, so the addressee should reason that the speaker must be doing something else. And the something else must be to request the salt. One would have to tell similar stories for Would you pass me the salt?, and so forth, and it is not clear whether ability is always, or ever, in point. But however these details are overcome, it is not clear in this popular sort of theory how one reasons from the assumption that the speaker is not asking a question to the conclusion that the speaker is making a request. How are these speech-acts related, on this view?
In the account given here, the relation is to be found in incompleteness. A request is the expression of an attitude toward a lack, a question expresses the lack itself. The politeness associated with Will you pass the salt? derives from the fact that the speaker, in using this incomplete (glueless) sentence-type, removes any presumption that the addressee will do this. It is an open question whether the addressee will pass the salt. The further politeness associated with Could you pass me the salt? derives from the fact that the speaker, in using this incomplete sentence-type, removes any presumption that the addressee could do this. It is an open question whether it is even possible for the addressee to pass the salt. This is why saying the uninverted, confirmation question You could pass me the salt? lacks politeness, and why some wieldings of it might even be taken to be offensive. Here, the presumption is that the addressee could pass the salt, since, in saying it, the speaker presents himself as seeking to confirm the belief that the addressee could pass the salt. Of course the addressee has not yet passed the salt, though able to. So confirming what is obvious, that the addressee is able to pass the salt, points toward some other explanation for the salt not being passed, the implications being potentially offensive.