Login: mrbrownies
Team: l33t really cool guys
Real Name:
Location:

Favorite Map: your mom
Favorite Game: cornholing
Favorite Unit: my cock

Why you fucking suck, noob
by Milk Man

Of all the illocutionary acts, boasting is perhaps the most primordial.  Indeed, animal behavior presents us with many examples of boasting, usually with the intention of attracting mates. The male peacock, for instance, communicates his virility by displaying his beautiful feathers.  While the deep-seeded nature of the boast makes it a compelling and accessible subject, however, it also makes it difficult the delineate boasting from demonstration.  Superficially, the relationship between boasting and demonstration can be defined simply as the one between the signifier and the signified.  Upon closer inspection, however, this bifurcation proves to be less evident.  While it may seem clear that uttering “I have a nine inch penis” is a boast whereas actually whipping-out one’s nine-inch penis is a demonstration, one must first consider whether preference for large penises is a cultural construction (and therefore simply a concatenated signifier) or the result of the biomechanical reality of the orifice in which it is meant to fit.  To complicate matters further, even if one could determine that the preference for large penises is the result of biomechanical facts, one could make the argument that it nevertheless signifies desirable genetic information.  Until these issues are resolved, one risks losing the object of intention in boasting in an endless chain of signification; denying us any knowledge of what boasts is ever about.  Accordingly, let us confine the definition of “boasting” to the linguistic act of boasting.  While victory dances such as the crip-walk*, for example, are almost certainly boasts as well, they will be categorized separately as “showing-off” in order to operationalize the stating of the conditions which constitute boasting.

(1) Preparatory condition

Before boasting’s preparatory conditions can be coherently enumerated it must be understood that a boast is not necessarily a result of a speaker/hearer dualism but rather takes place along an entire “patch” of social networks.  S might very well be boasting to his friend H about how great of a poet he is, knowing that H’s beautiful sister, N, loves poetry and has been known to be attracted to poets.  Though H might not even be aware that the assertion S is making is a boast at all, S understands that his social proximity to his sister is such that the boast will be most-likely be conveyed to N (the terminal node), who will then recognize the boast and determine its success or failure, that is to say, decide whether the information raises or lowers her esteem of S.  Furthermore, N need not be a specified individual: N can be any set of criteria delineating S’s intended audience.  Rather than having a beautiful sister, for instance, H could very well have a hideous one, but one with an indeterminate but decidedly plentiful number of attractive, young, and female friends towards whom S’s boast is intended: N in this case consists of all socially proximate individuals who meet the criteria “attractive,” “young,” and “female.”  Therefore:
H’s social proximity to N is such that it is possible for S to express p to N by uttering T to H:
The boaster is communicating with a person or persons who, because of their social proximity to individuals meeting the criteria by which the boaster has defined his intended audience, are understood to be appropriate transmitters of the boast.

Boasts are able to “flow” along social networks, even without H’s recognition of p, because they are always indirect speech acts.  Consider, for example, the absurdity of sentences such as “I boast to you that I have a nine inch penis” or dialogues such as; “So you write poetry?” H asked, “Yes, and I boast that to you” answered S.  In the case of boasting, the direct/secondary act (usually some assertion about S) acts as a “trojan horse” for the indirect/primary act of boasting.  In well-designed boasts, it is quite possible for H and any other intervening nodes separating S from N to mistake direct speech acts for the primary ones, so long as N does or will not.  The indirect nature of a boast also resolves the problems arising from the question of whether a boast is defined according to S’s intention or N’s judgment/recognition of p.  This question becomes evident when considering situations such as when S intends to make an assertion, but a boast is “read into” it by N or, conversely, when S intends to boast but p has not been transmitted to N.  Because indirect speech acts depend on S, H, and N’s external situations, or to but it in Searle’s terms, the principles of conversational cooperation and factual background information, they can be seen as existing “between” S and N rather than depending on one or the other.  A boast isn’t defined by S’s intention, but according to its design, and because boasts are distributed along social networks, their propositional content can never be determined as erased: p always exists as potentially expressed to N.  

(2) Sincerity condition
S is, does, intends to be, or intends to do A in such a way that A is satisfactory to N as a potentiality.

To some, the notion of defining boasting’s sincerity conditions may seem counter intuitive; boasts are often thought of as consisting of greatly exaggerated assertions, if not outright lies.  One reason for this understanding of boasting lies in the latent Christianity that continues to articulate western morality; a morality that highly values humility, which seems diametrically opposed to boastfulness.  This dichotomy is a false one, however: it is quite possible to boast of one’s humility, for example, or to humble oneself as a boast.  As Nietzsche once pointed out, the humble can be divided into those who are humble in a way that signifies a superabundance of power (master morality) and those who are humble in order to accept their lot and identify with their peers (slave morality).  More importantly, however, it is possible to uncover sincerity conditions for boasts if one distinguishes quantitative from qualitative accuracy.  In recognizing and judging a boast, it is expected that the quantitative aspects of the boast be exaggerated, whereas its qualitative aspects are expected to be sincere.  For example, if S boasts that he has a foot long penis, an unlikely assertion, N will most-likely assume that precise length of his penis is exaggerated, yet S’s penis must be, at the very least, be understood as satisfactory in order for S’s utterance of T to be categorized as a boast.  Indeed, the conditions for N’s judging S’s boast to be a successful one may be simply that S has managed to signal his being potential mate, in which case the sincerity conditions presupposing his boast would satisfied by his having a penis at all.

(3) Essential condition
S’s utterance of T is designed in such a way that p may potentially improve N’s esteem of S.
While, at this point in our analysis, boasting’s essential condition can be easily inferred and produced organically from the explications of its preparatory and sincerity conditions, it is important to keep in mind that for N’s esteem of S to improve, A must be an identify or action which can be categorized hierarchically.  This is not to say that A must be objectively impressive. One can very well boast of one’s being a great artist even if one’s art consists of defecating on a canvas so long as N recognizes this act as, for example, a work of Abstract Expressionism.  One cannot boast of being existent, on the other hand, as there is no gradient of states between existence and inexistence.  Analogously, the hierarchy into which S is categorized by N must be a regulative one rather than a constitutive one: A must not be tautologous to the nature of S’s relationship to N.  It is impossible for a general (S) to boast of his being a general to a private (N) (and vice versa) within a military context, for instance, because N’s needing to validate p undermines the definition of A.  In other words, a general cannot need to boast about being a general while being a general because the rank of “general” is itself defined as a specific position in a hierarchy determined by institutional facts.

(4) Gricean thesis
S intends that H recognize his intention of agreeing to preparatory conditions of his direct speech act in such a way that an indirect speech act meeting the preparatory, sincerity, and essential conditions of boasting can be recognized by N.