This post will discuss my experience of reading J.L Austin’s ‘How to Do Things with Words’, a collection of lectures on utterances published in 1955. The post aims to start a series where I will discuss works, without formally reviewing them. By doing this, I hope to clarify my understanding of the works and formulate opinions on them.

Austin starts by making a distinction between constative and performative statements. A constative statement is a descriptive sentence that is either true or false. Whereas, a performative statement is an utterance is a that does an action, such as ‘I name this ship’ or ‘I do’ in a wedding ceremony. Austin suggests the former has been the focus of analytic philosophy. By discussing the idea of performatives he hopes to undermine the idea that ‘a ‘statement’ can only be to ‘describe’ some state of affairs, or to ‘state some fact’. There are also questions, exclamations and commands among many other sentences and not just logical propositions.

The second trait that defines a performative statement is that it is either happy or unhappy, instead of being true or false. Austin lists a number of conditions necessary for performatives to be happy, such as that there must be an accepted conventional procedure in which it can be used and that the individual participants must intend to carry out the result of it. These only form a few conditions Austin commentates on. Performatives can also fail due to what Austin calls infelicities. Infelicities fall into two categories, misfires and abuses. A misfire is when an act is purported but void, whereas an abuse is act professed but which is hollow.

Austin goes into some detail about the types of misfires and abuses through which a performative can fail. An example of a misfire could revolve around the example of a game played at party, where someone says ‘I pick George’. If the response is ‘I’m not playing’ then the utterance would be unhappy because there is no convention that you can pick people who are not playing or because George is an inappropriate object for picking. A further example might include an the words ‘I will’ in a marriage ceremony being void if the other partner says ‘I will not’. As abuses centre around an act being hollow, an examples might include saying ‘I advise you’, when you do not believe your advice is wrong or saying ‘I declare war’ when you do not intend to fight.

Following these sections, Austin dedicates a large amount of space to trying to find a list of performative verbs. However, while doing this, he realises the constative and performative distinction, intially made in his first lecture, breaks down to a degree. In these sections, Austin introduces a large amount of ambiguity and hesitation and in fact even gives up on his effort to find a list at one point. It is easy to see why a thinker like Jacques Derrida took an interest in Austin (such as in Limited Inc.) when he discusses these difficulties and the ways in which communication can fail.

The best examples to illustrate this breakdown in the differences between constatives and performatives are found towards the end of Austin’s lectures. Constatives can be seen to have many of the same potential failings as performatives. For example, they might suitable in some contexts, but not in others. As Austin suggests, saying ‘France is hexagonal’ may be suitable for a top-level general, but it would not be correct for a geographer. Likewise, saying ‘Lord Raglan won the battle of Alma’ may be fine for a schoolbook, but it would not be suitable for a piece of historical research. Constatives, like performatives, can therefore be suitable in some contexts, but not in others.

Austin also introduces more concepts during his lectures. Most notably, distinctions between locutionary acts, illocutionary acts and perlocutionary acts. The former refers to saying something. Whereas, an illocutionary acts include ‘utterances which have a certain (conventional) force’, they do something. Perlocutionary acts are the actual responses to saying something. Furthermore, Austin comments on how the distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary acts is not always clear. Austin also categorises illocutionary acts into different groups. According to him ‘the verdictive is an excercise of judgement, the exercitive is an an assertion of influence or excercising of power, the commissive is an assuming of an obligation or declaring of an intention, the behabitive is the adopting of an attitude, and the expositive is the clarifying of reasons, arguments, and communications.’ These five groups of illocutionary acts can also overlap to a degree, bringing the theme of ambiguity present in Austin’s work back to the forefront again.

To conclude, J.L Austin’s ‘How to Do Things with Words’ is an interesting read, especially when one focuses on the themes of ambiguity and communicative difficulty prevalent in the work. For a historian like myself, I believe it could be interesting to apply some of the ideas in it to past documents. Austin’s ideas have been used in literary criticism and it could be fascinating to see what insights they could bring to the historical discipline.