Black, Max - Austin On Performatives

06/27/2008

The Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, Vol 38 No 145 July 1963

This is a relatively short paper that reviews Austin's lectures about performatives and constatives, and his attempt to establish a new tri-fold system of categorization between locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts.

First, author summarizes Austin's discussion of performative speech-acts like 'I promise x'. These are ideal cases of 'PerformativeA', which is: 'doing something other than, or more than, saying something true or false' (pg219). The problem here is that the analysis is too weak. It lets in things like 'I say the bridge is out!'. This is more than a true/false utterance-- it is an assertion and a warning. Hence 'PerformativeB' is a performative if it has the form 'I [present tense singular verb] X' if the circumstances are such that the person in question is actually doing that verb. (warn, reprimand, state) Author considers PerfomativeB's to be 'self-labeling utterances' and rather uninteresting, preferring the other to be performatives proper (pg220-1).

In trying to get more specific, Author points out the 'ceremonial' or 'conventional' aspects of performatives. They usually are:
i. rule governed (as to the way the act is supposed to happen)
ii. self-validating (doing them makes them valid)
iii. public and 'claim generating'
iv. part of a cultural understanding or ceremonially significant
(pg 222)
The problem here is that it seems just speaking any old sentence (even one with a truth-value) can conform to all these specifications.

Author believes it was the continual vagueness that led Austin to try the three-fold distinction:
Locutionary: the sense & reference of an utterance-- the speaker's meaning
Illocutionary: the intent (or intended effect) with which the utterance was made
Perlocutionary: the actual effect on the hearers ('was that a promise?')
(pg 223-4)
Author throws doubt over whether Loc. and Illoc. are truly distinct, even though Austin seemed more focused on whether Illoc. and Perloc. were truly distinct. Author suggests that to truly understand an Loc. act, you should know it also as an Illoc. act, which collapses the two into one: Loc. act. If this is so, the new re-working looks a lot like the old one, and again a systematic approach to natural language seems to falter.