austin john langshaw - per formative utterances

8/14/2019 AUSTIN John Langshaw - Per Formative Utterances

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Performative Utterances 8J.L. AUSTIN

You are more than entitled not to know whatthe word "performative" means. It is a newword and an ugly word, and perhaps it doesnot mean anything very much. But at any ratethere is one thing in its favor, it is not aprofound word. I remember once when I hadbeen talking on this subject that somebodyafterwards said: "You know, I haven't theleast idea what he means, unless it could .be'that he simply means what he says." Well, thatis what I should like to mean.

Let us consider first how this affair arises.We have not got to go very far back in thehistory of philosophy to find philosophersassuming more or less as a matter of coursethat the sole business, the sole interestingbusiness, of any utterance-that is, of any-thing we say-is to be true or at least false. Ofcourse they had always known that there areother kinds of things which we say-thingslike imperatives, the expressions of wishes,and exclamations-some of which had evenbeen classified by grammarians, though itwasn't perhaps too easy to tell always whichwas which. But still philosophers have as-sumed that the only things that they areinterested in are utterances which report factsor which describe situations truly or falsely. Inrecent times this kind of approach has been

questioned-in two stages, I think. First of allpeople began to say: "Well, if these things aretrue or false it ought to be possible to decidewhich they are, and if we can't decide whichthey are they aren't any good but are, in short,nonsense." And this new approach did a greatdeal of good; a great many things whichprobably are nonsense were found to be such.It is not the case, I think, that all kinds ofnonsense have been adequately classified yet,and perhaps some things have been dismissedas nonsense which really are not; but still thismovement, the verification movement, was,in its way, excellent.

However, we then come to the secondstage. After all, we set some limits to theamount of nonsense that we talk, or at leastthe amount of nonsense that we are preparedto admit we talk; and so people began to askwhether after all some of those things which,treated as statements, were in danger of beingdismissed as nonsense did after all really setout to be statements at all. Mightn't theyperhaps be intended not to report facts but toinfluence people in this way or that, or to letoff steam in this way or that? Or perhaps atany rate some elements in these utterancesperformed such functions, or, for example,drew attention in some way (without actuallyreporting it) to some important feature of thecircumstances in which the utterance was

From Ph ilosop hical Papers, 3 d ed., J . 0. Urmson and G . 1. Warnoc k, eds. (O xfo rd: Ox for d Unive rsity Press,1979), pp. 233-252.


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SPEECH ACTSbeing made. On these lines people have nowadopted a new slogan, the slogan of the"different uses of language." The old ap-proach, the old statemental approach, issometimes called even a fallacy, the descrip-tive fallacy.

Certainly there are a great many uses oflanguage. It's rather a pity that people are aptto invoke a new use of language wheneverthey feel so inclined, to help them out of this,that, or the other well-known philosophicaltangle; we need more of a framework in whichto discuss the& uses of language; and also Ithink we should hot despair too easily andtalk, as people are apt to do, about the infiniteuses of language. Philosophers will do thiswhen they have listed as many, let us say, asseventeen; but even if there were somethinglike ten thousand uses of language, surely wecould list them all in time. This, after all, is nolarger than the number of species of beetlethat entomologists have taken the pains to list.But whatever the defects of either of thesemovements-the 'verification' movement orthe 'use of language' movement-at any ratethey have effected, nobody could deny, agreat revolution in philosophy and, manywould say, the most salutary in its history.(Not, if you come to think of it, a veryimmodest claim.)

Now it is one such sort of use of languagethat I want to examine here. I want to discussa kind of utterance which looks like a state-ment and grammatically, I suppose, would beclassed as a statement, which is not nonsensi-cal, and yet is not true o r false. These are notgoing to be utterances which contain curiousverbs like "could" or "might," or curiouswords like "good," which many philosophersregard nowadays simply as danger signals.They will be perfectly straightforward utter-ances, with ordinary verbs in the first personsingular present indicative active, and yet weshall see at once that they couldn't possibly betrue or false. Furthermore, if a person makesan utterance of this sort we should say that heis doing something rather than merely sayingsomething. This may sound a little odd, butthe examples I shall give will in fact not be oddat all, and may even seem decidedly dull.

Here are three or four. Suppose, for example,that in the course of a marriage ceremony Isay, as people will, "I do"-(sc. take thiswoman to be my lawful wedded wife). Oragain, suppose that I tread on your toe andsay "I apologize." Or again, suppose that Ihave the bottle of champagne in my hand andsay "I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth."Or suppose I say "I bet you sixpence it willrain tomorrow." In all these cases it would beabsurd to regard the thing that I say as areport of the performance of the action whichis undoubtedly done-the action of betting, orchristening, or apologizing. We should sayrather that, in saying what I do, I actuallyperform that action. When I say "I name thisship the Queen Elizabeth" I do not describethe christening ceremony, I actually performthe christening; and when I say "I do" (sc.take this woman to be my lawful weddedwife), I am not reporting on a marriage, I amindulging in it.

Now these kinds of utterance are the onesthat we call performative utterances. This israther an ugly word, and a new word, butthere seems to be no word already in existenceto do the job. The nearest approach that I canthink of is the word "operative," as used bylawyers. Lawyers when talking about legalinstruments will distinguish between the pre-amble, which recites the circumstances inwhich a transaction is effected, and on theother hand the operative part-the part of itwhich actually performs the legal act which itis the purpose of the instrument to perform.So the word "operative" is very near to whatwe want. "I give and bequeath my watch tomy brother" would be an operative clause andis a performative utterance. However, theword 'operative' has other uses, and it seemspreferable to have a word specially designedfor the use we want.

Now at this point one might protest, per-haps even with some alarm, that I seem to besuggesting that marrying is simply saying a fewwords, that just saying a few words is marry-ing. Well, that certainly is not the case. Thewords have to be said in the appropriatecircumstances, and this is a matter that willcome up again later. But the one thing we


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THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGEmust not suppose is that what is needed inaddition to the saying of the words in suchcases is the performance of some internalspiritual act, of which the words then are to bethe report. It's very easy to slip into this viewat least in difficult, portentous cases, thoughperhaps not so easy in simple cases likeapologizing. In the case of promising-forexample, "I promise to be there tomorrown--it's very easy to think that the utterance issimply the outward and visible (that is, verbal)sign of the performance of some inwardspiritual act of promising, and this view hascertainlyheen expreised in many classicplaces. There is the case of Euripides' Hip-polytus, who said "My tongue swore to, butmy heart did notx-perhaps it should be"miqd" or "spirit" rather than "heart," but atany rate some kind of backstage artiste. Nowit is clear from this sort of example that, if weslip into thinking that such utterances arereports, true or false, of the performance ofinward and spiritual acts, we open a loopholeto perjurers and welshers and bigamists and soon, so that there are disadvantages in beingexcessively solemn in this way. It is better,perhaps, to stick to the old saying that ourword is our bond.

However, although these utterances do notthemselves report facts and are not themselvestrue or false, saying these things does veryoften imply that certain things are true and notfalse, in some sense at least of that ratherwoolly word "imply." For example, when Isay "I do take this woman to be my lawfulwedded wife," or some other formula in themarriage ceremony, I do imply that I'm notalready married, with wife living, sane, undi-vorced, and the rest of it. But still it is veryimportant to realize that to imply that some-thing or other is true, is not at all the same assaying something which is true itself.

These performative utterances are not trueor false, then. But they do suffer from certaindisabilities of their own. They can fail to comeoff in special ways, and that is what I want toconsider next. The various ways in which aperformative utterance may be unsatisfactorywe call, for the sake of a name, the infelicities;and an infelicity arises-that is to say, the

utterance is unhappy-if certain rules, trans-parently simple rules, are broken. I willmention some of these rules and then giveexamples of some infringements.

First of all, it is obvious that the conven-tional procedure which by our utterance weare purporting to use must actually exist. Inthe examples given here this procedure will bea verbal one, a verbal procedure for marryingor giving or whatever it may be; but it shouldbe borne in mind that there are many nonver-bal procedures by which we can performexactly the same acts as we perform by theseverbal means. It's worth remembering toothat a great many of the things we do are atleast in part of this conventional kind. Philoso-phers at least are too apt to assume that anaction is always in the last resort the making ofa physical movement, whereas it's usually, atleast in part, a matter of convention.

The first rule is, then, that the conventioninvoked must exist and be accepted. And thesecond rule, also a very obvious one, is thatthe circumstances in which we purport toinvoke this procedure must be appropriate forits invocation. If this is not observed, then theact that we purport to perform would notcome off-it will be , one might say, a misfire.This will also be the case if, for example, wedo not carry through the procedure-what-ever it may be-correctly and completely,without a flaw and without a hitch. If any ofthese rules are not observed, we say that theact which we purported to perform is void,without effect. If, for example, the purportedact was an act of marrying, then we should saythat we "went through a form" of marriage,but we did not actually succeed in marrying.

Here are some examples of this kind ofmisfire. Suppose that, living in a country likeour own, we wish to divorce our wife. We maytry standing her in front of us squarely in theroom and saying, in a voice loud enough for allto hear, "I divorce you." Now this procedure isnot accepted. We shall not thereby havesucceeded in divorcing our wife, at least in thiscountry and others like it. This is a case wherethe convention, we should say, does not existor is not accepted. Again, suppose that,picking sides at a children's party, I say "I pick


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SPEECH ACTSGeorge." But George turns red in the face andsays "Not playing." In that case I plainly, forsome reason or another, have not pickedGeorge-whether because there is no conven-tion that you can pick people who aren'tplaying, or because George in the circum-stances is an inappropriate object for theprocedure of picking. O r consider the case inwhich I say "I appoint you Consul," and it turnsout that you have been appointed already-orperhaps it may even transpire that you are ahorse; here again we have the infelicity ofinappropriate circumstances, inappropriateobjects, or what not. Examples of flaws andhitches are perhaps scarcely necessary-oneparty in the marriage ceremony says "I will,"the other says "I won't"; I say "I bet sixpence,"but nobody says "Done," nobody takes up theoffer. In all these and other such cases, the actwhich we purport to perform, or set out toperform, is not achieved.

But there is another and a rather differentway in which this kind of utterance may gowrong. A good many of these verbal proce-dures are designed for use by people who holdcertain beliefs or have certain feelings orintentions. And if you use one of theseformulae when you do not have the requisitethoughts or feelings or intentions then there isan abuse of the procedure, there is insincerity.Take, for example, the expression, "I con-gratulate you." This is designed for use bypeople who are glad that the person addressedhas achieved a certain feat, believe that he waspersonally responsible for the success, and soon. If I say "I congratulate you" when I'm notpleased or when I don't believe that the creditwas yours, then there is insincerity. Likewiseif I say I promise to do something, withouthaving the least intention of doing it orwithout believing it feasible. In these casesthere is something wrong certainly, but it isnot like a misfire. We should not say that Ididn't in fact promise, but rather that I didpromise but promised insincerely; I did con-graLulate you but the congratulations werehollow. And there may be an infelicity of asomewhat similar kind when the performativeutterance commits the speaker to future con-duct of a certain description and then in the

future he does not in fact behave in theexpected way. This is very obvious, of course,if I promise to do something and then breakmy promise, but there are many kinds ofcommitment of a rather less tangible formthan that in the 'case of promising. Forinstance, I may say "I welcome you," biddingyou welcome to my home or wherever it maybe, but then I proceed to treat you as thoughyou were exceedingly unwelcome. In this casethe procedure of saying "I welcome you" hasbeen abused in a way rather different fromthat of simple insincerity.

Now we might ask whether this list ofinfelicities is complete, whether the kinds ofinfelicity are mutually exclusive, and so forth.Well, it is not complete, and they are notmutually exclusive; they never are. Supposethat you are just about to name the ship, youhave been appointed to name it, and you arejust about to bang the bottle against the stem;but at that very moment some low type comesup, snatches the bottle out of your hand,breaks it on the stem, shouts out "I name thisship the Generalissimo Stalin," and then forgood measure kicks away the chocks. Well,we agree of course on several things. Weagree that the ship certainly isn't now namedthe Generalissimo Stalin, and we agree thatit's an infernal shame and so on and so forth.But we may not agree as to how we shouldclassify the particular infelicity in this case.We might say that here is a case of a perfectlylegitimate and agreed procedure which, how-ever, has been invoked in the wrong circum-stances, namely by the wrong person, this lowtype instead of the person appointed to do it.But on the other hand we might look at itdifferently and say that this is a case where theprocedure has not as a whole been gonethrough correctly, because part of the proce-dure for naming a ship is that you should firstof all get yourself appointed as the person todo the naming and that's what this fellow didnot do. Thus the way we should classifyinfelicities in different cases will be perhapsrather a difficult matter, and may even in thelast resort be a bit arbitrary. But of courselawyers, who have to deal very much with thiskind of thing, have invented all kinds of


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THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGEtechnical terms and have made numerousrules about different kinds of cases, whichenable them to classify fairly rapidly what inparticular is wrong in any given case.As for whether this l ist is complete, i tcertainly is not. One further way in whichthings may go wrong is, for exam ple, throughwhat in general may be called misunderstand-ing. You may not hear what I say, or you mayunderstand m e to refer to something differentfrom what I in tended to refer to , and so on.And apart from further additions which wemight make to the l ist , there is the generaloverriding consideration that , as we are per-forming an act when we issue these per-formative utterances, we may of course bedoing so under duress o r in some o thercircumstances which make us not entirelyresponsible for doing what we ar e doing. Th atwould certainly be an unhap piness of a kind-any kind of nonresponsibility might be calledan unhappiness; but of course it is a quitedifferent kind of thing from w hat we have beentalking abo ut . A nd I might mention tha t , quite

\differently again, we could be issuing any ofthese uttera nces, a s we can issue an utteran ceof any kind whatsoever, in the course, forexam ple, of acting a play o r making a joke orwriting a poem-in which case of cou rse itwould not be seriously m eant and w e shall notbe able to say tha t we seriously perf orm ed theact conc erned . If the poet says "Go and catch afall ing star" o r whatev er i t may b e, he doesn' tseriously issue a n ord er . Consid erations of thiskind apply to any utteran ce a t al l, not m erely toperformatives.

Th at , the n, 'is perhaps enough to be goingon with. We have discussed the performativeutterance and i ts infelicit ies. That equips us,we may supp oJe , with two shining new tools tocrack the crib of reali ty ma ybe. It also equipsus-it always does-w ith tw o shinin g newskids under our metaphysical feet . Th e ques-tion is how we use them.

So far we have be en going firmly ahe ad , feelingthe firm ground of prejudice glide away be-neath o ur fee t which is always rather exhilarat-

ing, but what next? Y ou will be waiting for th ebit when we bog dow n, the bit where we tak e i tall back, and su re enough that 's going to com ebut it will take time. First of all let us ask arather s imple quest ion. H ow ca n we be suye,how can we tell , wh ether any utterance is to beclassed as a performative or not? Surely, wefeel , we ought to be able to do that . And weshould obviously very much like to be able tosay that there is a grammatical cri terion forthis, some grammatical means of decidingwhether an utterance is performative. All theexamples I have given hitherto d o in fact havethe same grammatical form; they all of thembegin with th e ve rb in the first person singularpre sen t indicative active-not just an y kind ofverb of course, but still they all are in fact ofthat form. Furth erm ore, with these verbs that Ihave used th ere is a typical asymm etry betweenthe use of this person an d tense of the v erb andthe use of the sam e verb in other persons andother tenses, and this asymmetry is rather animportant clue.For example, when we say "I promisethat . . . ," the case is very different fromwhen we say "He promises that . . . ," or inthe past tense "I promised that . . . ." F o rwhen we say "I promise that . . ." w e d oper form an act of promising-we give apromise. What we do nor do is to report onsomebody's performing an act of promising-in part icular, we do n ot report on somebody'suse of the expre ssion "I promise." W e actuallydo use i t and d o the promising. Bu t if I sa y"He promises ," or in the past tense "Ipromised," I precisely do report on an act ofpromising, that is to say an act of using thisformula "I promisen-I report on a prese ntact of prom ising by hi m , or on a pa st act of myown. There is thus a clear difference betweenour first person singular present indicativeactive, and other persons and tenses. This isbrought out by the typical incident of littleWillie whose uncle says he'll give him half-a-crown if he promises never to smoke till he's55 . Little Willie's anxiou s paren t will say "Ofcourse he promises, don ' t you, Willie?" givinghim a nudge, and little Willie just doesn'tvouchsafe. The point here is that he must dothe promising himself by saying "I promise,"


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SPEECH ACTSand his parent is going too fast in saying hepromises.

That, then, is a bit of a test for whether anutterance is performative or not , but it youldnot do to suppose that every performativeutterance has to take this standard form. Thereis at least one other standard form, every bit ascommon as this one, where the verb is in thepassive voice and in the second or third person,not in the first. The sort of case I mean is that ofa notice inscribed "Passengers are warned tocross the line by the bridge only," or of adocument reading "You are hereby autho-rized" to do so-and-so. These are undoubtedlyperformative, and in fact a signature is oftenrequired in order to show who it is that is doingthe act of warning, or authorizing, or whateverit may be. Very typical of this kind ofperformative-especially liable to occur inwritten documents of course-is that the littleword 'hereby' either actually occurs or mightnaturally be inserted.

Unfortunately, however, we still can't possi-bly suggest that every utterance which is to beclassed as a performative has to take one oranother of these two, as we might call them,standard forms. After all it would be a verytypical performative utterance to say "I orderyou to shut the door." This satisfies all thecriteria. It is performing the act of orderingyou to shut the door , and it is not true or false.But in the appropriate circumstances surelywe could perform exactly the same act bysimply saying "Shut the door," in the impera-tive. Or again, suppose that somebody stickslip a notice "This bull is dangerous," or simply"Dangerous bull," or simply "Bull." Does thisnecessarily differ from sticking up a notice,appropriately signed, saying "You are herebywarned that this bull is dangerous"? It seemsthat the simple notice "Bull" can do just thesame job as the more elaborate formula. Ofcourse the difference is that if we just stick up"Bull" it would not be quite clear that it is awarning; it might be there just for interest orinformation, like "Wallaby" on the cage at thezoo, or "Ancient Monument." No doubt weshould know from the nature of the case that itwas a warning, but it would not be explicit.

Well, in view of this breakdown of gram-

matical criteria, what we should like tosuppose-and there is a good deal in this-isthat any utterance which is performative couldbe reduced or expanded or analysed into oneof these two standard forms beginning "I . . . "so and so or beginning "You (or he)hereby . . . " so and so. If there was anyjustification for this hope, as to some extentthere is, then we might hope to make a list ofall the verbs which can appear in thesestandard forms, and then we might classify thekinds of acts that can be performed byperformative utterances. We might do thiswith the aid of a dictionary, using such a testas that already mentioned-whether there isthe characteristic asymmetry between the firstperson singular present indicative active andthe other persons and tenses-in order todecide whether a verb is to go into our list ornot. Now if we make such a list of verbs we doin fact find that they fall into certain fairlywell-marked classes. There is the class of caseswhere we deliver verdicts and make estimatesand appraisals of various kinds. There is theclass where we give undertakings, commitourselves in various ways by saying some-thing. There is the class where by sayingsomething we exercise various rights andpowers, such as appointing and voting and soon. And there are one or two other fairly well-marked classes.

Suppose this task accomplished. Then wecould call these verbs in our list explicitperformative verbs, and any utterance thatwas reduced to one or the other of ourstandard forms we could call an explicitperformative utterance. "I order you to shutthe door" would be an explicit performativeutterance, whereas "Shut the door" wouldnot-that is simply a 'primary' performativeutterance or whatever we like to call it. Inusing the imperative we may be ordering youto shut the door;but it just isn't made clearwhether we are ordering you or entreating youor imploring you or beseeching you or incitingyou or tempting you, or one or another ofmany other subtly different acts which, in anunsophisticated primitive language, are verylikely not yet discriminated. But we need notoverestimate the unsophistication of primitive


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THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGElanguages. There are a great many devicesthat can be used for making clear, even at theprimitive level, what act it is we are perform-ing when we say something-the tone ofvoice, cadence, gesture-and above all wecan rely upon the nature of the circumstances,the context in which the utterance is issued.This very often makes it quite unmistakablewhether it is an order that is being given orwhether, say, I am simply urging you orentreating you. We may, for instance, saysomething like this: "Coming from him I wasbound to take it as an order." Still, in spite ofall these devices, there is an unfortunateamount of ambiguity and lack of discrimina-tion in default of our explicit performativeverbs. If I say something like "I shall bethere," it may not be certain whether it is apromise, or an expression of intention, orperhaps even a forecast of my future behavior,of what is going to happen to me; and it maymatter a good deal, at least in developedsocieties, precisely which of these things it is.And that is why the explicit performative verbis evolved-to make clear exactly which it is,how far it commits me and in what way, and soforth.This is just one way in which languagedevelops in tune with the society of which it isthe language. The social habits of the societymay considerably affect the question of whichperformative verbs are evolved and which,sometimes for rather irrelevant reasons, arenot. For example, if I say "You are apoltroon," it might be that I am censuring youor it might be that I am insulting you. Nowsince apparently society approves of csnsuringor reprimanding, we have here evolved aformula "I reprimand you," or "I censureyou," which enables us expeditiously to getthis desirable business over. But on the otherhand, since apparently we don't approve ofinsulting, we have not evolved a simpleformula "I insult you," which might have donejust as well.

By means of these explicit performativeverbs and some other devices, then, we makeexplicit what precise act it is that we areperforming when we issue our utterance. Buthere I would like to put in a word of warning.

We must distinguish between the function ofmaking explicit what act it is we are perform-ing, and the quite different matter of stating

1 what act it is we are performing. In issuing anexplicit performative utterancq we are not -stating what act it is, we are showing ormaking explicit what act it is. We can draw ahelpful parallel here with another case inwhich the act, the conventional act that weperform, is not a speech act but a physicalperformance. Suppose I appear before youone day and bow deeply from the waist. Well,this is ambiguous. I may be simply observingthe local flora, tying my shoelace, somethingof that kind; on the other hand, conceivably Imight be doing obeisance to you. Well, toclear up this ambiguity we have some devicesuch as raising the hat, saying "Salaam," orsomething of that kind, to make it quite plain ' )that the act being performed is the conven-tional one of doing obeisance rather thansome other act. Now nobody would want tosay that lifting your hat was stating that youwere performing an act of obeisance; itcertainly is not, but it does make it quite plainthat you are. And so in the same way to say "Iwarn you that . . ." or "I order you to . . ." or"I promise that . . ." is not to state that youare doing something, but makes it plain thatyou are-it does constitute your verbal perfor-mance, a performance of a particular kind.

So far we have been going along as thoughthere was a quite clear difference between ourperformative utterances and what we havecontrasted them with, statements or reports ordescriptions. But now we begin to find that thisdistinction is not as clear as it might be. It's nowthat we begin to sink in a little. In the firstplace, of course, we may feel doubts as to howwidely our performatives extend. If we thinkup some odd kinds of expression we use in oddcases, we might very well wonder whether ornot they satisfy our rather vague criteria forbeing performative utterances. Suppose, forexample, somebody says "Hurrah." Well, nottrue or false; he is performing the act ofcheering. Does that make it a performativeutterance in our sense or not? Or suppose hesays "Damn"; he is performing the act ofswearing, and it is not true or false. Does that


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SPEECH ACTSmake it performative? We feel that in a way itdoes and yet it's rather different. Again,consider cases of 'suiting the action to thewords'; these too may make us wonderwhether perhaps the utterance should beclassed-as performative. Or sometimes, if

~ o m e b d d y ays "I am sorry," we wonderwhether this is just the same as "I apologize"--in which case of course we have said it's aperformative utterance-or whether perhapsit's to be taken as a description, true or false, ofthe state of his feelings. If he had said "I feelperfectly awful about it," then we should thinkit must be meant to be a description of the stateof his feelings. If he had said "I apologize," weshould feel this was clearly a performativeutterance, going through the ritual of apologiz-ing. But if he says "I am sorry" there is anunfortunate hovering between the two. Thisphenomenon is quite common. We often findcases in which there is an obvious pure per-formative utterance and obvious other utter-ances connected with it which are not per-formative but descriptive, but on the otherhand a good many in between where we're notquite sure which they are. O n some occasionsof course they are obviously used the one way,on some occasions the other way, but on someoccasions they seem positively to revel inambiguity.

Again, consider the case of the umpirewhen he says "Out" or "Over," or the jury'sutterance when they say that they find theprisoner guilty. Of course, we say, these arecases of giving verdicts, performing the act of. ppraising and so forth, but still in a way they'have some connection with the facts. Theyseem to have something like the duty to betrue or false, and seem not to be so veryremote from statements. If the umpire says"Over," this surely has at least something todo with six balls in fact having been deliveredrather than seven, and so on. In fact in generalwe may remind ourselves that "I statethat . . ." does not look so very different fro&"I warn you that . . ." or "I promise to . . . ."It makes clear surely that the act that we areperforming is an act of stating, and so func-tions just like 'I warn' or 'I order'. isn't "Istate that . . ." a performative utterance? But

then one may feel that utterances beginning "Istate that . . ." do have to be true or false,that they are statements.

Considerations of this sort, then, may wellmake us feel pretty unhappy. If we look backfor a moment at our contrast between state-ments and performative utterances, we realizethat we were taking statements very much ontrust from, as we said, the traditional treat-ment. Statements, we had it, were to be true orfalse; performative utterances on the otherhand were to be felicitous or infelicitous. Theywere the doing of something, whereas for allwe said making statements was not doingsomething. Now this contrast surely, if we lookback at it, is unsatisfactory. Of course state-ments are liable to be assessed in this matter oftheir correspondence or failure to correspondwith the facts, that is, being true or false. Butthey are also liable to infelicity every bit asmuch as are performative utterances. In factsome troubles that have arisen in the study ofstatements recently can be shown to be simplytroubles of infelicity. For example, it has beenpointed out that there is something very oddabout saying something like this: "The cat is onthe mat but I don't believe it is." Now this is anoutrageous thing to say, but it is not self-contradictory. There is no reason why the catshouldn't be on the mat without my believingthat it is. So how are we to classify what's wrongwith this peculiar statement? If we remembernow the doctrine of infelicity we shall see thatthe person who makes this remark about thecat is in much the same position as somebodywho says something like this: "I promise that Ishall be there, but I haven't the least intentionof being there." Once again you can of courseperfectly we'll promise to be there withouthaving the least intention of being there, butthere is something outrageous about saying it,about actually avowing the insincerity of thepromise you give. In the same way there isinsincerity in the case of the person who says"The cat is on the mat but I don't believe it is,"and he is actually avowing that insincerity-which makes a peculiar kind of nonsense.A second case that has come to light is the

one about John's children-the case wheresomebody is supposed to say "All John's


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, 128' 1 'children are bald but John hasn't got any

children." Or perhaps somebody gays "AllJohn's children are bald," whenas a matter offact-he doesn't say so-Jbhn has no chil-dren. Now those who study statements haveworried about this; ought they to say that thestatement "All John's children are bald" ismeaningless in this case? Well, if it is, it is nota bit like a great many other more standardkinds' of meaninglessness; and we see, if welook back at our list of infelicities, that what isgoing wrong here is much the same as whatgoes wrong in, say, the case of a contract forthe sale of a piece of land when the piece ofland referred to does not exist. Now what wesay in the case of this sale of land, which ofcourse would be effected by a performativeutterance, is that the sale is void-void forlack of reference or ambiguity of reference;and so we can see that the statement about allJohn's~children s likewise void for lack ofr dreference. And if the man actually says thatJohn has no children in the same breath assaying they're all bald, he is making the samekind of outrageous utterance as the man whosays "The cat is on the mat and I don't believeit is," or the man who says "I promise to but Idon't intend to."

In this way, then, ills that have been foundto afflict statements can be precisely paral-leled with ills that are characteristic of per-formative utterances. And after all when westate something or describe something orreport something, we do perform an act whichis every bit as much an act as an act ofordering or warning. There seems no goodreason why stating should be given a speciallyunique position. Of course philosophers havebeen wont to talk as though you or I oranybody could just go round stating anythingabout anything and that would be perfectly inorder, only there's just a little question: is ittrue or false? But besides the little question, isit true or false, there is surely the question: isit in order? Can you go round just makingstatements about anything? Suppose for exam-ple you say to me "I'm feeling pretty moldythis morning." Well, I say to you "You'renot"; and you say "What the devil do youmean, I'm not?" I say "Oh nothing-I'm just

THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGEstating you're not, is it true or false?" And yousay "Wait a bit about whether it's true or false,the question is what did you mean by makingstatements about soqebody else's feelings? Itold you I'm feeling pretty moldy. You're justnot in a position to say, to state that I'm not."This brings out that you can't just makestatements about other people's feelings(though you can make guesses if you like);and there are very many things which, havingno knowledge of, not being in a position topronounce about, you just can't state. Whatwe need to do for the case of stating, and bythe same token describing and reporting, is t otake them a bit off their pedestal, to realizethat they are speech acts no less than all these1other speech acts that we have been mentior;-'ing and talking about as performative.

Then let us look for a moment at ouroriginal contrast between the performativeand the statement from the other side. Inhandling performatives we have been puttingit all the time as though the only thing that a ,performative utterance had to do was to befelicitous, to come off, not to be a misfire, notto be an abuse. Yes, but that's not the end ofthe matter. At least in the case of manyutterances which, on what we have said, weshould have to class as performative-caseswhere we say "I warn you to . . . ," "I adviseyou to . . ." and so on-there will be otherquestions besides simply: was it in order, wasit all right, as a piece of advice or a warning,did it come off? After that surely there will bethe question: was it good or sound advice?Was it a justified warning? Or in the case, letus say, of a verdict or an estimate: was it agood estimate, or a sound verdict? And theseare questions that can only be decided byconsidering how the content of the verdict orestimate is related in some way to fact, or toevidence available about the facts. This is tosay that we do require to assess at least a greatLmany performative utterances in a generaldimension of correspondence with fact. It maystill be said, of course, that this does not makethem very like statements because still theyare not true or false, and that's a little black /and white speciality that distinguishes state-ments as a class apart. But actually-though it


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SPEECH ACTS 129would take too long to go on about this-themore you think about truth and falsity themore you find that very few statements thatwe ever utter are just true or just false.Usually there is the question are they fair orare they not fair, are they adequate or notadequate, are they exaggerated or not exagger-ated? Are they too rough, or are they per-fectly precise, accurate, and so on? 'True' and'false' are just general labels for a wholedimension of different appraisals which havesomething or other to do with the relationbetw'een what we say and the facts. If, then,we hosen up our ideas of truth and falsity weshall see that statements, when assessed inrelation to the facts, are not so very differentafter all from pieces of advice, warnings,verdicts, and so on.

We see then that stating something is per-forming an act just as much as is giving an orderor giving a warning; and we see, on the otherhand, that, when we give an order or a warningor a piece of advice, there is a question abouthow this is related to fact which is not perhgpsso very different from the kind of question thatarises when we discuss how a statement is .related to fact. Well, this seems to mean that inits original form our distinction between theperformative and the statement is considerablyweakened, and indeed breaks down. I will justmake a suggestion as to how to handle thismatter. We need to go very much farther back,to consider all the ways and senses in whichsaying anything at all is-doing this or that-because of course it is always doing a goodmany different things. And one thing thatemerges when we do do this is that , besides thequestion that has been very much studied in thepast as to what a certain utterance means, there

is a further question distinct from this as towhat was the force, as we may call it, of theutterance. We may be quite clear what "Shutthe door" means, but not yet at all clear on thefurther point as to whether as uttered at acertain time it was an order, an entreaty, orwhatnot. What we need besides the old doc-trine about meanings is a new doctrine aboutall the possible forces of utterances, towardsthe discovery of which our proposed list ofexplicit performative verbs would be a verygreat help; and then, going on from there, aninvestigation of the various terms of appraisalthat we use in discussing speech-acts of this,that, or the other precise kind-orders, warn-ings, and the like.

The notions that we have considered then,are the performative, the infelicity, the ex-plicit performative, and lastly, rather hur-riedly, the notion of the forces of utterances. Idare say that all this seems a little unremunera-tive, a little complicated. Well, I suppose insome ways it is unremunerative, and I supposeit ought to be remunerative. At least, though,I think that if we pay attention to thesematters we can clear up some mistakes inphilosophy; and after all philosophy is used asa scapegoat, it parades mistakes which arereally the mistakes of everybody. We mighteven clear up some mistakes in grammar,which perhaps is a little more respectable.

And is it complicated? Well, it is compli-cated a bit; but life and truth and things do tendto be complicated. It's not things, it's philoso-phers that are simple. You will have heard itsaitl, I expect, that oversimplification is theoccupational disease of philosophers, and in away one might agree with that. But for asneaking suspicion that it's their occupation.

austin john langshaw - per formative utterances

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