A performative is never true or false. That doesn’t mean anything goes. In Lecture II, Austin lays out six rules that decide whether a performative succeeds or fails — known collectively as the “felicity conditions.” The overview article only noted that these exist; the care behind the theory shows up in the wording itself.
The six rules, in Austin’s own words
Austin sets the conditions out carefully, numbered one by one. First come the four called A and B.
(A. 1) There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances, and further, (A. 2) the particular persons and circumstances in a given case must be appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked. (B. 1) The procedure must be executed by all participants both correctly and (B. 2) completely.
(Japanese and English renderings of quotations throughout are ToL’s own.) Take a wedding: A.1 is that the conventional procedure of marriage exists at all; A.2 is that whoever performs the ceremony — a minister, a registrar — actually has the standing to do so; B.1 and B.2 are that the vows are spoken correctly and all the way through. These four conditions, taken together, govern the form of the act — everything on the list so far is something an outside observer could check: the procedure, the people, the circumstances, the execution.
The remaining two, the Γ rules, govern something else entirely — the speaker’s inner state. When a procedure is designed to call for certain thoughts, feelings, or later conduct from its participants, those participants must actually have those thoughts and intend to act accordingly (Γ.1), and must actually go on to act that way afterward (Γ.2). Promising, thanking, apologizing — all of these carry this extra pair of conditions.
“Misfire” and “abuse” are not the same kind of violation
Among these six, breaking an A or B rule has a very different result from breaking a Γ rule, as Austin is careful to point out. Break an A or B rule, and the act itself never comes off — a mock wedding is no marriage, a naming by someone with no standing is no name at all. Austin calls this a “misfire”: the act is void, it doesn’t take. Break a Γ rule, and the act does come off, but hollow — an “abuse”: the act is “professed” rather than genuine, done but empty. For a “promise” made with no intention whatsoever of keeping it, Austin deliberately leaves the sentence unfinished — “I have promised but….” — and that trailing silence captures the shape of this particular unhappiness better than any definition could.
Even so, the list is not complete
At the start of Lecture III, looking back on this achievement, Austin deliberately pours a little cold water on his own apparatus. Two shiny new keys — misfire and abuse — come, he warns himself, with two new skids underfoot; in philosophy, to be forearmed should also mean being forewarned.
He then candidly admits that these six rules apply to “all ceremonial acts” (not only verbal ones), and that the list itself is not complete — there are other dimensions of “unhappiness” still to be reckoned with, such as a participant simply misunderstanding the words, or a plain mistake. If someone at a wedding mishears the vows, or simply gets the order of the ceremony wrong, none of the six rules quite covers that. Perhaps the real gain of this lecture was not the classification itself, but the new question it made available: not true-or-false, but happy-or-unhappy.
Beyond the felicity conditions
These six rules are not merely a catalogue of ways a performative can fail. As the next article shows, they lead to the observation that for a performative to be happy, a whole cluster of surrounding statements must be true — and that observation, in the end, becomes the very thing that shakes the boundary between performative and constative.