As the overview article showed, Austin named the sentences whose utterance simply is an act “performatives” — “I do” is the paradigm case. But the naming itself, and the trouble waiting just past it, deserve a closer look.
1. Why “performative” and not “operative”?
Searching for the right name, Austin first tries out and discards several candidates. “Contractual” (as in “I bet”) and “declaratory” (as in “I declare war”) each capture part of the family, but too narrowly. A legal term coined by jurists — “operative,” used strictly for the clauses of a document that actually effect a transaction (the rest merely “recites” the circumstances) — comes closest, a point Austin credits to the legal philosopher H. L. A. Hart. But “operative” carries other baggage in ordinary use, tending to mean little more than “important.” So Austin settles on a new word — its etymology not irrelevant, but free of that preconceived baggage — “performative.”
2. Can saying make it so? — the same act can be done without a single word
Under the heading “Can saying make it so?”, Austin raises the most natural objection to his own claim: say “to marry is to say a few words” or “betting is simply saying something,” and the doctrine sounds odd, even flippant, at first. Why does it sound odd? Because the very same kind of act can sometimes be performed without words at all.
I may in some places effect marriage by cohabiting, or I may bet with a totalisator machine by putting a coin in a slot.
(Japanese and English renderings of quotations throughout are ToL’s own.) So Austin refines the claim. Uttering words is, for most performatives, the leading — often the only visible — incident in performing the act, but it is never the sole thing necessary. What is generally required is that the circumstances in which the words are spoken be appropriate, and that the speaker (or others involved) also carry out the right “physical” or “mental” acts alongside them. Naming a ship requires that the speaker actually be the person appointed to name her; a Christian marriage requires that the speaker not already have a living, sane, undivorced spouse — Austin offers both as concrete examples of what “appropriate standing and circumstances” actually means.
So “saying makes it so” doesn’t mean words alone are enough — it means that under the right circumstances, with the right standing and the right procedure, uttering the words counts as performing the act itself. What that “rightness” consists of, in detail, is the felicity conditions — the subject of the next article in this feature.
3. Grammar and vocabulary alone can’t draw the line
Can a performative be picked out by grammatical features alone? Austin pursues this possibility doggedly, and in the end concedes defeat.
We may get the performative without the operative words thus: In place of ‘dangerous corner’ we may have ‘corner’ … We may get the operative word without the utterance being performative, thus: In cricket a spectator may say ‘it was over (really)’.
Any simple grammatical rule — “every sentence with an imperative verb is performative,” say — runs into counterexamples. No single, simple criterion draws the boundary between performative and constative. That, for now, is the conclusion — and, as it turns out, this very impasse is what sets up the next move: a shift to a broader general theory.
4. The performative quietly demands some things be true
Even as the grammatical search stalls, Austin notices an unexpected link between performatives and truth. If a performative like “I apologize” is happy, he argues, at least four things must be true: (1) that the statement that I am actually apologizing is itself true; (2) that the statement that the A-type conditions hold is true; (3) that the statement that the Γ-type conditions hold is true; and (4) for at least some kinds of performative, such as a promise, that the statement that I ought (or ought not) subsequently to do some particular thing is true.
A performative itself is neither true nor false. But its being “happy” turns out to require a whole surrounding cluster of true statements — a sign that the world of constatives (truth and falsity) and the world of performatives (happiness and unhappiness) are more deeply entangled than they first appeared.
After performative and constative
With the grammatical search stalled, and performatives shown to demand a surrounding cluster of true statements, only one question remains: is the constative itself, too, a disguised performative — one built on the hidden verb “state”? That question is what finally demotes the performative/constative distinction to a special case inside a broader general theory — locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts — covered in a separate article in this feature.