Review: How to Do Things with Words, Second Edition

Title: How to Do Things with Words, Second Edition
Author: J. L. Austin
Editor: J. O. Urmson; Marina Sbasà
Publisher: Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975
ISBN: 0-674-41152-8

It wasn't until I was around 80% through the book that I realized the significance of the title of J. L. Austin's book, How to Do Things with Words. The concepts were clear enough, but some mental block made me interpret the title to mean "to do things with to words", rather than, "to make things happen by using words" or, "using words is to do something." Surely Austin would be pleased with my original misinterpretation. Surely that is how he meant it to be.

Austin takes up the whole book exploring how certain uses of language seem to, by their very utterance, create an act—saying does something. If I say that I promise to do something, it is the actual saying that is the promising. In saying something, I make a promise. The promise exists because of my saying something. Promising is a performative, distinguished from constatives such as "there is a fly in my soup."

To explain his conclusions on performatives, Austin starts with one's original misconceptions regarding this classification and allows us to follow our reasoning, however incorrect, to its conclusion. We follow what was apparently Austin's road to his theory of performatives, Austin apparently believing that the reader will better understand the ending if one understands how one gets there. (He realizes that some will say, "Why not cut the cackle? ... Why not get down to discussing the thing bang off in terms of linguistics and psychology in a straightforward fashion?" 123.)

I'll give the story away: Austin finds that the distinction between performatives and constatives is really an illusion. Every act regarding an utterance can be categorized as:

locutionary act: The meaning of the statement itself (e.g. saying "step back" is to tell someone to step back).
illocutionary act: The contextual function of the act (e.g. by telling someone to step back, you are warning them of a falling object).
perlocutionary act: The results of the act upon the listener (e.g. alerting the listener to the falling object, in the sense that the listener became knowledgeable of the impending danger.

With this framework in place, Austin concludes that every utterance (with a few limited exceptions) is really an act, and that what we originally thought of as a "performative" is simply a verb that makes performing an act explicit. Saying, "There is a fly in my soup," for example, certainly has a locutionary act: I said that there was a fly in my soup. That statement could be one or more of several illocutionary acts: I was complaining of the food, I was berating the waiter, I was describing the soup, or just making a statement, as if I had said, "I state that there is a fly in my soup." The utterance can have a perlocutionary act: by sayinng there was a fly in my soup, I convinced the waiter to bring me another bowl, for instance.

How to Do Things With Words is in essence a locutionary act, claiming that every time we use words we do something. In leading us through lectures describing stages of reaching that conclusion, Austin performs a locutionary act of explaining why he thinks that to be the case. If you agree, the book will have an accompanying perlocutionary act of convincing you that he is right.

Notes

A performative is similar to the legal concept of the "operative" part of a contract—here Austin claims he owes this obvservation to Professor H. L. A. Hart, author of The Philosophy of Law (7).
Austin describes ways in which a performative can be "unhappy," such as the speaker not having the property capacity to perform the act (23). This sounds very much like Hart's version of postivism, in which law is law only by its legitimation only through being enacted within a certain legal framework.
"I advise you to do X" as a performative seems suspect—it's more a description of what one is doing (42). Austin's later description of illocutionary acts and doing away with the performative/constative distinction makes more sense.
Austin shows that the performative of "I call you off-side" in a game can be restated as "You were off-side" said by the official (58). Like Hart, Austin uses games to described language-related philosophy.
Marking the action by the word is the case in which the use a marker itself becomes a performative. "End" signalling the end of a book eventually comes, not just to signal the end, but actually to end the book (65). Austin's description relates to modern computer language syntax: Does the <html> in an HTML file mark the start of an HTML file, bring an HTML document resource into being, or both? Is there a difference between the two?
Even saying "although" my mean the same as "I concede that" (75).
Austin distinguishes among an utterance's phonetic act (the sounds made: thuh kat is on thuh mat), phatic act (the words spoken: "the cat is on the mat"), and rhetic act (the meaning of the words in the sentence: saying that the cat is on the mat) (95). The latter seems to be equivalent to the locutionary act.
By finding virtually all utterances to be acts, Austin recharacterizes some attributes of statements according to the descriptions originally formulated when a performative/constative distinction was considered. Thereby a statement being "truth" or "false" "do[es] not stand for anything simple at all; but only for a general dimension of being a right or proper thing to say as opposed to a wrong thing, in these circumstances, to this audience, for these purposes and with these intentions." Austin shows that true or false is really whether something was the proper thing to say about facts, in light of "your knowledge of the facts and the purposes for which you were speaking. ... This doctrine is quite different from much that the pragmatists have said, to the effect that the true is what works ..." (145).
Austin concludes by listing five categories of performatives, along with examples of each (151):

verdictives

give a verdict, such as by a jury or an umpire (e.g. "grade," "assess," "rule")

exercitives

exercise powers, rights, or influence (e.g. "appoint," "advise," "warn")

commissives

commit one to doing something (e.g. "declare," "promise," "agree")

behabitives

relate to social behavior (e.g. "apologize", "congratulate," "challenge"

expositive

explain how the utterances fit in the context (e.g. "reply", "argue," "illustrate"