13 February 2008: not new facts stated, but an act performed by a body with standing.
Speech act
An utterance that performs an action rather than describing one.
- Theme
- Logic, language and interpretation
- Tradition
- Analytic
- Term fixed
- 1955
In plain terms
Most philosophy of language assumed sentences describe things, and that the interesting question is whether the description is true.
Austin noticed how much of language does no such thing. I promise. I apologise. You are dismissed. I name this ship. None of these reports anything. Saying them, in the right circumstances, is doing the thing - and asking whether they are true is a category error.
What matters instead is whether they come off. A promise made by someone with no intention of keeping it, a sentence passed by someone who is not a judge, an apology from a person with no standing to give one - each fails, and each fails differently. Austin called the conditions for success felicity conditions, and mapping them turned out to be a large subject.
As a philosopher would put it
Austin's initial distinction between performatives and constatives collapses under his own analysis - stating is itself an act with conditions of felicity - and is replaced by a three-level analysis of every utterance: the locutionary act of saying something with a sense and reference, the illocutionary act performed in saying it, and the perlocutionary effect achieved by saying it.
Felicity conditions specify what has to hold for an illocutionary act to succeed: an accepted conventional procedure, appropriate persons and circumstances, correct and complete execution, and the requisite thoughts and intentions. Failures divide into misfires, where the act does not come off at all, and abuses, where it comes off insincerely.
Searle systematises this into five classes - assertives, directives, commissives, expressives and declarations - and adds constitutive rules. The extension into political philosophy is substantial: Langton's work on illocutionary silencing argues that some speech can deprive other speech of its illocutionary force, so that an utterance is made and the act does not occur.
Where you meet it
On 13 February 2008 the Australian Parliament's first item of business was a motion moved by the Prime Minister. The text was three paragraphs of apology to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples removed from their families under successive government policies.
The wording had been argued over for more than a decade, and the argument was specifically about the word sorry. Previous governments had offered regret and had declined to apologise, on the stated grounds that an apology would carry a legal admission - which is a claim about illocutionary force rather than about content, and an accurate one.
The motion was passed by both houses. What made 13 February an event was not that new facts were stated; the Bringing Them Home report had established them in 1997. It was that a body with standing performed the act, in the correct form, in the appropriate circumstances. Austin's felicity conditions had been the point of contention all along, and everyone involved understood that without needing the vocabulary.
What is actually disputed
How much illocutionary force depends on convention.
Austin ties it to accepted procedures, which explains marriages, verdicts and namings well and ordinary assertions badly - there is no ceremony for stating something. Searle grounds it in constitutive rules and speaker intention, which covers the ordinary cases and weakens the account of the ceremonial ones. Grice's programme reduces more of it to intention recognition, which pulls the whole subject toward pragmatics.
The live extension is about power. If successful illocution requires uptake and appropriate standing, then whether an act comes off depends on the speaker's position - which means the same words can perform an act for one person and misfire for another. Langton's silencing argument uses this; critics reply that it stretches misfire beyond what the machinery supports, and the exchange has been running for over thirty years without resolution.
Commonly confused with
- saying something Every speech act involves saying something. The point is that saying is only one of the things being done.
- speech in the free-speech sense That is a legal and political category about what may be said. This is a technical analysis of what utterances do.
Defined against
- Proposition A speech act is not assessed as true or false but as felicitous or not, which is precisely the contrast Austin was drawing
Philosophers
- Ludwig Wittgenstein Language as a set of activities rather than a system of descriptions
- Judith Butler Performativity extended from utterances to identity
- Jacques Derrida The argument that citation and iterability underlie performative force
- John Dewey Language as instrumental transaction rather than representation
Works
- How to Do Things with Words The founding lectures
- Philosophical Investigations The background against which the category makes sense
- Gender Trouble Performativity, extended and transformed
- Of Grammatology The critique of Austin on citation
- Experience and Nature Language as a form of action
Schools
- Ordinary Language Philosophy Where the category is developed
- Post-Structuralism Where performativity is generalised
- Structuralism The framework it complicates
- Classical Pragmatism Where language had already been treated as action
Related concepts
Meaning 1892 · Language game 1953 · Sign and symbol 1868 · Proposition 1903 · Interpretation 1819
Austin's 1955 lectures are where the category is established; the insight that most utterances are not descriptions is anticipated in Wittgenstein's later work and in Reid, but Austin built the machinery.