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In Pursuit of Performatives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

L. W. Forguson
L. W. Forguson
Affiliation:
State University of New York at Buffalo
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Extract

It sometimes happens that a philosopher will develop a view on some topic and then later come to reject it. J. L. Austin was perhaps unique in that he not only rejected a philosophical view of which he himself was the author, he patiently developed the view and then showed it to be ultimately unsatisfactory within the compass of the same work. And he did this not once but three times, in material intended for publication. I am thinking, of course, of his notion of performative utterances: the view that there is a class of utterance, the members of which would on standard grammatical grounds be classed as statements, yet whose proper business is not to state anything but to perform some act. For example, to say ‘I promise to be there’ is to promise to be there, and not (or at least not merely) to state that one promises nor even to state that one will be there.

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Type
Articles
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Philosophy , Volume 41 , Issue 158 , October 1966, pp. 341 - 347
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1966

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References

page 341 note 1 See ‘Performative Utterances’, in Austin, 's Philosophical Papers, ed. Urmson, J. O. and Warnock, G. J. (Oxford, 1961), 220–39Google Scholar; How To Do Things With Words, ed. Urmson, J. O. (Oxford, 1962)Google Scholar; and ‘Performative-Constative’, tr. G. J. Warnock from ‘Performatif-Constatif’, in La Philosophie Analytique (Paris, 1962), 271–304Google Scholar, and reprinted in Philosophy and Ordinary Language, ed. Caton, Charles E. (Urbana, 1963), 22–54.Google Scholar

page 341 note 2 Chisholm, Roderick, ‘J. L. Austin's Philosophical Papers’, Mind, LXXIII, No. 289, 1–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 341 note 3 Black, Max, ‘Austin on Performatives’, Philosophy, XXXVIII, No. 145, 217–226.Google Scholar

page 341 note 4 Chisholm, , op. cit., 9.Google Scholar

page 341 note 5 Mentioned briefly in ‘Performative Utterances’, and ‘Performative-Constative’, and carried out in more detail in How To Do Things With Words.

page 342 note 1 ‘Performative Utterances’, op. cit., 228.Google Scholar

page 342 note 2 ‘Performative Utterances’, op. cit., 230.Google Scholar

page 342 note 3 Chisholm, , op. cit., 9.Google Scholar

page 342 note 4 Chisholm, , op. cit., 9.Google Scholar

page 343 note 1 Ibid.

page 345 note 1 Black, , op. cit., 219.Google Scholar

page 345 note 2 Ibid., 220.

page 346 note 1 Black, , op. cit., 221.Google Scholar

page 347 note 1 It should be mentioned that Black does come to this conclusion himself (op. cit., 223), but apparently fails to see both that Austin realised it, and that it was Austin's main reason for abandoning the performative-constative distinction.

page 347 note 2 How To Do Things With Words, 94.Google Scholar

page 347 note 3 I should like to thank Mr G. J. Warnock for helpful criticism of an earlier draft of this paper.