Ep. 186: J.L. Austin on Doing Things with Words (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Our question for episode 186 is something like, what's the relationship between language and the world? And we read J.L. austin's how to Do Things with Words, based on lectures he gave in 1955. For more information, please check out partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer welcoming you all to the podcast, but infelicitously, because you are a horse. In Madison, Wisconsin,

0:24 Seth: this is Seth Paskin, illocutionarily yours, in Austin, Texas, this is

0:29 Wes: Wes Alwan, hereby appearing on the podcast. From Cambridge, Massachusetts, this is Dylan Casey,

0:36 Dylan: essentially asymmetric, in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:39 Mark: So those will be especially bewildering to people.

0:44 Wes: I am the one who actually used a performative in my introduction.

0:48 Dylan: You are.

0:48 Mark: I tried. I welcome you.

0:52 Wes: I apologize.

0:54 Mark: Well, I don't apologize, but I am sorry.

1:00 Wes: Just descriptive.

1:01 Dylan: No one gets why we're laughing.

1:02 Wes: This is the nerdiest of all inside joke situations.

1:07 Mark: J.L. Austin counts as analytic philosophy in the tradition of Frege and Russell and Wittgenstein and those folks. But it's more in the following Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. It's what's called ordinary language philosophy that it's less concerned, like Frege and Russell were, with what's the underlying logical structure of language? What would a perfect language be? It seems like a lot of sentences aren't straightforwardly true or false, like the king of France is bald when there is currently no king of France. And so Russell wanted to use logic to give a schematic examination of that and say why it doesn't seem true or false in the ordinary sense.

And early Wittgenstein followed in that with the idea of language as a picture of reality, where the ideal sentence is just a description of two basic elements of reality, you know, their relationship between each other. But by Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, he had outgrown that idea. And the doctrine was the meaning of a word is its use. It's not that a word has to literally, or every sentence has to literally give a picture of some situation, some state of affairs in the world. It's that we use words in all sorts of ways and they might not have a literal meaning.

And so Austin is following up on that, clarifying that, but it's still very analytic in that he's talking about lots of different tools we use in language and trying to make very fine distinctions between different things we might say and different ways we might say them.

2:34 Wes: So previous philosophers of this ilk were focused on. So, Mark, you mentioned this relationship between language and the world where they're trying to figure out how we can use language to actually refer to things, to objects or the facts, how we pick those things out, what relation that is. And they're thinking primarily of descriptive. What we would call descriptive statements or assertions of fact, like the present king of France is bald or something like that. That's a question of reference. And then the question of meaning is, I think Kripke sort of modifies this view.

But up until Kripke, meaning was the means by which we pick things out, right? So this doctrine of definite descriptions, where if you say enough about something, enough about its properties, you have thereby fixed it, the object or the fact that you're referring to in the world. Part of the innovation of meaning as use is just to get beyond a lot of the paradoxes and problems that arise with that point of view, so that the meaning, you know, as we saw with Wittgenstein, it's not just fixed by an idea or a rule, but it's actually part of a language game and fixed by the way a community uses a word.

With Austin, we're moving beyond these descriptive statements, or what he calls constative statements. He's thinking instead about a whole new form of language use which he calls the performative, which I think before him, I don't know of anyone who is paying attention to that. And the performative is a kind of use of language which, unlike a statement, which is trying to simply say something about the world, to use a performative like apologize or to say I'm sorry. Well, is sorry a good example? I bet, I bet or I promise is the example. So to say I promise is in fact an action.

It is to make a promise. So in a way, I think of this book as about the relation not between language and the world, but between language and action and the sense in which the use of language is an action. It's most obvious in the case of performatives. And we'll get into more detail about why that is. But it'll turn out by the end of the book, the distinction between performatives and constantive statements is not so clear. And this element of action is actually a part of all language, including these descriptive statements that we're more used to from previous analytical philosophy.

4:58 Dylan: I think Wes gave a pretty good overview of how the argument works in Austin. I Don't know that much about the history of it, but it did strike me that this focus on the performative was something that I had not heard about. And given all the philosophy books that I've read, I felt kind of dumb to not have ever asked in class. Well, what about things like when I say I'm sorry for something, aren't I doing something different? It made me wonder why that doesn't come up all the time in a philosophy class, especially when you're talking about things like declarative statements and how it corresponds with the world. Reading this made me feel like, well, there's this whole way in which we interact with the world, particularly in exhibiting our own action, our own essential activity of ourselves, that I hadn't really paid attention to.

5:46 Seth: So I have some vague recollections of being introduced to speech act stuff when I was in school, and I did a fair bit of philosophy of language at one point. But contextually, what I think the historical flow here is, in some sense is we have this sort of tradition and philosophy that propositions are assertions about the facts of the world, and that the content of a proposition, it's true or false, and that's determined by the content of the proposition and its alignment or validation or what have you in the world. The cat is on the mat is true, just in case there's an actual cat on the mat.

Prior to Austin writing this book, you had in the early part of the 20th century, you had Wittgenstein writing the Tractatus. You had the guys who are all about verification, logical positivists, right, that they spawned. And you've got this thing where it says, okay, well, if your proposition doesn't have content or has content that somehow doesn't align to the world, et cetera, can't be validated or verified, then it's nonsense. And so I think what Austin is trying to do here. And Dylan, your response is absolutely apropos and correct. Like, okay, so philosophers haven't been talking about anything but propositions for the last 2000 years, and they don't recognize that there are other ways that language gets used.

That's pretty naive and stupid. But in the context of what I think Austin was trying to accomplish was he was trying to respond to that trend within the quote, unquote analytical tradition and say, I can give you a whole class of. Of statements that aren't assertions and aren't nonsense, and yet they're also not true and false. So he's trying to turn the world on its head. A little bit in that little discipline as he talks about performative acts, he's basically saying performative speech acts are another class of language usage that later on in the book he actually says of, which propositional statements are actually a subset of.

Essentially, he's trying to say these things are valid, they're not nonsense, they're meaningful, and they don't have truth value, but they do have some value in whether or not they're satisfactorily used. And that's really what he's trying to build out in this series of lectures.

8:01 Dylan: In fact, if anything, he sort of implies that the net that he made was bigger and that propositions are a subset in some important way.

8:10 Wes: The way the book builds up is we discover performatives as something distinct from statements of fact or constatives, and then eventually we find out that they're harder to distinguish than we thought and that there's a performative element to all language use.

8:28 Mark: Because the fundamental thing that we should be analyzing in philosophy of language is the speech act. A particular person in a particular situation, given particular conventions, with a particular audience saying something. And it's perfectly legitimate for many purposes to isolate some elements of that speech act. For instance, the factual claim that is involved, if there is one that the person is actually saying. But we have to recognize that that is an abstraction that is appropriate for some purposes. When we're talking about scientists arguing about a scientific theory, we don't care about the fact that they're all scientists and who exactly they're talking to and what their background is and what particular culture they're from within a given realm of discourse.

We just want to know how the different factual claims they're making stack up against each other. But as we've gotten into our philosophy of science discussions, like with Kuhn and things even that I was saying, within a given tradition, within a given set of conversational conventions, within a given set of background beliefs. Like, that's when that kind of analysis purely of the factual matters makes the most sense. But one of the examples like he gives later in the book is, is France hexagonal, which, if you look at a map, it sort of looks like a hexagon.

And is that sentence true or false? Well, it obviously depends why you're saying that, who you're saying it to, what purpose it is that it's being said for. So if you're saying to a general who's talking about how I'm going to run my troops through it, then, well, yeah, it roughly, it works but if it's a cartographer, somebody actually making a map, then no, it's obviously not a hexagon when you zoom in far enough. And we've talked about that from the point of view of pragmatism. You know, it depends why you want to know. But Austin wants to distinguish himself sharply from pragmatism, though he does not give us any clue really why that is.

10:27 Dylan: He sort of has an offhand comment at the end, which we should talk about.

10:31 Wes: So the speech act stuff we get at. Yeah, that's the very end. That's the climax of the book, where we start describing these speech act elements of any statement. But when I first read the stuff about the performative, it actually took me a little while to get it.

10:46 Dylan: Yeah.

10:47 Wes: And so I think listeners will probably still not know exactly what we're talking about. So we should back up and do that carefully.

10:54 Dylan: We should work through what exactly is a performative and that tree of distinctions that he makes on them.

11:00 Mark: Right, so this is 12 lectures given in 1955 to Harvard.

11:05 Dylan: The William James Lectures.

11:06 Mark: Yes. The book came out in 1962, and it appears to be just his lecture notes, supplemented in some places by the notes of a couple people that attended the lectures. But it's not that he even took this and wrote a book.

11:21 Dylan: Exactly. Which is his most famous work, apparently. Right, yeah.

11:27 Wes: He didn't publish very much at all. And apparently I read that it was considered sort of vulgar to publish it.

11:33 Mark: I see. He died in 1960. So he died before this came out.

11:36 Wes: Yes. Most of his stuff was published posthumously.

11:39 Dylan: He thought it was vulgar to publish. So he considered himself a teacher mainly or.

11:43 Wes: Well, let me give you the. According to Searle, this is from the Internet Encyclopedia article on Austin. According to Searle, Austin's reluctance to publish was partly characteristic of his own attitude, but also it was part of the culture of Oxford at the time. Quote, Oxford had a long tradition of not publishing during one's lifetime. Indeed, it was regarded as slightly vulgar to publish. I thought that was amusing and amazing at the same time.

12:08 Mark: Perish, then publish.

12:10 Wes: That's right. That's my plan. Mark, were you saying that this is really essentially written by someone else, or they're just taking this down verbatim?

12:23 Mark: No, no, this is mostly verbatim. The notes in the back of the book points out every single place where marginal addition by paragraph beginning the explicit blah, blah, blah, and why they added that. So it's two editors putting this together.

12:38 Wes: It has the air of something being very polished and extremely clear. And exhaustive and. Yeah.

12:44 Seth: And linear.

12:46 Dylan: Yeah. For analytical philosophy. It actually maybe partly because he gave him as lectures, it's readable even if you have to pay a lot of attention to it. And I was very appreciative of the fact that at the beginning of every lecture he recapitulates where he's been.

13:00 Seth: Exactly.

13:01 Dylan: There's a mini couple paragraph, incredibly clear statement of what he was trying to do in the previous lectures, sort of accreting throughout all 12.

13:12 Wes: So as far as the performative goes, we first get that in his section called Preliminary isolation of the Performative on page five, he describes the performative as something that it does not describe or report or constate. He likes this word constative and constate, anything true or false. And then the second criterion is that by uttering the sentence, you are performing the action, or at least part of the action.

13:42 Dylan: Well, which importantly says would not normally be described as just saying something. So if I say the cat is on the mat, that could be considered just saying something. But if you say, I bet you $25 that Eagle river is going to beat Jonestown in the race today, that's more than just saying something.

14:01 Wes: So that's an element of the speech act.

14:03 Dylan: Yeah, well, there's an action that I'm implying there that he would say. I'm not merely describing something in that utterance. I am acting in a distinct way from when I say the cat is on the mat.

14:19 Seth: Right. Well, you're not describing the state of affairs, you're making a prediction. But you're also saying, I'll bet you. Which is the act itself. Right?

14:29 Dylan: Yes, exactly.

14:30 Wes: Yeah. So the bet comes about by way. It's really important to emphasize this. The bed actually comes about by way of those words. Now, there are lots of other circumstances that'll turn out that have to be met too. So I have to say, yes, Dylan, I'll take you on. For it to become a bet, and there have to be. There actually has to be a. I forget what you were referring to. But the underlying premise of the bed actually has to exist and be happening and all kinds of other requirements which we'll get into. But to say, I bet it's not simply. And as he'll say later, it's not simply to report on an inner state that this is my intention to create a bet with you, and now I am reporting on that.

It is actually to do something in the sense of. To forge the actual agreement. Saying in this sense is doing. And so the other examples he Uses are things like saying, I do when you're getting married, or I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth when smashing a bottle against the stem, and again, other circumstances given.

15:29 Mark: Can I just tell you a little story? So when I was a young cynical person, one of the ways that I thought I was smarter than everybody else was because was critical of the marriage ceremony, that like, I will love you forever.

I will.

Well, how do you know that? Come on. I mean, people are basically determined by forces beyond their control. So if these are predictions, they are baseless predictions. Well, so that was. Austin is answering me, young me there by saying, no, no, these are not predictions. These are. By making a promise like this, you are actually engaging in an action. It's not really appropriate to say, is it literally true that I will in fact do this? All this stuff, I can still successfully make a promise as long as I intend to do that. As long as I'm saying it in the right circumstance to the person I'm not already married to somebody else. There's all these conventional things that have to be in play.

16:21 Wes: I'm not saying it to a chair.

16:23 Mark: Yes, I cannot welcome a horse.

16:25 Wes: I'm saying it to someone who actually wants to marry me.

16:28 Mark: And

16:30 Dylan: all those qualifications go into whether or not you make a decision about something parallel to the truth value of it, whether it's true or false. But it doesn't keep it from being performative.

16:44 Seth: Right.

16:45 Dylan: All those qualifications are part of his classification of performative utterances and help us understand what they are and their relative success, yada, yada, yada. But I don't think any of those distinctions prevent it from being performative.

16:58 Mark: Right, Right. It could just be an infelicitous performative, as he puts it. So that's not that it's true, it's that it's happy or abusive.

17:06 Dylan: It could be an abusive performative.

17:07 Wes: Before we get to all that, just to hammer home the idea of what the performative is, he says on page six, none of the utterances cited is either true or false. I assert this as obvious and do not argue needs argument. No more than that damn is not true or false. It may be that the utterance serves to inform you, but that is quite different. To name the ship is to say in the appropriate circumstances, the words 'I name', etc. When I say before the register or altar, etc. I do. I am not reporting on a marriage, I am indulging in it. And so in the same vein, when I say, you know, at the beginning of a podcast, I hereby appear on the podcast.

As opposed to just I'm appearing on the podcast. What I was giving was a statement which could have been by itself just descriptive. Here I am, I'm actually on the podcast. But it was performative in the sense that to say hereby says, by showing up and saying this words, I inaugurate my participation in the podcast. And that is an essential part of that participation in my participation doesn't happen without that ceremonial beginning, which makes me

18:20 Mark: think we should get some famous people to say, I hereby appear on the podcast. And then we just insert that and then they've appeared.

18:26 Wes: Exactly. Exactly.

18:28 Mark: There's no other. We couldn't get anybody else to say

18:31 Wes: that saying makes it so.

18:33 Dylan: He comes back to this question about truth value, or what Mark said about how could you possibly know what's gonna happen to you when you say I do? In the ritual of the marriage ceremony, he at the very end of lecture one, talking about promising and the notion of a false promise, and he says, do we not actually, when such an intent is absent, speak of a false promise? Yet, so to speak, is not to say the utterance I promise that is false in the sense that though he states that he does, he doesn't, or that though he describes, he misdescribes, he misreports.

So in making a promise, he does promise. The promise here is not even void, though it is given in bad faith. His utterance is perhaps misleading, probably to deceitful and doubtless wrong, but it is not a lie or a misstatement. At most, we might make out a case for saying that it implies or insinuates a falsehood. But this is a very different matter. We do not speak of a false bet or a false christening. And that we do speak of a false promise need commit us no more to the fact that we speak of a false move. False is not necessarily used in statements only.

19:43 Wes: Yeah, he's responding here to this idea, which I was ready to advocate for before he rebutted it. But this begins on page 10. And the idea is that promising isn't just a matter of uttering words. It's an inward, spiritual act. And when you promise someone, you make a promise to someone. You're just reporting that to them. Because it does sound weird and legalistic to say by saying I promise or saying I do at the altar, for instance, that is in a way the act of marriage. I think that's counterintuitive in some ways. And someone might say, well, no, it's this inner Commitment. And I am just reporting that at the time of marriage.

20:24 Dylan: So in that way, you're saying, I promise is descriptive of an inner state.

20:29 Wes: Right. That's the view that he's trying to rebut and that you just. You read some of the reasons for. And basically what he's going to say, well, if that's true, then no one can make a false promise. Right? You could say, I promise you I'm going to clean up my room tonight. And I didn't really intend it, so my report is false, and therefore I'm not making a promise under this view of the world, which is simply not the case. Right. So I could actually make a promise with ill intent, and it would be infelicitous, ultimately, in this particular way that he talks about.

But it's still a promise. I am still essentially binding myself to something, in a way, in a broad sense, contractual. So what I'm doing, the reason why just letting out a certain utterance can be an action in the sense, is because it actually affects people. Right? So I create certain expectations on the part of another person. If I say I do at a marriage ceremony, there's another person there who expects me to show up and cohabitate, probably expects me to behave as if I am her husband and has all sorts of other expectations that flow from that that I am essentially bound to by uttering those words.

And it's the mere utterance of those words which binds me to all that, because I engaged in this social act where I've created expectations on the part of others.

21:52 Mark: When I got married, I said, I generally do. Is that okay?

21:56 Wes: I generally do for the most part. For the most part,

22:04 Mark: I was just describing.

22:08 Dylan: This is one of the things that I found most interesting about the book. And I can't say that I fully processed it, but it opens up talking about things like sincerity, insincerity, and the notion of both making mistakes and of also lying or purposely misrepresenting it makes talking about all that richer because it helps link it up with this notion of acting and trying to talk about truth value in the world, which ends up later.

22:39 Wes: It's not just that I have misreported my intent to someone. Right. You know, it sounds very close to saying, well, I told you a lie. But breaking a promise is doing more than simply having told someone a lie. Because again, it's an action in the sense that it has all these effects on the world. It precipitates a whole bunch of actions on the part of the other person. Predicated on their idea of your goodwill. And so it can create these actual disastrous consequences in the world. So, yeah, I think, Dylan, I agree, this concentrating on this idea that it is actually an act, I think is really important.

23:15 Dylan: And one thing it made me think a lot about was the presumed promise that a lot of reporting and maybe scientific work includes that. When we talk about one of the reasons why fraud in a scientific paper, or maybe just fraud in general in reporting or whatever is so terrible, is because of the implied promise that when you're reporting on the results of your experiment, that whatever's wrong about that is sincerely made, as opposed to insincerely made, so that maybe your theory's wrong, maybe your experiment, the data is wrong, and somebody else finds that out later.

But that whole process depends upon the sincerity of the individual actors in that even if they're biased, for instance, they need to be sincerely biased right in their activity. But it's when they're insincere, when they're trying to subvert it, that it becomes horrible and we recognize it as wrong. But there's this aspect of it being an implied promise the whole time.

24:22 Seth: So you're bringing out, Dylan, the touch point with pragmatism. I think in some respect here, just want to touch on it. We don't have to delve into it right now. But the idea that he says somewhere something to the effect of utterance can be considered performative if it's undertaken in a certain set of circumstances with a certain set of actors and a certain set of expected outcomes and a certain set of assumptions, right? And in the case of promising or betting, like in the wedding ceremony, you know, you have to have the intention. It has to be the right person.

You can't be saying I do to somebody who's not your wife. You know, there's a bunch of different conditions that have to be satisfied. But what he's kind of pointing out is that. And what you're dressing is the ways in which the act can fail. So if we think about these performatives as actions, right? Like let's say as an analogy, I'm trying to do a jump shot and shoot a basketball through a basketball hoop. So when I launch the ball, if it goes through the net, it's a success. If it doesn't, it's a failure. In the same way a performative. If the goal is to bind in a conventional wedding ceremony by exchanging vows with the person I love and the intentions are there, blah, blah, blah, then it's like the ball goes through the net, it's a success.

But what complicates it, or what's interesting about the vistas that he's opened up here are the different ways in which you can fail to successfully complete the act, and then the ways in which you can successfully complete the act, so to speak, but at the same time, you do it, as you mentioned, insincerely. So you can make the vow, but not actually believe it in your heart. Or you could make the vow, believe it in your heart, but actually be legally married to somebody else at the time. Or you could make the vow, believe it in your heart, not be legally married to anybody else, but be being married by somebody who doesn't have the power, the authority of the state, to join you in a wedding ceremony, for example.

26:30 Wes: Or you could just not follow through.

26:32 Seth: Yeah. Or you can get divorced later or not follow through on those vows, or

26:37 Wes: flee the country directly after the ceremony because you're afraid, even though you were sincere initially.

26:43 Seth: And this is kind of where I'm. I'm asking myself, what's the point? Like, why would philosophers be concerned with this? But essentially, he's trying to outline a philosophy of language. He's taking that approach of trying to create classification. So he comes up with all these terms, and he has this taxonomy of the ways in which these acts can fail. It can be infelicitous, or I don't even remember all the words. He's very jargony, but the idea is, I think he's thinking you can actually create a taxonomy and a classification of these types of acts and all the ways in which they succeed and fail.

And we'll be able to identify all the different vectors against which performative acts are made and be able to judge anyone against that. In the same way that when we talked about logical language and propositions, we can come up with logical conditions that satisfy whether a proposition is true or false. That feels like what is behind this. And then if you look at the history of philosophy of language after Austin, it's decades of essentially trying to do that very thing.

27:50 Wes: And as we've kind of mentioned already where this is headed. Every statement will turn out to have what is called an illocutionary aspect, which is its performative aspect. So this won't be limited ultimately to these particular situations of promises and getting married. There'll be an element of this in every use of language, which is the fascinating, bigger implication that we get to at the end of the book. I think Seth has launched us into lecture number two. We get this mention of infelicities, the way promises can go wrong. Promises, performatives. But I tend to treat promise as sort of the, er, performative. It's the paradigmatic example of the performative. And so on pages 14 and 15, he gives a very neat little outline of all the requirements that have to be meant for a performative, not to be infelicitous.

28:46 Dylan: So really it's a list of infelicities.

28:48 Wes: Yes, yes.

28:50 Mark: But interestingly categorized because he divides the misfires. Right. Where you have, you know, the wrong person, you're trying to marry a horse, or the priest is not a real priest or whatever. You don't. So you can't get married from abuses where you're insincere or you don't follow through. Those are fundamentally different kinds of things.

29:09 Wes: Yeah, they're different. And Seth already got at this in the sense that the abuses. In the case where there's an abuse, the promise or the performative does go through, it happens. So I can make a promise that I didn't intend to keep and still make the promise. But in the cases of. So he has A1, A2, B1 and B2, these conditions, if they have not fulfilled the promise or the performative act, it doesn't even happen. Should I just go through them real quick or.

29:39 Dylan: Yeah, sure, go through. But I want to understand what it doesn't happen means. But I think we should do that after you go through the list.

29:46 Wes: So A1, there must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect. The procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons and certain circumstances. A2. The particular persons and circumstances in a given case must be appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked. So not a table. If I'm getting married or I order you to charge into battle, I must say that to a soldier and I must be an officer. B1 the procedure must be executed by all participants correctly, and B2 executed by all participants completely.

And if none of those things happen, then the performative hasn't occurred. Right. So if I say again, I say I do to a table, then there is no marriage performative in that case. In these last two cases, Gamma 1 and Gamma 2. So Gamma 1, where as often the procedure is designed for use by persons having certain thoughts or feelings or for the inauguration of certain consequential conduct on the part of any participant, then a person participating in and so invoking the procedure must in fact have those thoughts or feelings, and the participants must intend so to conduct themselves and further, Gamma 2 must actually so conduct themselves subsequently.

So Gamma 1 is about intent and sincerity, and Gamma 2 is about follow through. And those two things, even if they're not met, the performative act could still occur by meeting all the conditions A1 through B2. But even if they're subject to these infelicities of being insincere or not having follow through, the performative act has still occurred. So if I say, I bet you that such and such is going to happen and I didn't really mean it and I'm trying to deceive you, well, I still made the bet, or I have no intent to pay or something like that, I still made the bet.

31:35 Dylan: So the question I have is a little bit on how you're characterizing it as happened or not happened. On page 14, he prefaces this doctrine of infelicities by saying what we may hope to discover by looking at and classifying types of cases in which something goes wrong in the act. Marrying, bedding, bequeathing, christening, or whatnot is therefore at least to some extent a failure. The utterance is then, we may say, not indeed false, but in general unhappy, which is a kind of funny word to use, but I take him to be classifying. So, first of all, there's performatives have this aspect of have a parallel categorization to true and false.

The way constitutes do so constatives have this aspect of being true or being false. And there's something parall, but not quite exactly the same. In the case of performatives and the successful ones in general, he calls them happy in some ways, the more interesting thing is going through all the cases in which they end up being unhappy parallel to falseness. And that was the list that Wes just went through, which is page 18

32:44 Mark: of the PDF if people want to look that up online.

32:47 Dylan: Yep. So in the case of, say, of misapplication, Caligula marries a horse. Right. Caligula made a horse a senator. Right. But he maybe also married the horse, who knows? I understood that to be an infelicitous example of performative, but not that the performative didn't happen. There was a way in which it was unsuccessful, it was a failure in some way. It had a parallel to being false, but that didn't keep it from being a performative and that it didn't happen.

33:16 Wes: The falsity happens in the dimension of sincerity. So it. If you look at page 16, he pretty clearly says it doesn't happen in those cases, so that the act in Question. For example, marrying is not successfully performed at all, does not come off, is not achieved. Whereas in the two gamma cases, the act is achieved. Although to achieve it in such circumstances as when we are, say, in seer is an abuse of the procedure.

33:42 Dylan: Okay, so the distinction here is that in all these cases, they're performatives, but now we're going to judge the corresponding, I want to say truth value, but that's not right. The corresponding thing is whether it happened or not. So we would say that he. If I think of myself as a judge and he makes this parallel, a lot of. There's a lot of this act that happens legalistically. So if I say, is he really married? And a judge would say, well, no, he's not married because you can't marry a chair. And that's the way in which it didn't happen. For all the, you know, if you think about trying to make a judgment whether a marriage should be annulled or whether it's void, that's the word that he uses in the table is he says misfires, acts, purported, but void. And I guess that's the way in which he means it didn't happen.

34:30 Wes: Yeah, exactly. There's nothing binding actually happens. And there'll be parallels to all this stuff in constant statements as well. Right. And the parallel will end up being the similar things could go wrong where you don't successfully execute. Right. So you don't get the words out of your mouth, someone doesn't hear you, something like that. If you're just trying to say, hey, it's raining outside. But if I'm insincere, then that saying something false has parallel to these elements of insincerity. But we'll get to all that later.

34:59 Mark: We want to add the example we started off with. The present king of France is bald. His analysis of this is when you start to refer to the present king of France, since there is no present king of France, then your statement is void. It's not true, it's not false, it's just void.

35:14 Wes: And as you remember, the way Russell dealt with that with his theory of definite descriptions is to say, well, it's false. Because we analyze that into there exists such an X that X is the present king of France and X is bald. He wanted to do away with this idea that that statement is this meaningless case. But I think for Austin, it's a speech act that hasn't been actually executed properly.

35:39 Dylan: So it's a category that has meaning, and that meaning is that it's void. In what it was supposed to accomplish.

35:46 Wes: Looks like a statement, but it wasn't pulled off correctly. And so it wasn't just to pull

35:51 Mark: forward some terminology that we'll actually explain later, but it was a successful locution. You actually said something. All those words individually had meaning. They belong to a grammar. Speakers are going to understand what you mean. But the illocution, the actual performative aspect, did not work. It was void.

36:11 Wes: Well, we'll get to that later, because illocution has three parts to it, and I think it fulfills some of those, but not others. But let's wait until we have that under our belt. What he's going to go on to talk about is a little more detail about some of these infelicities. And he's going to ask then how widespread those infelicities are. And it'll turn out that they apply to all ceremonial acts. This is page 24. And then on page 26, we get this idea. Well, they even apply to statements. That's the. They might even apply to statements. That's where we get the present king of France is bald example.

Then he asks the question, how complete is the classification? And notes that actions can be as satisfying as actions. They can be unsatisfactory in a bunch of other ways. And then as utterances, this is 27 to 28, they can be unsatisfactory in the ways that utterances are unsatisfactory. So they could be uttered by an actor on stage, they could be poetry, things like that, which he names just

37:13 Mark: because those are things that he's not

37:15 Wes: going to talk about, which he calls etiolations of language, which I like. He does come back to that a little bit later on. I think the important shift is that around page 51, where he wants to get into this relationship, into the relationship between that. Dylan has already alluded to a few times where certain statements have to be true for performatives to be happy, for them to be felicitous.

37:40 Seth: Yeah, I think in that part of the lecture, he's addressing the question that obviously certain conditions have to obtain as represented in language. You would make statements like, I am sincere about my promise. It is true that we are conventionally and legally able to marry. It is true that I have the intention to live my life with this person, etc. So there's two points to that. The first is performative acts. Do they have reliance on statements or assertions or that have truth value, or essentially, what's the role of truth in the performative act?

But I think he's also addressing a potential criticism that a performative could be reduced to a series of constantives. So you could say, I bet you that team A will beat team B tomorrow is valid if and only if all of these statements are true. And I think he's trying to point out that you can't reduce a performative utterance to just a series of truth conditions based on statements or propositions about all those different vectors that we talked about earlier.

38:56 Wes: I took him as doing something more like, he's leading us into this down the path where true false statements will be assimilated to performatives. But anyway, I read the wrong page number. It starts on page 45. And which lecture are we in?

39:11 Seth: This is lecture four.

39:13 Wes: So page 45, where he's going to ask, so we know that certain statements have to be true in order for the performative to be happy. What are those statements? And then what's the relationship between them and the performative?

39:26 Seth: Right. So the statements have to be true is a way of saying the conditions have to obtain. So the idea would be if the promise is to be happy, then I must actually intend in my heart to fulfill that promise. I intend in my heart to fulfill that promise must be true.

39:48 Wes: It's more than those circumstantial requirements. So right, on page 46, he's going to just list what has to be true.

39:56 Seth: Right? Those four conditions on page 46 are essentially he's saying, I mean, we can read them, right? It is true and not false that I am doing or have done something, but in particular that I'm in this case apologizing. It is true and not false that certain conditions do obtain. It is true and not false that certain other conditions obtain of our kind. Gamma. That particular, that I'm thinking something and it is true and not false that I'm committed to doing something subsequently. The idea, Wes, I guess what I'm trying to say is those truth conditions that he outlines on page 46 have to be able to be represented in propositional content.

So for number four, it's true or not false that I'm committed to doing something subsequently. The way that would be represented would be to say I'm committed to not repeating the behavior for which I'm apologizing today. That statement has to be true. That's how you would represent the statement about that. And what I think he, he says in here is basically, yes, there have to be conditions that obtain which can be represented as true or false propositional statements. But that doesn't Mean that the performative utterance can be reduced to a series of those things.

And at the end of that chapter.

41:12 Wes: Yeah, I think he's said that very. You still think he's doing. Making that argument here?

41:17 Seth: No, I'm saying he's countering that argument.

41:19 Wes: No, I know, but he tells us that at the very beginning. I didn't think he was still on that. On this. We know that they can't be reduced to those things.

41:26 Mark: Well, he is concerned with the relationship between the two kinds of sentences that he's first said that, look, things about infelicity and felicity apply to constitute statements as well. Things about truth and falsity are at least relevant to performatives as well. And so there is a danger here that, well, maybe these are the same thing. So he's. Before he, you know, as we said at the end, he really does want to say that these are just different aspects of the same speech act, that the speech act is the primary unit. But before he gets that, he's going to try like, well, what can we really say?

Certain sentences are for sure performatives, and certain other sentences are for sure constantives. Let's look at a grammatical way like he tries out a couple different ways that he thinks we could make a definite, clear definition that will distinguish one from the other. Since he's introduced this sort of element of doubt by saying, well, truth can apply to performatives, just not in the direct way and vice versa.

42:22 Wes: It's not so much at this point about he's rebutting the idea that performatives can be reducible to constantives. He's trying to tell us the sense in which there are parallels in constatives to performatives. So when we get to all that stuff about entails, presupposes and implies, he's trying to show us the ways in which the relationship between certain true statements and the performative itself are parallel to relationships between a constative and other required statements that must be true to pull off the constative. So, for instance, in the case of entailment, all men blush entails some men blush. That's parallel to the sense in which promising something entails an ought entails my being committed to doing something.

43:10 Seth: I see what you're talking about, Wes. Can I read just the last paragraph of that chapter? In conclusion, we see that in order to explain what can go wrong with statements, we cannot just concentrate on the proposition involved, whatever that is, as has been done traditionally, we must consider the total situation in which the Utterance is issued the total speech act, if we are to see the parallel between statements and performative utterances and how each can go wrong. So the total speech act in the total speech situation is emerging from logic piecemeal as important in special cases. And thus we are assimilating the supposed constative utterance to the performative.

43:49 Mark: And just to look forward, Wes had suggested that we look at the Stanford Encyclopedia article on speech acts. And though Austin describes his program here as, you know, I'm just laying out a program and I'm not really doing it. Well, Searle, his student, really did take this up and has a whole book, maybe multiple books, on what he calls illocutionary logic. You know, you might have thought that logic was just all about entailment, as Wes just read, but it can also be about things within the speech act. So if I'm warning you that the bull is charging, I am also stating that the bull is charging. The first speech act implies the second one, but not the other way. Just because I'm stating that the bull is charging, that doesn't mean anything about whether I'm warning you or what other purposes I might have.

44:33 Wes: In context, it could be a warning, but.

44:35 Mark: Yeah, yes, but. And Searle tries to be very systematic and lay out a whole bunch of rules, you know, parallel to what we have in formal logic for this illocutionary

44:42 Wes: logic at the very end of this chapter. So Seth has read the sense, he wants to establish these parallels between statements and performative utterances. Those parallels are along the dimension of these relations between the speech act and then other true statements. So in the case of implies, for instance, if I say the cat is on the mat when it is not the case that I believe the cat is on the mat because it's implied when I say it that I believe it, that's a case of insincerity. So the infelicity that we thought of primarily as applying to a performative can also apply in this case.

He'll say the insincerity of an assertion is the same as the insincerity of a promise. And I'll do this in the same ways with presupposition and entailment. And the whole point here, he's gradually getting you to see what we initially divided off from performatives. These constantives will be a subset of them, ultimately will be speech acts themselves. I think we can fast forward through lecture five.