J.L. Austin argued that utterances are not merely true or false statements about the world—many utterances perform actions. Saying 'I promise to come' is not describing a promise but performing one; saying 'I do' in a wedding ceremony performs the action of getting married. These performative utterances must be evaluated not for truth but for success or felicity. Austin's insight that language is fundamentally action-oriented reshaped philosophy of language and philosophy of mind.
Distinguish performative utterances ('I name this ship') from constative ones ('Water boils at 100°C') and see why the truth-conditional account fails for performatives. Then study conditions of felicity (sincerity, authority, etc.).
All utterances are either true or performative—Austin later blurred this distinction, treating all utterances as performing acts. Performatives are exempt from truth-evaluation—they can be evaluated for truthfulness of their presuppositions.
From your study of meaning and reference, you know that philosophy of language has traditionally focused on how words and sentences relate to the world — how names refer, how sentences have truth conditions, how meaning is compositionally determined. J.L. Austin's theory of speech acts challenges the assumption underlying this entire approach: that the primary function of language is to describe states of affairs that can be evaluated as true or false. Austin argued that a vast range of utterances do not describe anything at all — they perform actions.
The insight begins with performative utterances. When a judge says "I sentence you to five years," they are not reporting a pre-existing sentence — they are imposing one. When you say "I promise to return your book," you are not describing a mental state of intending — you are creating a commitment that did not exist before you spoke. When an authorized official says "I name this ship the *Queen Mary*," a ship gets a name through the utterance itself. In each case, the saying is the doing. These contrast with constative utterances — "water boils at 100 degrees Celsius," "the cat is on the mat" — which describe states of affairs and can be straightforwardly evaluated as true or false. Performatives cannot be so evaluated: asking whether "I promise to come" is true or false is a category error. The right question is whether it succeeded.
The evaluative framework for performatives is felicity conditions rather than truth conditions. A performative succeeds (is felicitous) when the right conventional procedure exists, the right people are involved, the circumstances are appropriate, and the procedure is executed correctly and completely. A performative fails (is infelicitous) when these conditions are not met. Austin distinguished two kinds of failure: misfires, where the act does not come off at all (a non-judge "sentencing" someone produces no sentence — the utterance is void), and abuses, where the act succeeds but something is wrong with the speaker's sincerity (a promise made with no intention of keeping it is still a promise — you really have committed yourself — but it is an abuse of the performative act). Misfires concern the external conditions; abuses concern the internal ones.
Austin's later work dissolved the clean performative/constative distinction. He recognized that even apparently constative utterances have a performative dimension: to say "the cat is on the mat" is to perform the act of stating — and stating is itself an action with its own felicity conditions (you must be in a position to know, you must not be lying, the context must be appropriate for assertion). This led Austin to replace the binary with a three-part framework applicable to all utterances. The locutionary act is what is said — the proposition expressed. The illocutionary act is what is done in saying it — asserting, promising, warning, commanding, questioning. The perlocutionary act is the effect produced on the audience — convincing, frightening, persuading. Every utterance has all three dimensions, and understanding what a speaker means requires identifying the illocutionary force, not just the propositional content. This framework — subsequently developed by John Searle — became the foundation of speech act theory and transformed how philosophy understands the relationship between language and action.
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