How To Do Things With Words by J. L. Austin

Author:J. L. Austin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Barakaldo Books
Published: 2020-06-24T16:00:00+00:00

LECTURE VIII

IN embarking on a programme of finding a list of explicit performative verbs, it seemed that we were going to find it not always easy to distinguish performative utterances from constative, and it therefore seemed expedient to go farther back for a while to fundamentals—to consider from the ground up how many senses there are in which to say something is to do something, or in saying something we do something, and even by saying something we do something. And we began by distinguishing a whole group of senses of ‘doing something’ which are all included together when we say, what is obvious, that to say something is in the full normal sense to do something—which includes the utterance of certain noises, the utterance of certain words in a certain construction, and the utterance of them with a certain ‘meaning’ in the favourite philosophical sense of that word, i.e. with a certain sense and with a certain reference.

The act of ‘saying something’ in this full normal sense I call, i.e. dub, the performance of a locutionary act, and the study of utterances thus far and in these respects the study of locutions, or of the full units of speech. Our interest in the locutionary act is, of course, principally to make quite plain what it is, in order to distinguish it from other acts with which we are going to be primarily concerned. Let me add merely that, of course, a great many further refinements would be possible and necessary if we were to discuss it for its own sake—refinements of very great importance not merely to philosophers but to, say, grammarians and phoneticians.

We had made three rough distinctions between the phonetic act, the phatic act, and the rhetic act. The phonetic act is merely the act of uttering certain noises. The phatic act is the uttering of certain vocables or words, i.e. noises of certain types, belonging to and as belonging to, a certain vocabulary, conforming to and as conforming to a certain grammar. The rhetic act is the performance of an act of using those vocables with a certain more-or-less definite sense and reference. Thus ‘He said “The cat is on the mat” ‘, reports a phatic act, whereas ‘He said that the cat was on the mat’ reports a rhetic act. A similar contrast is illustrated by the pairs:

‘He said “I shall be there” ‘, ‘He said he would be there’;

‘He said “Get out” ‘He told me to get out’;

‘He said “Is it in Oxford or Cambridge?” ‘He asked whether it was in Oxford or Cambridge’.

To pursue this for its own sake beyond our immediate requirements, I shall mention some general points worth remembering:

(1) Obviously, to perform a phatic I must perform a phonetic act, or, if you like, in performing one I am performing the other (not, however, that phatic acts are a sub-class of phonetic acts—as belonging to): but the converse is not true, for if a monkey makes a noise indistinguishable from ‘go’ it is still not a phatic act.

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