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How Performatives Work[1]
by John R. Searle
The notion of a performative is one that philosophers and linguists are so comfortable with that one gets the impression that somebody must have a satisfactory theory. But I have not seen such a theory and in this article I want to address the question: how exactly do performatives work? I believe that answering that question is not just a fussy exercise in linguistic analysis but can give us insights into the nature of language and the relation between speech acts and actions generally. Some people who have written about performatives seem to think that it is just a semantic fact about certain verbs that they have performative occurences, but the puzzle is: how could any verbs have such remarkable properties just as a matter of semantics? I can't fix the roof by saying, "I fix the roof" and I can't fry an egg by saying, "I fry an egg", but I can promise to come and see you just by saying, "I promise to come and see you" and I can order you to leave the room just by saying, "I order you to leave the room". Now why the one and not the other? And, to repeat, how exactly does it work? The most widely accepted current view is something like the following: performative utterances are really just statements with truth values like any other statements, and Austin was wrong to contrast performative utterances with some other kind. The only special feature of the performative statement is that the speaker can perform some other speech act indirectly by making the statement. And the task of a theory of performatives is to explain how the speaker can intend and the hearer can understand a second speech act from the making of the first speech act, the statement.
I have not seen an account of performatives that I thought was even remotely satisfactory. Therefore, in this paper I will attempt to:
1. Characterize performatives in a way that will enable us to give a (fairly) precise statement of the problem,
2. State the conditions of adequacy on any solution;
3. Show that certain analyses of performatives fail;
4. Introduce the elements of the apparatus necessary to solve the problem; and
5. Suggest a solution.
I. What exactly is a performative?
The word "performative" has had a very confusing history and I need to make clear at the start how I am using it. Austin originally introduced the notion of performatives to contrast them with constatives; and his idea was that performatives were actions, such as making a promise or giving an order; and constatives were sayings, such as making a statement or giving a description. Constatives, but not performatives, could be true or false. But that distinction didn't work, because stating and describing are just as much actions as promising and ordering, and some performatives, such as warnings, can be true or false. So it looked for a while as if he would have to say that every utterance was a performative, and that would render the notion useless. Another distinction which didn't work is that between explicit and implicit performatives, e.g. the distinction between "I promise to come" (explicit) and "I intend to come" (implicit). This distinction doesn't work because in the sense in which the explicit performatives are performatives the implicit cases aren't performative at all. If I say, "I intend to come", I have literally just made a statement about my intention. (Though, of course, in making such a statement, I might also indirectly be making a promise.)
I believe the correct way to situate the notion of performatives within a general theory of speech acts is as follows: some illocutionary acts can be performed by uttering a sentence containing an expression that names the type of speech act, as in for example, "I order you to leave the room". These utterances, and only these, are correctly described as performative utterances. On my usage, the only performatives are what Austin called "explicit performatives". If we adopt this usage, it now becomes essential to distinguish between performative utterances, performative sentences, and performative verbs. As I shall use these expressions a performative sentence is a sentence whose literal utterance in appropriate circumstances constitutes the performance of an illocutionary act named by an expression in that very sentence in virtue of the occurence of that expression. A performative utterance is an utterance of a performative sentence token, such that the utterance constitutes the performance of the act named by the performative expression in the sentence. A performative verb is simply a verb that can occur as the main verb in performative sentences. When such a verb occurs in such a sentence in a performative utterance I shall speak of the performative use of the sentence and the verb.
It is clear that on this account only a very restricted class of utterences are performative utterences. An utterance of
1. Leave the room!
can constitute the making of an order, but it is not performative, whereas an utterance of
2. I order you to leave the room.
would normally be performative.
Furthermore not every sentence containing a performative verb in the first person present indicative is a performative sentence.
3. I promise to come on Wednesday.
is a performative sentence, but
4. I promise too many things to too many people.
is not a performative sentence. In English most, but not all, performative utterances contain occurences the first person present singular indicative of the performative verb. There are also some occurences in the present continuous, e.g.
5. I am asking you to do this for me Henry, I am asking you to do it for me and Cynthia and the children.
and some performative utterances use verbs in the plural, e.g.
6. We pledge our lives our fortunes and our sacred honor.
Furthermore some performative sentences are in the passive:
7. Passengers are hereby advised that all flights to Phoenix have been cancelled.
Sometimes the performative expression is not a verb and it may be in a separate clause or sentence, as in
8. I'll come to see you next week, and that's a promise.
Not every occurrence of a performative sentence is a performative use. The sentence "I promise to come and see you on Wednesday" could be used to report a habitual practice. E.g. Whenever I see you on Tuesday I always do the same thing: I promise to come and see you on Wednesday.[2]
II. What exactly is the problem about performatives?
Put at its most naive (and in a preliminary formulation we will later have to correct), the puzzle about performatives is simply this: how can there be a class of sentences whose meaning is such that we can perform the action named by the verb just by saying literally we are performing it? How can meaning determine that saying is doing? How does the saying constitute the doing? There are other questions related to this: why is the class of verbs restricted in the way that it is? As I mentioned, I can promise by saying "I hereby promise," but I can't fry an egg, by saying "I hereby fry an egg." Furthermore, how can one and the same unambiguous sentence have both a literal performative and a literal assertive use?
Another crucial question is why is it that in some sense I can't lie or be mistaken or utter a falsehood with the performative part of the performative utterance, in the way that statements normally can be lies, falsehoods or mistakes. This question has to be stated precisely. When I say, "Bill promised to come and see you last week" that utterance can be a lie, a mistake, or some other form of falsehood, just as any statement can. But when I say "I promise to come and see you next week" that utterance could be insincere (if I don't intend to do the act represented by the propositional content) and it can fail to be a promise if certain of the presuppositions fail to obtain (e.g. if the person I take myself to be addressing is not a person but a fence post) but I can't be lying or mistaken about it's having the force of a promise, because, in some sense that we need to explain, my uttering the sentence and meaning literally what I say gives it the force of a promise. Just to have a name I will call this the "self guaranteeing" character of performative utterances.
Finally, there is a problem about the semantic analysis of performative verbs. Are we to be forced to say that these verbs have two meanings, one performative and one not? Or two senses? Or what?
III. Conditions of adequacy
What are the constraints that we would like to achieve on our analysis of performatives? Well first we would like the analysis to fit into an overall account of language. Ideally performatives should not just stick out as some oddity or anomaly, but it should seem necessary that these verbs, sentences, and utterances would have these properties given the rest of our account of language. In this connection we would like to preserve the intuition that performative sentences are ordinary sentences in the indicative and that as such they are used to make statements that have truth values, even when uttered performatively. Also, we would like to avoid having to postulate ambiguities; especially since we have independent linguistic evidence that performative verbs are not ambiguous between a performative and a nonperformative sense. For example we can get something like conjunction reduction in examples of the following sort: the sentence, "John promises to come and see you next week and I promise to come and see you next week", can be paraphrased as "John promises to come and see you next week and so do I". We need further to explain the occurence of "hereby" in performative sentences. But the hard problem is that we need to meet these constraints in a way that accounts for the special character of performatives, especially the self guaranteeing feature that I mentioned earlier.
Just so we can see what the problems are, I will simply list the main features that I would like to be able to account for.
1. Performative utterances are performances of the act named by the main verb (or other performative expression) in the sentence.
2. Performative utterances are self guaranteeing in the sense that the speaker cannot be lying, insincere, or mistaken about the type of act being performed (even though he or she can be lying, insincere, or mistaken about the propositional content of the speech act and he or she can fail to perform the act if certain other conditions fail to obtain.)
3. Performative utterances achieve features 1. and 2. in virtue of the literal meaning of the sentence uttered.
4. They characteristically take "hereby" as in "I hereby promise that I will come and see you".
5. The verbs in question are not ambiguous between a performative and a non-performative sense, even though the verbs have both performative and non-performative literal occurences.
6. Performative utterances are not indirect speech acts, in the sense in which an utterance of "Can you pass the salt?" can be an indirect speech act of requesting the hearer to pass the salt.
7. Performative utterances in virtue of their literal meaning are statements with truth values.
8. Performative sentences typically use an unusual tense in English, the so called "dramatic present".
IV. Previous analyses
I am not sure that all these conditions can be met, and perhaps some of them are incorrect, but in any case the discussions I have read and heard of performatives fail to meet them. Let me review my own earlier writings on this subject. I claimed, in Speech Acts and other writings that in general illocutionary acts have the structure F(p), where the "F" stands for the illocutionary force, and the "(p)" stands for the propositional content. If communication is to be successful, the hearer has to be able to figure out from hearing the sentence what is the illocutionary force and what is the propositional content. So there will in general be in the synax of sentences an illocutionary force indicating device and a representation of the propositional content. In the sentence, "It's raining," the propositional content expressed is: that it is raining, and the illocutionary force of a statement is indicated by word order, intonation contour, mood of the verb and punctuation.
Now on this account, I argued in Speech Acts that the performative prefix is just an indicator of illocutionary force like any other. In "I state that it is raining" and "I order you to leave the room" the performative prefixes "I state" and "I order" function to make explicit the illocutionary force of the utterance of the sentence. As far as it goes, I think that account is right, but the problem is that it doesn't explain how performatives work. In particular, it doesn't so far explain how the same syntactical sequence can occur in some cases as an indicator of illocutionary force and in others as part of propositional content. So one of the ways to describe the present task is to answer a question which I left unanswered in Speech Acts.
In Foundations of Illocutionary Logic, Daniel Vanderveken and I argued that performative utterances were all cases of declarations. Declarations, just to remind you, are speech acts such as for example, "The meeting is adjourned" or "War is hereby declared" where the illocutionary point of the speech act is simply to bring it about that the propositional content matches the world. The proposition is made true, solely in virtue of the performance of the speech act. On this account, just as I can declare the meeting to be adjourned, so I can declare a promise to be made or an order to be issued, and I use a performative prefix to do these things. Now if we just read off the structure of the speech act from the surface structure of the sentence that account seems obviously right. The propositional content, e.g. that I order you to leave the room, is made true by the utterance of the sentence "I order you to leave the room," and such an utterance differs from an utterance of the sentence, "Leave the room"; because though an utterance of "Leave the room" also makes it the case that I ordered you to leave the room; it does not do so by declaration. It does not do so by representing it as being the case, and thus it differs from a performative.