Origin of the Term

Although Austin had already used the term in his 1946 paper "Other minds", today's usage goes back to his later, remarkedly different exposition of the notion in the 1955 William James lecture series, subsequently published as “How to Do Things with Words”. The starting point of the lectures is Austin's doubt against a widespread philosophical prejudice, namely, the implicit presumption that utterances always "describe" or "constate" something and are thus always true or false. After mentioning several examples of sentences which are not so used, and not truth-evaluable (among them non-sensical sentences, interrogatives, directives and "ethical" propositions), he introduces "performative" sentences as another instance.

J. L. Austin's Definition

In order to define performatives, Austin refers to those sentences which conform to the old prejudice in that they are used to describe or constate something, and which thus are true or false; and he calls such sentences "constatives". In contrast to them, Austin defines "performatives" as follows:

• Performative utterances are not true or false, that is, not truth-evaluable; instead when something is wrong with them then they are "happy" or "unhappy".

• The uttering of a performative is, or is part of, the doing of a certain kind of action (Austin later deals with them under the name illocutionary acts), the performance of which, again, would not normally be described as just "saying" or "describing" something [2, p. 5].

For example, when Peter says: "I promise to do the dishes" in an appropriate context then he thereby does not just say something, and in particular he does not just describe what he is doing; rather, in making the utterance he performs the promise; since promising is an illocutionary act, the utterance is thus a performative utterance. If Peter utters the sentence without the intention to keep the promise, or if eventually he does not keep it, then although something is not in order with the utterance, the problem is not that the sentence is false: it is rather "unhappy", or "infelicitous", as Austin also says in his discussion of so-called felicity conditions. In the absence of any such flaw, on the other hand, the utterance is to be assessed as "happy" or "felicitous", rather than as "true".

The initial examples of performative sentences Austin gives are these:

• “I do (sc. take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife)” – as uttered in the course of the marriage ceremony.

• “I name this ship the ‘Queen Elizabeth’.”

• “I give and bequeath my watch to my brother” – as occurring in a will.

• “I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow” [2, p. 5].

As Austin later notices himself, these examples belong (more or less strikingly) to what Austin calls, explicit performatives; to utter an "explicit" performative sentence is to make explicit what act one is performing. However, there are also "implicit", "primitive", or "inexplicit" performatives. When, for instance, one uses the word "Go!" in order to command someone to leave the room then this utterance is part of the performance of a command; and the sentence, according to Austin, is neither true nor false; hence the sentence is a performative; –still, it is not an explicit performative, for it does not make explicit that the act the speaker is performing is a command.

As Austin observes, the acts purported to be performed by performative utterances may be socially contested. For instance, "I divorce you", said three times by a man to his wife, may be accepted to constitute a divorce by some, but not by others.