Distinguishing Performatives from Other Utterances

Austin found great difficulty in drawing a completely clear distinction between "performatives" and "constatives"; among other things he came to the conclusion that to state something is to perform an illocutionary act, which renders all constatives as performatives; for reasons like these, he eventually suggested abandoning the dichotomy, replacing it by a trichotomy of speech acts, namely, the so-called "locutionary", "illocutionary" and "perlocutionary acts".

There is a most thorough and accurate study of how "performatives" might be defined following Austin by Jan S. Andersson, "How to define 'Performative'" [1]. Furthermore, during the 1970s there was much dispute about questions such as whether performatives are truth-evaluable or not, whether there are non-explicit performatives at all, whether performatives can be reduced to truth-evaluable sentences (and vice versa), and several others [5]; however, nowadays many of these issues appear to have lost some of their attraction.

Are Performatives Truth-Evaluable?

According to Austin's original account, it is an essential characteristic of performative sentences that they are neither true, nor false, that is, not truth-evaluable. However, in his 1989 article “How Performatives Work” John R. Searle argues that performatives are true/false just like constatives [7]. Searle further claims that performatives are what he calls declarations; this is a technical notion of Searle's account: according to his conception, an utterance is a declaration, if "the successful performance of the speech act is sufficient to bring about the fit between words and world, to make the propostional content true" [7]. Searle believes that this double direction of fit contrasts the simple word-to-world fit of assertives.

Kent Bach and Robert M. Harnish agree with Searle that performatives are true/false, but for different reasons [4]. They hold that performatives are truth-evaluable because they are directly statements, but only indirectly promises, apologies etc. While Searle sees performatives as declarations, Bach and Harnish claim that only some performative utterances are declarations, such as "I pronounce you man and wife."

But Bach and Harnish attack Searle's account in a more fundamental way. They dispute Searle’s explanation of what the question concerning performatives is about. According to Searle the question concerning performatives is that they are sentences that perform an explicit action specified by the verb, just by saying that the action is being performed. Bach and Harnish feel that this is the wrong approach to inquiries into the nature of performatives. They feel that an approach such as the one Searle posits assumes incorrectly that performatives are conceptually distinct from other utterances. This type of assumption is unfavorable according to Bach and Harnish because it rules out the null hypothesis without foundation. They feel the null hypothesis in this case is that there may not be in fact, any need for a special justification for an utterance’s performative effect.

According to Bach and Harnish, ordinary performatives do not need distinctive rationalization, because they are ordinary acts of communication that are successful only if an audience can infer your communicative intention to be expressing a distinct position. They feel that this description of performatives contrasts Searle’s view of performatives as declarations, because declarations are only ‘incidentally communicative’ and are successful only if they fulfill the applicable conventions.

Bach and Harnish also reject Searle’s view that the performative force of performatives is contained in its literal meaning. They feel that Searle incorrectly confounds performative force with its communicative accomplishment. Bach and Harnish argue that although the communicative success of performatives relies on the fact that they are statements, the performative force of performatives do not.