True-false does not apply

The language philosopher J.L. Austin published a book in 1962 called How To Do Things With Words. There are two concepts he introduces in this work that I think are extremely relevant for today.

The first concept is what he calls the Performative Utterance, which is actually a kind of action. Austin explains that some statements, he calls them Constative, can be true or false. For example, ‘the sky is blue’ is a statement that can be evaluated and verified. But Performative Utterances don’t fit into a tidy true-false binary. For example, ‘I bet you 5 bucks it will rain tomorrow.’ Is this true or false? Well, it’s neither. Instead, Austin says, it’s either felicitous or not, and felicitous just means well-suited or well-expressed.

So performatives are not held to the standard of true-false, they are held to whether they are done well or not. Which, in today’s world where it feels like truth is crumbling around us, is a bit crazy-making. But Austin also shared a second concept that I think can provide some hope. He defined how you can evaluate whether a performative statement, which is ultimately a kind of action, is felicitous or not. In other words, how you can evaluate the equivalent of true-false.

So here’s a 3-step version of his criteria.

1. The speaker has to actually have the authority for this performative. Me saying ‘I bet you 5 bucks it will rain tomorrow’ is not felicitous if I do not have five dollars. If the person stating the performative or a person receiving it doesn’t have the power to see it through, the statement is called void.
2. Secondly, the participants on both sides have to be genuine in their feelings and their intentions to follow through. If I propose a bet and don’t intend to follow through, the statement is called an abuse. If I propose a bet, you say yes, and we both intend to follow through, but then for any number of reasons we don’t, the statement is called a misfire.
3. Finally, there has to be some sort of convention or context that the performative statement lives within. Like if we lived in a world where the concept of betting didn’t exist, me saying ‘I bet you 5 bucks’ would be meaningless or in Austin’s terms infelicitous, i.e., poorly suited and poorly expressed.

So, performatives–the kinds of complicated day-to-day human utterances that literally cannot be evaluated along a true-false–can instead be evaluated as one of 5 things: felicitous, infelicitous, misfire, abuse, or void.

Admittedly, this is much less satisfying than true or false, but I think it’s also much more useful to have a system that actually applies to the majority of statements that people make. Because, as Austin points out, even statements that appear at first to be those constative statements of fact can actually be performatives. There is no clear line of distinction between these categories.

So for me, going forward, I’ll be evaluating crazy-making statements no longer with this blunt force, misapplied attempt at true-false, but instead with the much more sophisticated evaluation of asking, ‘what’s not right about this performance?’ I hope this gives you a new tool as well. Thanks for listening.

Source: https://archive.org/details/austin-how-to-do-things-with-words/mode/2up