After a brief summary of how one can do things by or in saying something, that is, after reviewing what has been said in the first lecture, Austin proposes to take a closer look at the ways in which those “appropriate circumstances” could be studied and organized. As has been shown, when something goes wrong we do not speak of falsehood (as in the case of constatives) but rather of a sort of unhappiness or infelicity.
His first attempt renders this scheme:
(A. 1) There must exist an accepted conventional procedure of uttering certain words in certain circumstances.
(A. 2) The persons uttering those words must be the accepted ones.
(B. 1) The procedure must be executed by all participants both correctly and…
(B. 2) … completely
(Γ. 1) Where the procedure is designed for persons having certain thoughts or intentions, the persons in question must indeed have those thoughts.
(Γ. 2) Where a subsequent conduct is part of the procedure, the persons must conduct themselves accordingly.
Every difference in the labels shown in brackets stands for something. For instance, the difference between the infelicities caused by lack of any of the conditions A and B and those pertaining to conditions Γ is this: when e.g. you’re not the right man trying to christen a ship (A.2) or you’re not doing the necessary procedure completely (B. 2), then the act is not achieved, does not come off. Austin terms these Misfires. In the case of Γ-infelicities, the act is achieved, but you are being e.g. insincere (Γ. 1), so the act is void or without effect. Austin names these Abuses.
The difference between A- and B-infelicities is also significant. A cases are called Misinvocations because there is either a lack of procedure or a inability to apply the procedure in question. Austin further terms the latter category Misapplications. Instances of B-infelicity are called Misexecutions: Flaws, when the procedure is not executed correctly, Hitches – when it is not executed completely. So, for now, the doctrine of infelicities looks something like this:
Three questions seem to be in place. First, what sort of ‘act’ is prone to infelicity? We have so far discussed the acts of uttering words[1] but there are arguably other types of acts that can “go wrong” in similar ways. Austin writes: “infelicity is an ill to which all acts are heir which have the general character of ritual or ceremonial, all conventional acts” (p. 19). Second, one might ask whether the classification above is a complete one. As has been established, the uttering of words in those circumstances is a case of performing an action and qua actions they are subject to a whole array of unsatisfactoriness.
Also, as utterances, they might be uttered in a particular language activity which is, in some way or another, parasitic; for instance poetry, acting, soliloquy are some such instances. Austin also mentions misunderstanding but does not pay much attention as to how is this type of infelicity is to be connected to the already mentioned ones. A third, simple, question ends this lecture: are they mutually exclusive. Not only that the presence of one impediment does not exclude the presence of another, but more often than not the types of going wrong “shade into one another” to the effect that an analytical decision would be, in various ways, arbitrary.
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