Things get even more complicated. For not only does one need to distinguish the behavitives and mere polite, conventional (even formal) exposure of feelings, that is, between “I approve”, “I approve of”, and “I feel approval of”, but Austin introduces a certain class of expositive (or expositional) performatives. “Here, the main body of the utterance[1] has generally or often the straightforward form of a statement, but there is an explicit performative verb at its head which shows how the ‘statement’ is to be fitted into the context of conversation” (p. 85). Some examples are “I argue that there is no backside of the moon”, “I concede that there is no backside of the moon”, “I prophesy (or predict) that there is no backside of the moon” etc. Austin finds it downright “irritating” that the clause following the performative verb “will normally look just like a statement” and that with behavitives, just as with expositives, and what he later considers as verdictives (“I declare that…”), “the whole utterance seems essentially meant to be true or false despite its performative characteristics” (p. 89). Moreover, to not observe that these strange performative in question is, as Austin describes it, “the sort of Alice in Wonderland over-sharpness of taking ‘I think that p’ as a statement about yourself” (p. 90). Is it that unhappiness is a flaw both of performatives and constatives?
We see now where the failure of the grammatical criterion and the “capable of being rendered as explicit performaitves” criterion had led Austin: statements (constatives) too are capable of being rendered as explicit performatives, e.g. “I assert/state that…”, “I argue that…”, “I know that…” etc. As obvious as the performative-constative (doing-stating) distinction was at the very beginning, isn’t saying also the doing of something? As a matter of fact, Austin adds in the end of the lecture, in saying something, we do quite a lot of things, which could be distinguished as:
(A.a) a phonetic act: to perform the act of making certain noises
(A.b) a phatic act: to pronounce not just noises, but ‘lexical items’, words that are in the vocabulary
(A.c) a rhetic act: to utter not just words, but words with meaning, with reference and predication and a ‘sense’.
[1] Notice here a distinction between the ‘propositional content’ and the ‘force’ indicated by the expositive.
Very useful, thank you very much for posting, greetings from Argentina.
ReplyDeleteThank you :)))
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