What is felicity conditions?

J.L. Austin, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

J.L. Austin answers

The term felicity conditions names the conditions that must be satisfied if a performative utterance is to come off successfully — to be, as I put it, happy rather than unhappy. When I say "I promise," "I name this ship," or "I do take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife," I am not describing anything; I am doing something. And what I am doing can go wrong in a variety of ways that have nothing to do with truth or falsity.1

The conditions fall into several distinguishable kinds.2 There must exist an accepted conventional procedure with a certain conventional effect — you cannot perform an act for which no procedure exists.3 The particular persons invoking that procedure must be the appropriate ones, in the appropriate circumstances.4 The procedure must be executed both correctly and completely — a bet announced after the race is over has not been happily brought off, however correctly the words were uttered.5

And where the procedure is designed for use by persons having certain thoughts or feelings, those persons must actually have them, and must intend to conduct themselves accordingly.6 A useful illustration: if someone not appointed to name a ship snatches the bottle, smashes it on the stem, and shouts out a name, we all agree the ship is not thereby named — and that it is, as I put it, an infernal shame.7

But we may disagree about exactly which condition was violated: was the procedure invoked by the wrong person, or was part of the procedure itself (getting oneself appointed) left incomplete?8 That classificatory question may in the last resort be somewhat arbitrary, which is why lawyers have developed technical vocabularies to cope with precisely these distinctions.9

One further point worth holding onto: the conditions are not mutually exclusive. One can go wrong in two ways at once — one can, for instance, insincerely promise a donkey to give it a carrot.10 And the list is not complete: misunderstanding, duress, and other forms of non-responsibility add further dimensions of unhappiness that sit alongside the main categories without neatly collapsing into them.11

Sources

  1. These performative utterances are not true or false, then. But they do suffer from certain disabilities of their own. They can fail to come off in special ways, and that is what I want to consider next. The various ways in which a performative utterance may be unsatisfactory we call, for the sake of a name, the infelicities; and an infelicity arises—that is to say, the utterance is unhappy—if certain rules, transparently simple rules, are broken.
    Philosophical Papers, pp. 242–243
  2. I fear, but the time of hope, that these at same course necessary conditions to be satisfied will strike you as obvious.
    How to Do Things with Words, pp. 21–22
  3. (A. 1) There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances.
    How to Do Things with Words, pp. 21–22
  4. (A. 2) the particular persons and circumstances in a given case must be appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked.
    How to Do Things with Words, pp. 21–22
  5. To bet is not, as I pointed out in passing, merely to utter the words 'I bet, &c.': someone might do that all right, and yet we might still not agree that he had in fact, or at least entirely, succeeded in betting. To satisfy ourselves of this, we have only, for example, to announce our bet after the race is over.
    How to Do Things with Words, pp. 21–22
  6. (I. 1) Where, as often, the procedure is designed for use by persons having certain thoughts or feelings, or for the inauguration of certain consequential conduct on the part of any participant, then a person participating in and so invoking the procedure must in fact have those thoughts or feelings, and the participants must intend so to conduct themselves.
    How to Do Things with Words, pp. 21–22
  7. We agree that the ship certainly isn't now named the Generalissimo Stalin, and we agree that it's an infernal shame and so on and so forth.
    Philosophical Papers, p. 246
  8. We might say that here is a case of a perfectly legitimate and agreed procedure which, however, has been invoked in the wrong circumstances, namely by the wrong person... But on the other hand we might look at it differently and say that this is a case where the procedure has not as a whole been gone through correctly, because part of the procedure for naming a ship is that you should first of all get yourself appointed.
    Philosophical Papers, p. 246
  9. lawyers, who have to deal very much with this kind of thing, have invented all kinds of technical terms and have made numerous rules about different kinds of cases, which enable them to classify fairly rapidly what in particular is wrong in any given case.
    Philosophical Papers, p. 246
  10. No, in the sense that we can go wrong in two ways at once (we can insincerely promise a donkey to give it a Carrot).
    How to Do Things with Words, pp. 29–31
  11. One further way in which things may go wrong is, for example, through what in general may be called misunderstanding... and apart from further additions which we might make to the list, there is the general over-riding consideration that, as we are performing an act when we issue these performative utterances, we may of course be doing so under duress or in some other circumstances which make us not entirely responsible for doing what we are doing.
    Philosophical Papers, p. 246