J.L. Austin, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The distinction I need to draw here is between what one says and what one does in saying it — and these come apart rather more sharply than philosophers had generally noticed. Consider the utterance "It is going to charge." One can make entirely plain, in every relevant sense, what is being said — the sense of the words, their reference — and yet leave quite open whether the utterance was a warning, a statement, a prediction offered as casual observation, or something else again.1
That residue — the something-else that remains undetermined even after the meaning is fixed — is what I call the illocutionary dimension of the utterance: the act performed in saying something, as opposed to the act of saying something.2 The locutionary act is the act of producing an utterance with a determinate sense and reference.
The illocutionary act is what one does by means of that locution — asking, ordering, warning, promising, appointing, criticising, identifying, describing, and the numerous like.3 It makes a very great difference whether one was advising or merely suggesting, strictly promising or only announcing a vague intention; these are not differences in what was said but in the force with which it was said.4
Now, philosophers had for too long treated every problem of utterance as a problem of locutionary usage — of sense and reference, of meaning in the narrow sense — and this is precisely what I called the descriptive fallacy: the mistake of treating all utterances as if their only job were to describe some state of affairs, to be assessed as true or false.5
But "I warn you that it is going to charge" is not a description of a warning; it is the warning. And once one sees that, one sees that the category of illocutionary force cannot be collapsed into meaning, however liberally meaning is construed. We can use "meaning" to gesture at force — "he meant it as an order" — but force and meaning in the sense of sense-and-reference must be kept distinct, just as sense and reference themselves had to be distinguished within meaning.6
The clearest cases are the explicit performatives: "I promise," "I congratulate you," "I welcome you." When I say "I congratulate you" without being pleased or without believing the credit is yours, I have still performed the act — the congratulation is not void, it is hollow, a case of insincerity rather than misfire.7 The act went through; what went wrong was the absence of the requisite feeling or belief behind it.
That is an infelicity of a different kind from the case where no act is achieved at all — where, say, nobody takes up the offer and the bet is never made.8 And here is the point that eventually forced me to revise the original performative/constative contrast. Statements — the constatives I had initially placed on the other side of the line — turn out to be infelicitous in exactly the same ways.9
"The cat is on the mat but I don't believe it is" is not self-contradictory, but it is outrageous in precisely the way that "I promise to be there but I have not the least intention of being there" is outrageous: both involve the speaker avowing an insincerity that the act of stating, no less than the act of promising, presupposes one does not have.10
Stating, it turns out, is itself an illocutionary act — one species among many, not the neutral baseline against which performatives are measured. The trichotomy — locutionary, illocutionary, perlocutionary — is the considered framework. The perlocutionary act is what one brings about by saying something: persuading, alarming, amusing. That is a further and separate dimension again, and the three must not be run together.
it might be perfectly possible, with regard to an utterance, say 'It is going to charge', to make entirely plain 'what we were saying' in issuing the utterance, in all the senses so far distinguished, and yet not at all to have cleared up whether or not in issuing the utterance I was performing the act of warning or not.How to Do Things with Words, pp. 105–106
I explained the performance of an act in this new and second sense as the performance of an 'illocutionary' act, i.e. performance of an act in saying something as opposed to performance of an act of saying something.How to Do Things with Words, pp. 106–108
To perform a locutionary act is in general, we may say, also and eo ipso to perform an illocutionary act, as I propose to call it. To determine what illocutionary act is performed determine in what asking or answering a question, pronouncing sentence, making an appointment or an appeal or a criticism, making an identification or giving a description, and the numerous like.How to Do Things with Words, pp. 105–106
It makes a great difference whether we were advising, or merely suggesting, or actually ordering, whether we were strictly promising or only announcing a vague intention, and so forth.How to Do Things with Words, pp. 106–108
for too long philosophers have neglected this study, treating all problems as problems of 'locutionary usage', and indeed that the 'descriptive fallacy' mentioned in Lecture I commonly arises through mistaking a problem of the former kind for a problem of the latter kind.How to Do Things with Words, pp. 106–108
I want to distinguish force and meaning in the sense in which meaning is equivalent to sense and reference, just as it has become essential to distinguish sense and reference within meaning.How to Do Things with Words, pp. 106–108
If I say 'I congratulate you' when I'm not pleased, or when I don't believe that the credit was yours, then there is insincerity... We should not say that I didn't in fact promise, but rather that I did promise but promised insincerely; I did congratulate you but the congratulations were hollow.Philosophical Papers, p. 245
I say 'I bet sixpence', but nobody says 'Done', nobody takes up the offer. In all these and other such cases, the act which we purport to perform, or set out to perform, is not achieved.Philosophical Papers, p. 245
statements are liable to be assessed in this matter of their correspondence or failure to correspond with the facts, that is, being true or false. But they are also liable to infelicity every bit as much as are performative utterances.Philosophical Papers, pp. 251–252
The person who makes this remark about the cat is in much the same position as somebody who says something like this: 'I promise that I shall be there, but I haven't the least intention of being there'... there is insincerity in the case of the person who says 'The cat is on the mat but I don't believe it is', and he is actually avowing that insincerity.Philosophical Papers, pp. 251–252