Performative/constative and speech-act theory: did the original performative/constative distinction survive its own development in the William James Lectures?

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

The position in brief

The lectures begin with the contrast between constative utterances (which describe and can be true or false) and performative utterances (which do something and are not true or false but happy or unhappy according to whether the felicity conditions are met).123 They end with the abandonment of that very distinction in favor of the more general analysis of every utterance into locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary dimensions, with constatives themselves treated as illocutionary acts of stating.4

The original performative/constative contrast is provisional pedagogy; the worked-out framework is the trichotomy and the analysis of illocutionary force. The lectures revise themselves, and the framework as it stands at the close — not as it stood at the opening — is the considered position.5

Sources

  1. HEN we originally contrasted the performative with the constative utterance we said that (x) the performative should be doing something as opposed to just saying something; and (2) the performative is happy or unhappy as opposed to true or false. Were these distinctions really sound?
    How to Do Things with Words, pp. 139–141
  2. But I do not want to say that there is or is not any parallel here; only that at least there is a very close parallel in the other two cases; which suggest that at least in some ways there is danger of our initial and tentative distinction between constative and performative utterances breaking down.
    How to Do Things with Words, pp. 61–62
  3. This doctrine is quite different from much that the pragmatists have said, to the effect that the true is what works, &c. The truth or falsity of a statement depends not merely on the meanings of words but on what act you were performing in what circumstances. What then finally is left of the distinction of the performative and constative utterance?
    How to Do Things with Words, pp. 151–153
  4. This is a wide field and certainly will not lead to a simple distinction of 'true' and 'false'; nor will it lead to a distinction of statements from the rest, for stating is only one among very numerous speech acts of the illocutionary class. Furthermore, in general the locutionary act as much as the illocutionary is an abstraction only: every genuine speech act is both.
    How to Do Things with Words, pp. 153–155
  5. Or take different of also used earlier, to a type test surely I state that he did not do it is exactly on a level with argue that he did not do it, I suggest that he did not do it, I bet that he did not do it, &c.
    How to Do Things with Words, pp. 141–142

Where the argument is made

  • How to Do Things with Words (William James Lectures, Harvard 1955
  • 1st edn. Oxford, 1962
  • 2nd edn., Urmson and Sbisà, 1975), the entire book
  • 'Performative Utterances' (BBC Third Programme talk, 1956) in Philosophical Papers
  • 'Performatif-Constatif' (Royaumont 1958, English trans. Warnock in C. E. Caton ed., Philosophy and Ordinary Language, 1963)

How the argument was received

The single most influential philosophical framework developed in mid-twentieth-century Oxford. Searle's Speech Acts (1969) systematized the framework with significant narrowing; Strawson reframed in terms of speaker intention; Grice developed a parallel pragmatic apparatus that complements rather than competes; Derrida used the parasitic-uses exclusion to argue against the framework's claim to be a complete theory; Sbisà, Bach and Harnish, and Recanati continued the tradition. Austin died with the second edition not yet conceived; Marina Sbisà's later editorial work (1975) is the closest we have to a finished version.