In How to Do Things with Words, J. L. Austin inaugurates a decisive rupture with the philosophical orthodoxy that treated language primarily as a descriptive medium whose central function was to state facts truly or falsely. Against this constative model, Austin argues in Lecture I that certain utterances do not merely report actions but constitute actions in their very articulation. Statements such as “I name this ship,” “I bet,” or “I promise” are not descriptions of prior intentions; they are performative utterances, speech acts in which saying is itself a mode of doing. As Austin insists in the opening lectures, these expressions are neither true nor false because their force lies not in correspondence but in felicitous enactment: they succeed only when uttered under appropriate conventional conditions by authorised persons within recognised procedures. This shift is foundational, for it relocates meaning from semantic representation to pragmatic efficacy. Austin’s exemplary cases—marriage vows, christenings, wagers, bequests—demonstrate that language is embedded within social ritual and institutional convention, where utterance functions as action rather than mirror. Lecture II deepens this argument through the taxonomy of infelicities, showing that failed performatives are not false but unhappy: they misfire when procedural conditions are absent and become abuses when sincerity or subsequent conduct is lacking. The crucial theoretical consequence is that meaning cannot be isolated from context, authority, and convention. Austin thus redefines language as a form of social praxis, exposing the philosophical error of reducing speech to representation alone. What emerges is a profoundly pragmatic conception of discourse in which words acquire force not because they describe the world, but because, under determinate conditions, they intervene in and transform it.
Austin, J.L. (1962) How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
