hello everyone so in today's lecture we're going to be covering JL Austin and his idea of speech Acts or performatives now um this is going to be our first sort of philosophy reading proper and it's a nice way to it's a nice kind of segue into the second unit of the course the second unit of the course is going to be focused a lot on investigations of the deep structure of language and this is one of the things that that Austin is gonna is gonna start us thinking about here um in this uh in this lecture and so we're going to be talking about Austin and in particular his development of or a discovery of depending on how you want to look at it of what we call speech Acts or performatives and this is going to give us a good idea of the power of language in terms of some of its deeper structure and also of the of the complexity uh of language and it'll be a nice it'll be a nice kind of introduction to uh to some some of those deeper perspectives that we're going to be covering at in much greater length uh in the second unit of the course so let me do a screen share and I'll uh I'll pull up the Austin reading and then we'll we'll walk through some of the highlights and I'll sort of explain uh his idea of speech Acts or performatives and why uh it's a it's a good sort of uh a good sort of way to start appreciating the power the depth and the complexity of this absolutely crucial instrument for us uh as human beings language in the first unit we talked about the uses and abuses of language uh and now in this uh in this sort of segue to unit two uh we're going to be taking a bit of a deep dive into the structure of language and Austin is going to be a nice place uh to jump to jump into uh that sort of discussion in the second unit so let me do a screen share here okay so here's the Austin reading this is from his work from his 1962 work which was published published uh after his death how to do things with words these were originally lectures and so the uh the first chapter is lecture one rather than chapter one and Austin is going to be developing here the idea of speech Acts or performatives and so we're going to have to sort of unpack what exactly those are and how they work and why Austin thinks that it's important to know about them now before we get started a couple of sticky notes there let me open them up and just say a brief word about both of them the first sticky note here Austin is uh usually identified with developing the notion of speech actual perform it is but he wasn't the first person to notice this aspect of language a much earlier German philosopher Adolf reinoff in 1913 had already stumbled on this issue of speech Acts or performatives um rhinoc like Austin and Austin Austin's later um uh uh the John Searle the person who develops some of Austin's ideas later on uh rhinocch as well as Austin and Cyril they all note that the social context required for speech acts to do their extra work which we'll talk about here in a second this is what Austin calls the elocutionary meaning of a speech act as well as the need for inner intention to accompany the outward speech act uh in order that the extra work be done all of them emphasize that we'll be talking about both of those uh both of those aspects the social context as well as the inner intention we'll uh we'll talk about both of those in the context of uh going through this uh chapter from how to do things with words but that's a quick note in terms of the historical background Austin wasn't the first person uh to stumble on this issue of speech Acts or performatives to to investigate it uh but he's certainly the most famous person and he's typically credited with developing it uh initially here uh in his in his book how to do things with words so the second sticky note so basic things about the uh about the structure of speech action you need to know this this is absolutely crucial it's not uh uh laid out so much in the first chapter in in this kind of straightforward fashion but it's nice to sort of have this under our belt before we actually dive into the actual text now for Austin speech Acts or performatives they are different from uh straightforward simple sentences that describe things because he argues that they do extra work and that extra work is done in the very process of uttering the sentence for example and so he he divvies up the um the different aspects of the speech act into three into three different parts he says the first part of the speech Act is what he calls the locutionary the simple grammatical meaning of a sentence the third part let's just skip down to number three here is called the perlocutionary the prolecutionary is that which one wishes to bring about by the sentence being uttered so for example if I'm if I'm communicating a simple fact about something uh presumably the the prolecutionary uh aspect of that of that sentence is that somebody be informed that you'd be informed about what I'm telling you um or take the example of a command or or an imperative if I you know if I say hey go close the door well there's a locutionary aspect to that the simple grammatical meaning subject verb object you know the different sort of grammatical parts of the sentence and there's also a prolecutionary and the prolecutionary there is that the door be closed now notice something and this is this is why it's helpful to sort of contrast speech acts with with commands with with a speech act like go close the door in order for what I wish to bring about by that sentence being uttered to be brought about there has to be an extra physical action that occurs for example you have to get up and go close the door and that happens separate and apart from my uttering the command so that's that's a prolecutionary in terms of a command with a speech act the the interesting thing about speech Acts is that perlocutionary is brought about in part by the sentence itself which sounds kind of kind of strange and and mysterious but from Austin's perspective it's as simple as understanding what you and I do every single day and so with a speech act not only does it have a locutionary aspect it has a prolecutionary that which one wishes to bring about by the sentence being uttered but in a speech act it's the actual uttering of the sentence that helps bring that about and the extra work that is done the part of the sentence so to speak that does that extra work that brings about that prolecutionary is that second part what Austin calls the illocutionary the extra work by a speech act which substantially changes a state of affairs above and beyond a simple perlocutionary meaning in other words the and one way to understand this is that the perlocutionary unlike let's say in a command where it's a separate sort of physical action that has to occur after I after I I give a command in a speech act the provocutionary is brought about by the illocutionary the extra work that the that the speech act does and again the sound this this sounds almost strange and mysterious because in the situation let's say of a command which is not a speech act um it would be as if you know I say go close the door and then somehow simply by saying that the door starts closing well in a speech act something like that is what occurs says Austin Now commands aren't speech acts in that sense but in a speech act that which I wish to bring about is brought about buy the extra work that is done in the sentence and that extra work that part of the sentence that does the extra work is called the illocutionary so these three parts are aspects of the speech act it's very important that you have this under your belt as we go through the reading again the locutionaries the simple grammatical meaning of the sentence the elocutionary aspect is the extra work of a speech act that substantially changes a state of affairs um above and beyond a simple prolecutionary meaning partly because unlike let's say the prolocutionary meaning with a with a command that involves an extra sort of physical action with the illocutionary the provocutionary is brought about by the elocutionary it's almost as if two and three are sort of combined together in the in the speech Act in the sense that the illocutionary um the the actual saying of the sentence helps to bring about the the State of Affairs that you wish to bring about by the sentence being uttered whereas for example in a command you'd have to have a separate physical action so those are the three parts or aspects of a speech act the locutionary the illocutionary and the prolecutioner now let's start going through the highlighted sections here so first Austin notes it was for too long the Assumption of philosophers that a business the business of a statement can only be to describe some State of Affairs or to State some fact which it must do either truly or falsely one of the things that Austin is pushing against here is an overly simplistic narrow sort of conception of language that only talks about essentially the informative function with a straightforward notion of Truth and falsity and from Austin's perspective language is much more complex and much more powerful than that and so this is one of the one of the reasons why it's nice to start with Austin it's also nice to start with Austin in terms of in terms of asking these deeper structural questions about language partly because Austin writes in a clear and and uncomplicated sort of fashion so that's one of the things that that he's pushing against an overly simplistic notion of language as just being the communication of information he says far from that simplistic notion of language language actually in terms of speech acts helps to change states of Affairs bring states of Affairs into existence via that illocutionary uh part of the speech act that in essence bring helps bring about the prolecutionary now let's go down here on the left side here's what Austin has to say he says and again he's this is published in 1962 uh after his death and so he's writing roughly in mid 20th century and it's also important to to note here that Austin who was a uh he was a philosopher at Oxford University belongs to a tradition in 20th century philosophy called ordinary language philosophy you should have this in your notes and ordinary language philosophy as the name indicates uh believes that the way that you understand the deeper structure of language and what language is doing is you actually pay attention to the utterances of ordinary folks and this is in contrast to let's say coming up with a theory about how language works and then cramming your observations into your theory and then anything that doesn't anything that doesn't fit into the into the the preconceived box of your theories gets thrown out Austin and the ordinary language philosophers have a completely different view you start from on the way that ordinary people use ordinary language and then that will give you an indication of the deeper structure the deeper aspects of what is actually going on in terms of language you don't construct the theory first and then and then try to cram your observations so Austin comes from a tradition called ordinary language philosophy and here one of the things that he says we have to start doing is we have to start paying attention to the way that ordinary folks use language especially in terms of what he calls the speech Acts or performatives that do extra work above and beyond a normal sort of descriptive sentence that's the ACT part of speech act that's the perform part of performative and these terms are used interchangeably speech action performatives and so Austin is arguing that if you actually pay attention to the way that ordinary language works you'll see that language isn't just about this sort of oversimplified notion of simply transmitting information but rather language uh is is enormously powerful and can actually transform states of Affairs now let's uh let's talk about these two highlighted boxes highlighted boxes here on the left Austin notes in recent years many things which would have once been accepted without question as statements by both philosophers and grammarians have been scrutinized with new care the scrutiny arose someone indirectly at least in philosophy first came the view he says not always formulated without unfortunate dogmatism that a statement of fact ought to be verifiable and this led to the view that many statements in other words sentences that seem to have the correct form grammatically are only what may be called pseudo-statements now let's unpack what exactly he's talking about here with this first sticky note and this is some important stuff so make sure that you have this have this down so Austin is here referring to what we call verificationism and verificationism is a very influential view in philosophy in the first half of the 20th century the verificationists um and there's a there's a number of different uh terms that we use to describe them sometimes they're called verificationists sometimes they're called logical positivists the term positive here is an alternate meaning of the word positive it doesn't mean woohoo I'm feeling great positive but rather positive in the sense of factual um so we call them verificationists sometimes we call them logical positivists I.E logical factualists so to speak um and sometimes we call them the Vienna Circle because a lot of them live in and around Vienna Austria and got together from time to time particularly prior to the Second World War now the verificationists themselves often came from backgrounds in mathematics and the Natural Sciences and they had a deep interest in philosophy and they wanted to introduce the same sort of rigor and philosophy that they were used to in their home disciplines and verificationism as with philosophy in general in the 20th century is very much focused on language so especially in terms of a philosophical understanding of language the verificationists wanted to introduce the same sort of rigor uh in philosophy that they were used to especially in some of their home disciplines and again this is part of a larger 20th century turn toward the examination of language and philosophy now the verification has developed what is known as the verificationist Criterion Criterion is simply a standard of judgment in this case judging which sentences are legit legitimate and which ones aren't and so the verification is Criterion basically says that sentences can be legitimate in one of only two ways either and the the legitimacy here is has to do with a straightforward explanation of how one verifies or disconfirms a sentence in other words a straightforward explanation of how you either confirm that a sentence is true or or confirm that it's false either way and so that's the verifications Criterion so there's two different ways um to confirm whether or not a sentence is true or false the first way is you can do it internally and these sorts of sentences where you can do it internally are called analytic sentences and by internally what they mean is that the truth or falsity of the sentence is determined internally by the meanings of words you don't have to go out and do and do studies or do or gather empirical evidence or investigations or anything like that so for example the sentence Bachelors are unmarried men we know that that's a true sentence and we know it because of internal uh factors that is to say the meanings of the words themselves determine that this sentence is true and so that's an analytic sentence I can determine truth or falsity internally now the other way to determine truth and falsity are is externally rather and these sentences are called synthetic sentences and so for synthetic sentences those are the sentences where I actually have to go out and do some investigation to figure out whether or not they're true or false so synthetic sentences are determined as true or false by external empirical data so for example if you have the sentence for car is red how do you figure out if that's true or false well you can't do it internally by the meanings of the words you have to actually go out and identify the relevant car and see what color it is and compare it with what the sentence says in this case that the car is red if if a car ends up being red the sentence is true if it's not red then the sentence is false and again it doesn't matter whether the sentence is true or false what matters here is that I have a clear idea of how to get to a notion of Truth and falsity with these sentences and so I can either do it internally with these analytic sentences or I can do it externally with so-called synthetic sentences now all of the sentences where I can't do that where I can't straightforwardly either on an internal basis or external basis determine truth or falsity all other sentences the verificationists argued are illegitimate and this is a really steep price to pay partly because uh this eliminates a lot of the sentences for example in ethics in Aesthetics in metaphysics and so forth and the verificationists were willing to pay that price not because they were trying to be mean but because they were trying to be thorough and consistent again they wanted to introduce the same sort of rigor and philosophy that they were used to in the Natural Sciences in mathematics and sort of clear out what they saw as as some of the some of the confusing underbrush in terms of in terms of sentences and so they're trying to use this verificationist Criterion uh to to get a clearer picture of how language how language works and so everything all the other sentences that aren't either analytic sentences or synthetic senses um where you can't straightforwardly determine truth or falsity all those other sentences the verification is to argument are illegitimate now there is a there's a regardless of what we think about verificationism we need to understand that their hearts are in the right place regardless of whether or not they were ultimately correct about language Austin thinks they're they're incorrect insofar as they have a way too narrow conception of language that's why he's doing this whole analysis of speech act which he argues are neither analytic nor synthetic but we know perfectly well how to use them and how to evaluate them but from the verificationist perspective if a sentence is not analytic or synthetic then it gets thrown out it's illegitimate the basic idea behind this the motive behind it is also pretty clear and and one can sympathize with this uh because the basic idea behind this was that if someone can't explain why a given sentence that they've uttered or written or whatever if they can't explain why a sentence can uh why or how a sentence can either be straightforwardly confirmed or disconfirmed then why should we believe that they themselves understand that sense in other words if you utter a sentence and you can't straightforwardly communicate to me how to determine its truth or falsity why should I have any confidence that you yourself have any idea what you're saying and so that's that's one of the underlying ideas here so ultimately besides its steep cost that is to say you have to Chuck an awful lot of sentences that are very important to us ethics Aesthetics metaphysics Etc so besides that steep cost verificationism was ultimately unsuccessful partly because of the entanglement of analytic and synthetic sentences and also because of the status of the verificationist Criterion itself in other words it's unclear in terms of the actual Criterion itself whether it's analytic or synthetic and how exactly we would demonstrate that without in a question begging fashion assume assume the Criterion being true ahead of time in other words what exactly is the status of the verificationist Criterion is it analytic or is it synthetic and so that itself is unclear and you can't it's hard to to see how you would demonstrate that without simply in a in a question begging fashion that is to say assuming what you're trying to prove without assuming that the Criterion is true ahead of time and so verificationism ultimately doesn't work and so it's got some it's got some uh internal sort of issues it's also uh it was also subject to some criticism about the interdependence of analytic and synthetic and people like Austin with this notion of speech acts push against verificationism and say look this is a much too narrow picture of language language is much more diverse and much more powerful than the verificationists think and so this is this is what Austin is referring to in that first highlighted box again very very influential perspective in philosophy in the first half of the 20th century now second highlighted box here Austin notes we that is even philosophers set some limits the amount of nonsense we'll prepare to admit we talk so that it was natural to go on to ask as a second stage whether many apparent pseudo-statements in other words statements that the verifications would have chucked really set out to be statements at all it is commonly come to be commonly held at many utterances which look like statements are either not intended to be statements at all in terms of in terms of uh simple descriptive statements are only intended in part to record or impart straightforward information about the facts so let's open up the second sticky note Austin is here doing something that we should always do with any argument and that is asking what the assumptions of the presuppositions are and so Austin is here questioning a presupposition of verificationism verificationism presumes assumes that sentences only work in one way as statement's conveying information what if that's not true says Austin well then perhaps sentences that work in different ways are legitimate even if they don't meet this verificationist Criterion because they never set out to work in the way that the sentences that the verification is thought were legitimate they don't work in the way that those sentences operate even though they may seem to work in that way in other words the verificationists assume that sentences only work in one way to convey information and that those sentences can be analyzed either internally or externally but what happens if that assumption is not true if sentences are used in different ways well then if they're used in different ways then you can't say that the verificationist Criterion is the be-all end-all of what determines whether or not a sentence is legitimate because to say that the verification is Criterion is the be all end-all in terms of determining whether or not sentences are legitimate presupposes that sentences only legitimately work in one way the way that the verificationist Criterion argues sentences have to work in order to be legitimate and so again one of the things that Austin is doing is he's pushing against what he regards as that too narrow conception of the of the view of language that verificationism has now preliminary isolation of the performance second part of this chapter so now that he's laid out uh sort of what he's doing here in terms of giving us a broader picture of how sentences work now he's going to start getting into some detail about these speech Acts or performatives and so he notes Here in the first highlighted box there on the left he says the type of utterance we are to consider here is not of course a general type of nonsense though misuse of it can as we shall see in gender rather special varieties of nonsense rather it's one of our second class the masqueraders so let's unpack what he's talking about there masqueraders here mean sentences that are assumed to be statements of fact but which are in reality neither that nor just nonsense rather they appear on the surface to be similar in form to statements of fact that's the masquerading bit but they actually do something quite different namely they change states of Affairs and these kinds of sentences are what Austin will dub speech Acts or performatives and he argues that in ordinary language we use speech acts performatives all the time we know exactly how they work how to evaluate them and they do not fall within that basic assumption from the verificationists that's legitimate sentences can only work in one way these speech Acts or perform it is working in an entirely different way and thus they cannot be they cannot be evaluated by the verificationist Criterion and simply thrown out because they don't happen to meet that Criterion because the Criterion itself presupposes that sentences only work in one way to Simply communicate information Austin says if you drop that underlying assumption you'll see that sentences work in all sorts of different ways and some of them like speech Acts work in a way that actually transforms states of Affairs so let's get to some some examples and some detail here on the right side Austin notes first of all these speech acts a they don't describe a report or constate anything at all and they're not true and false in a straightforward sense and that was that was something else that the that the verifications Criterion presupposed it presupposed that legitimate sentences are only sentences that basically communicate information and thus the notion of Truth and falsity that we use to evaluate them is a sort of a stripped down notion of Truth and falsely applicable to only those kinds of sentences and everything else gets chucked out the window and Austin is saying no there are uh different kinds of sentences in language and it's it's not just these straightforward sort of descriptive sentences but we use sentences in all sorts of different ways including these speech Acts or performatives and therefore the speech acts are performed is when we evaluate them we don't evaluate them in that sort of uh strip down simplified uh reduced sense of Truth and falsity in terms of what the verificationists wanted to do with analytic or synthetic sentences in other words if if uh if we have a speech act a notion the notion of Truth and falsity we use with speech acts is a little bit different and we know exactly how to evaluate them we just don't evaluate them in the same way that we evaluate simple descriptive sentences so first of all Austin says in a that speech acts don't describe or report things in other words they do something different and therefore you can't really evaluate them in terms of Truth and falsity at least not the same kind of Truth and falsity that you use for a straightforward sort of factual sentence and number two B the uttering of the sentence is or is part of the doing of an action that's that illocutionary part and that illocutionary part actually helps to change the State of Affairs simply by the sentence itself it's doing that extra work in part bringing about that prolecutionary aspect now he has some examples here to make this clear and before we get to the examples I'm going to give you some information that comes from a little bit later in the uh in the chapter in the lecture here he says uh there are two basic categories of speech acts he says one is contractual where you bring contracts into existence and Bets and promises are sort of the the quintessential representatives of that kind of contractual speech act and then he says there are declaratory speech Acts um which uh which change uh um the the way things are in other words they declare things to be the case and so they change sort of uh something status let's say so some examples here the first one is from a marriage ceremony I do I take this person to be my lawfully wedded spouse as uttered in the course of the marriage ceremony now this is a crucial part of the actual change in the State of Affairs and as Austin will point out um these speech acts have to be uttered in the correct context in other words you can't just stand on a random street corner and yell at some random passerby hey I take you to be my lawfully wedded spouse it's the speech Act is not going to have the effect uh that that it would have in ordinary circumstances but in ordinary circumstances within the correct context then this kind of utterance is crucial in terms of the transformation of the State of Affairs and here we can we can talk about that transformation in terms of this being both a declaratory and contractual speech act in other words when you say I take this person to be my lawfully wedded spouse you are bringing a contract into existence and you are bringing the contract into existence in part by the uttering of these words it's also a declaratory kind of speech act because your status has now changed and you can see that for example when you go and pay your taxes it's a different tax rate when you're married than when you're single and so this is an example of a contractual speech Act second kind of contractual speech act this is more of a declaratory where you change something status I named this ship the Queen Elizabeth as uttered when smashing the bottle against the stern so let me Smash the champagne bottle against the ship it's no longer simply a hunk of metal in a shipyard it's the Queen Elizabeth third example I give him bequeath my watch to my brother as occurring in a will notice how is the watches property status transformed it is transformed crucially by the use of this kind of sentence after the use of this kind of sentence for example when the will is read out after after someone's death then the watch becomes someone else's property that changes the State of Affairs it brings things into existence now the watch is the property of someone else in the same way that the status of of the hunk of metal got changed and now it's the Queen Elizabeth in the same way that the sentence uttered in a marriage ceremony brings a contract into existence and changes the status of the individuals fourth example and this is this is the easiest example of all of them to understand in terms of what's going on here with respect to the elocutionary aspect this is a bet and Bets and promises are quintessential sort of contractual speech acts they bring contracts into existence I bet you Sixpence it will rain tomorrow notice you don't have to write anything down nothing has to be sort of formalized you can just say this sentence and if the other party accepts then the State of Affairs is transformed in other words now there's a contract that exists and think about this sort of you know in terms of a practical example with respect to yourself let's say that there was an important life situation uh that that was coming up for you and you had your best friend promise you that they would be there to help you and you accepted this promise and so now there's a contract that exists in other words the person is obligated and you are expecting them uh to show up and to to fulfill the promise that they made to you notice also what happens let's say if they don't show up and if they don't have an excuse for not showing up you are going to at a minimum be very disappointed if not outright angry depending on how important this this important life event is and it may be important enough and and especially if the person doesn't have a good excuse um you may be upset with them enough such that it might break the friendship because of the contract that has been broken and that's what Austin is trying to get us to see here with these speech Acts or performatives language isn't just about the communication of information it actually changes or transforms states of Affairs and we do this all the time argues awesome we just don't realize it and again part of his his perspective on things as an ordinary language philosopher is that you start from people's ordinary usage of language and then you use that to figure out how language actually works you don't come up with this notion of a verifications Criterion and then try to fit your observations into the verificationist box and whatever doesn't fit you throw it out Noah says Austin you start from ordinary language by Ordinary People now let's go down a little further here so uh there on the left side he's talking about the uh the uh the extra action that is done the performance of a performative and on the right side he talks about those two different categories of speech acts that we mentioned they're either contractual or they're declaratory now last part of this first lecture can saying make it so now that Austin has fleshed out some of the nuts and bolts of the speech act and given us some examples he realizes that we're gonna perhaps resist this notion of language and we're going to ask him is this really true is it really true that language can change states of Affairs and is this true that that we can do this simply by uttering words by words coming out of our mouth and so he realizes he needs to flesh out this this uh this aspect and answer the question can simply saying it make it so foreign now the first thing he says here on the bottom of the left side is yes simply saying something can make it so but you have to be in the right circumstances again this goes back to uh the example that I gave you with the uh with the line from a merit ceremony you can't just utter that kind of sentence on a random street corner to a random passerby it's not going to have that effect but in the right circumstances in the appropriate circumstances yes it is a crucial part of the transformation of that State of Affairs likewise in terms of the proper circumstances top of the right side there he says for a bet to have been made it's generally necessary for the offer of the BET to have been accepted by a taker that's Again part of those appropriate circumstances so the you know with contractual speech acts the other person has to um has to accept so to speak uh the the the offer of the of the contract to be brought into existence and once they do then it's then it's live so to speak now here the bottom of the right side um Austin is uh considering the question okay we have the if we have the right circumstances we've got these speech acts they they transform states of Affairs but is this really possible just with words coming out of our mouth yes he says and so to analyze this a little more deeply especially in terms of Notions of Truth and falsity as applied to speech acts he wants to give us an example here and this example is taken from the uh the the ancient Greek tragedy the politics um and these are the tragedies or plays that we have uh from ancient Greece that were that were publicly performed um if you've never read any of the ancient Greek tragedies I'd encourage you to do so there's some of the deepest explorations of of uh The Human Condition and this line happens to come from one of those tragedies it's called the hippolysis and Austin just like uh most British intellectuals of of his day had a classical education and so this sort of example would have come naturally to him so let's backfill a little bit in terms of uh where this line comes from uh with respect to the play so hippolytus is the main character in a play of the same name from 428 BC by the Athenian playwright euripides um there are three great uh Athenian playwrights whose plays we have remaining to us uh first one is escalus the second one is Sophocles he's the guy that wrote uh the the famous play Oedipus the King and the third one is euripides um and the ancient Greek tragedies they're important not just because they're deep explorations of The Human Condition but also because they continue to be important sources of inspiration for modern thinkers for example um a good part of what Freud was doing is simply being a very uh very close reader of these ancient Greek tragedies amongst other things so for example the whole notion of the Oedipus complex it's actually there in Sophocles play Oedipus the King it's actually there in the text Freud didn't invent that and that's precisely why he called it the Oedipus complex now this is this is a line from the play the hippolytus and so let me give sort of a quick uh thumbnail sketch of what's going on here in the play and then we'll get to the line that Austin quotes So the hippolytus is a play about revenge particularly uh and specifically about the Revenge of the goddess Aphrodite who represents um sexual love or Eros in the Greek the Revenge of Aphrodite on the main character hippolytus now hippolytus is a devotee a follower of another of the Olympian deities in the uh in the pantheon of uh of the ancient Greeks and that is Artemis goddess of the Hunts and the sister of Apollo Artemis was known as Diana to the Romans and uh Artemis is one of uh one of very few uh especially of the Olympian deities uh who is virginal and all of those deities incidentally are female apparently the the ancient Greeks did not believe that the male deities were capable of of this sort of restraint certainly not Zeus if you know anything about ancient Greek mythology but in any case a politus is a follower of Artemis and so in in part to honor Artemis he has taken a vow of virginity and he's not just taking a bow of virginity but he actively despises and disdains that aspect of human nature that is represented by Aphrodite namely uh uh sexual longing arrows desire and so Aphrodite feels that he is uh not respecting her that he is insulting her and if you know anything about Greek mythology the last thing you want to do is to disrespect to insult any of the deities particularly the main Olympian deities because they will get the revenge on you and the revenge is typically very brutal and that is the case here and so Aphrodite decides okay you're gonna disrespect what I represent in terms of that aspect of human nature um fine I'm going to get my revenge and the revenge is is really bad as it typically is when you anger the deities and so Aphrodite makes a politicism stepmother fall in love with him the stepmother is the queen Phaedra and Phaedra is distraught she's she's suicidal about these thoughts she's having it's not her fault it's these thoughts are being placed in Her Mind by Aphrodite and and Phaedra is just a pawn in this larger plan of Revenge and So eventually Phaedra's uh maidservant decides to go to hippolytus she tells the queen look just uh let me go to a politics and see if I can work things out so the maidservant goes to hippologists and this is where the this is where the line comes from she she asks a politist to promise her to make a contractual speech act that whatever she's going to tell him that he won't breathe a word of it to anyone now politic says fine okay I promise and then the maidservant tells him what's going on whereupon a politics goes into this the the to this long over the top rant about uh basically it's a misogynistic rant about how women are the cause of everything that's wrong in the world and even though the ancient Greeks were themselves um misogynistic this is such a long and extended Ranch you can tell that the that euripides has sort of put this in here in order to you know in order to make a politics look ridiculous even in the context of ancient Greek society and so then hippologist starts asking himself if he can wiggle out of the contractual speech act that he had made with the maidservant and this is where the line comes from so he tries to he tries to split apart in this in this sort of uh conversation he has with himself um he tries to split apart the saying and the intending in other words with this line he says my tongue swore but my heart or mind or other backstage artiste did not and what Austin wants to ask here in terms of using this line as an example he wants to ask us okay can we split apart the saying and the intending can we split apart the external words that we're using and the internal intention can we let hippolytus off the hook in other words um and Austin is going to say no you have to with speech acts assume that the internal intent is there even if you can't verify it until it for example comes time for somebody to fulfill their promise now ultimately in terms of the the actual play um in terms of this in terms of this elaborate plan of Revenge hippolytus refuses to break his promise and that in and of itself is going to help Aphrodite uh achieve her goal of Revenge on hypothesis how exactly that happens you'll have to read the Plata to find out I won't give you any spoilers now so that's where that line comes from and so the basic question here that Austin is asking is can we allow the splitting apart in a speech Act of the external words and the internal intention he says no in order for a speech act to work in order for the speech act to do the extra work that it does you have to assume inner intent and so he notes here at the at the at the bottom of this highlighted box he says accuracy and morality alike are on the side of the plane saying that our word is our bond in other words and you can see this especially with contractual speech acts if you can't take for granted somebody's inner intent then the extra work that is done by by bringing the contract into existence for example with a better a promise that contract isn't going to come into existence because you're not going to take for granted their inner intent to follow through with what they've what they've promised or to pay up if they lose the BET and so Austin says no with a speech act with a performative you have to assume inner intent even though um for example with bets and promises you can't verify that until it comes time for the person to pay up or to fulfill whatever their promises now what about this notion of Truth and falsity Austin says well we use a different sense of Truth and falsity when we're evaluating speech acts so just like speech acts don't simply communicate information they transform states of Affairs we know how to evaluate them in the way that we evaluate them is a little bit different than with these uh simpler sort of descriptive sentences so here's what he says we'll start here a few lines down from the top on the right side he says do we not actually when such intention is absent speak of a false promise he says sure we speak of a false promise but that's not false in the sense of a normal let's say synthetic descriptive sentence it's not false in the sense in which I tell you that my car is red but then you go out and check and you find out that it's blue it's a different kind of falsity why because he says so to speak is not to say that the utterance I promise that is false in the sense that though he states he does he doesn't or that though he describes he misdescribes in other words it's not like somebody telling you that the car is one color and then you find out that it's another color that's not the sense of falsity why because if somebody makes a false promise the promise is still live and valid the sense of falsity here doesn't have anything to do with um the the idea that all of a sudden the promise vanishes into thin air no it's still a live promise so what do we mean when we use the word false for example when we describe a false promise well we're not using false in the sense in which we use it in descriptive sentences where if you say something is one way and then you check and it's actually not that way at all because here with promises the promise is still valid it's still live so what sense of false are we referring to here when we describe a false promise well he says the person who utters a false promise does indeed promise the promise is not void although it's given in bad faith as utterance is perhaps misleading probably deceitful doubtless wrong but it's not a lie it's not a misstatement in other words once the promise is once the State of Affairs is transformed and the promise exists the contract exists just because it's false doesn't mean all of a sudden the contract vanishes into thin air and the person has no obligation the promise is still live so to speak um he says that most we might make out a case for saying that it implies or insinuates a falsehood or a misstatement in terms of a lack of intent but notice you can't pop open somebody's head and see whether or not the intention is there and so this is one of the reasons why you have to assume inner intent otherwise the extra work that the speech act does simply will not be done and he says moreover we do not speak of a false bet or a false christening and that we do speak of a false promise need commit us no more than the fact that we speak of a false move in other words just like in a board game if you make a false move it's not that you didn't move at all it's that there was something amiss there was something wrong about the way that you move and here in this case the something wrong has to do with the lack of inner intent so the promise is still live the person is still held accountable for the promise it's false in the sense in which the intent that needs to be there wasn't there and so there was there was something wrong about the promise there was something defective so to speak uh in the speech act but you're still going to hold the person accountable for the fact that they promised you the falseness of the promise doesn't make the promise disappear it simply indicates a lack of inner intent an inner intent that you must assume precisely because in terms of language and the way language works and we'll we'll revisit this point on numerous occasions uh in subsequent in subsequent readings in terms of the way communication works you and I never directly communicate mind to mind we always communicate indirectly and so um we never literally see each other's thoughts and in terms of the special speech acts uh unless you have some reason to suspect otherwise you have to assume inner intent and so in in order for the extra work to be done here it's only after the fact that you might find out that the person never intended to follow through with for example the contractual speech Act of a promise and so simply because we describe a promise as false doesn't mean that it's false in the sense in which your car is really blue when you said it was red it means that the promise which is still live has something missing and what's missing is what you have to assume in order to have the extra work be done that a speech act does namely the change in the State of Affairs and so what's missing here is the inner intent so he notes we do not speak of a false better a false christening and that we do speak of a false promise need commit us no more than the fact that we speak of a false move false is not necessarily used of statements only in other words just like there are different kinds of sentences that do different kinds of things we don't simply use the word true or false in one simple straightforward strip down kind of fashion in other words when we're evaluating descriptive sentences that's one sense of true and false we're talking about speech acts that's a different kind of true or false and so with a speech act if we say it's a false promise it doesn't mean that the promise evaporates or that you're not going to hold somebody accountable rather there's something defective in that contractual speech act that causes it uh to to cause that causes it not to uh not to uh have the have the change in the situation uh that the person uh that the person was committed to come about in other words the person promises to do something they don't do it uh and they don't do it let's say because they lack an inner intention now as the State of Affair has been changed anyway yes because the promise is live the contract is live even though they end up not following through and so not sort of doing what they what they promised they would do nonetheless the State of Affairs is transformed because the promise is live and the promise is still uh one that they are held accountable for even though they lack the inner intention to follow through with it so as Austin says false is not necessarily used of statements only there's a diversity of ways that we apply the word uh false or true just like there's a diversity in the sorts of sentences that we use and we don't just use sentences to describe things sometimes we use sentences to actually change states of Affairs and the uttering of the sentence the sentence itself argue because Austin is a crucial part in how we do that hence the title of the entire work how to do things with words words don't just describe they actually transform the world and this is again this is a nice segue into uh this this deeper sort of structural analysis of language and it gives us a deeper appreciation for all the different things that language can do it doesn't just describe things it actually helps us transform the world on an everyday basis remember Austin is an ordinary language philosopher and he's simply trying to flesh out here what you and I do every single day we just don't realize that we're doing this in terms of language and so we don't realize the power and the complexity and the diversity of our language Behavior so that is Austin and a brief look at speech Acts or performance