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You're listening to the Parsley Xamon Life episode 186 Part 2 on Jail Austin's How to Do Things with Words.

Last time we laid out what a performative is, it's a kind of statement that's not primarily true or false.

It's like I do in a marriage ceremony. You're not describing that you do. You are performing the act of marriage or at least initiating it in uttering that performative.

And then we said how his ultimate goal here in separating performatives and statements,

is ultimately to show how they're actually very similar and how the statement is just kind of a subsection of the performative of a speech act.

I think we can fast forward through lecture five.

He's trying to make the point in there that you can't depend on grammatical form to identify performatives that if I'm an umpire and I yell out in the right context at the right time indicating that throw beat the runner to the point where you're in the right context.

I don't need to say I declare that you are out there can be different forms of performative acts that don't necessarily rely on grammar.

And that's where he introduces the concept to of like mood and emphasis. You can say out out out out, you know, like all of which will influence or signal that a performative act is or is not being.

Yeah, he's looking for some criterion and grammar or the vocabulary that will tell us when is someone using a performative and when aren't they he's discovering that there is no definitive criterion like that.

In fact, the next few chapters are versions of that he's going to work through different cases of trying to come up with a clear criteria for performatives.

The grammaticals, one of them how to you know coming up with a list of all possible performatives is another.

Yeah, so this chapter, the chapter six, the shift now is to seeing if we can make a list of all verbs in which there is this asymmetry which he discovered in the previous chapter and the asymmetry is that when I say I bet I have actually made a bet versus when I say he bets or something like that I'm using the term descriptively.

Save the present historical like I typically bet for walking or something like that for in many other cases there's no such asymmetry it's descriptive in both cases so I walk could be a historical present it could be a habitual present like I habitually take walks or something like that.

But it is in any case descriptive it is not a performative one kind of circumstance he distinguishes of just matching the words to an action so you could say.

I hear by walk across the promenade or something and then you walk but that's still not a performative like actually saying that is not the doing of the thing that's actually descriptive you're describing what you are doing but it's not doing it.

I pompously announce that I walk that would be performance performative this is an interesting distinction right so that so you were walking across the promenade and my right there be no speech act you could make that would be performative of that unless by walk we mean more than what I'm doing.

So I mean more than walking unless it's actually has some ritual component to it right so there could be a quote unquote walk which is a ceremonial part ceremony for the community which is not actually performed unless someone says I hear by walk and then begins the walk.

But other than that ceremony unless there's a ceremonial component like that no this is a really interesting distinction because he never talks about normal verbs.

There are names of actions except for these performative ones which in a funny way they're performative but there are other verbs that are also performative or feel like they are performative and then I'm doing something right but they're not doing something in the way he's talking about where the act is is it connecting us with people or it made me wonder like want to think about what the differences between bedding and walking and we've been talking about how that that I say I'm not talking about that.

I say I bet that's a performative act and if I say I walk that's not performative but it does sure feel like when I'm walking I'm performing something and yet if I make the motion like I'm in the bedding pool and I just raise my hand or whatever it is that showing that I'm betting that could actually be the performative I am betting without my saying anything exactly exactly also there are circumstances under which any assertion like I walk could be performative right if they're performing.

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