Words and deeds

You don’t need to write thick books and many articles to have a big impact on philosophy. Wittgenstein, for instance, published only one article and one book (the Tractatus) during his life. His Philosophical Investigations were more or less ready for publication, when he died. His other later published works were lecture notes taken by students and fragments and notes by Wittgenstein himself that were not (yet) meant to be published. Or take Edmund Gettier. His publication list is also short, but he has become famous by an article of only three pages (“Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?”). His other works have been forgotten, but this article, published in 1963, is still much discussed and belongs to the classics of epistemology.
Also J.L. Austin’s (1911-1960) publications list is short. Moreover, his most famous work How to do things with words has been published in 1962, so two years after his death, and it has not been edited by himself. It has become one of the most influential books in the philosophy of language, but the ideas Austin developed in this little book help also to understand what we do in daily life, when we are speaking. Actually, these ideas are very simple and looking back one wonders why nobody have had them before. But as it happens so often, ideas need a fertile soil to shoot, in this case the breeding ground of the relatively new analytical philosophy. Austin tells us that his first views on the theme were formed in 1939 and next he used them in an article in 1946. However, he fully developed his views only in his William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955, which were published only seven years later, in 1962.
Traditionally, certainly during the first days of analytical philosophy, language was seen to exist of statements that can be true or false. “The cat is on the mat”, is a typical example of such a statement. The cat is there on the mat or it isn’t there. In the first case the statement is true, in the second case it is false. But stop! This is quite a limited view on language, so Austin. Not all sentences are descriptive in this way and so not all sentences have a “truth value”. Take this sentence: “I do” (meaning “I take this person to be my lawful wedded wife/husband”). Or take these words: “I name this ship ‘Queen Elizabeth’ ”, while smashing the bottle against the stem. With sentences like these we don’t state a fact that can be true or false. Such sentences are also not meant to utter a statement that has a truth value. No, with such a statement we perform an act. By saying “I do”, I take the other person as my spouse. The utterance is not a description of what happens, which can be a right or a wrong description, but the utterance is an action; it is performing the act of marrying the other itself. Therefore Austin calls such a sentence a “performative sentence”. Although a performative sentence cannot be true or false, nevertheless something can go wrong. Then we say that this sentence was not uttered at the right place, it was a mistake, it was fake, it was infelicitous, or something like that.
Austin makes also clear that by speaking a sentence we can do different things. Take for example again the sentence “The cat is on the mat”. When uttering this sentence, we can mean to say that a certain animal is at a certain place, and nothing more. Austin calls uttering a sentence in this way a locutionary act. However, usually we have a further aim when uttering this sentence. For instance we want to inform you, so that you’ll not step on the cat; or maybe you are looking for the cat. Then we utter a warning, or give information, etc. Austin says then that we perform an illocutionary act by uttering this sentence. But it is also possible that we want that the person we are addressing brings the cat to us, or that this person gives the cat some milk: we want to bring about or achieve something with our words. If so, then we perform a perlocutionary act by uttering our sentence.
People often say: No words but deeds. Now we know that it is false contradiction. But who didn’t know that words can hurt … or can make you happy?

Source
J.L. Austin, How to do things with words. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962.