How to Do Things with Words

There are sentences where I am not describing what I am doing, nor stating that I am doing it, but simply doing something. These kinds of utterances are neither true nor false.
I propose to call it a performative sentence or utterance or simply a "performative"
Many performatives are contractual ("I bet") or declaratory ("I declare war") utterances.

Things that can be and go wrong on the occasions of such utterances are infelicities:
- Misfires - Act purported but void
  - Misinvocations - Act disallowed
    - ?
    - Misapplications
  - Misexecutions - Act vitiated
    - Flaws
    - Hitches
- Abuses - Act professed but hollow
  - Insincerities
  - ?
An actor on a stage, a poem, or a soliloquy are special cases, used not seriously, but in ways parasitic upon normal use.

The boundary between "inappropriate persons" and "inappropriate circumstances" will necessarily not be a very hard and fast one. Indeed circumstances can clearly be extended to cover in general the natures of all persons participating.
We must at all costs avoid over-simplification, which one might be tempted to call the occupational disease of philosophers if it were not their occupation (see Intriguing Words, Expressions, Phrases)

Insincerity is when the circumstances are in order and the act is performed, not void, but I had no business to congratulate you or to condole you, feeling as I did.
For a certain performative utterance to be happy, certain statements have to be true.
In order to explain what can go wrong with statements we cannot just concentrate on the proposition involved (whatever that is) as has been done traditionally. We must consider the total situation in which the utterance is issued - the total speech act - if we are to see the parallel between statements and performative utterances, and how each can go wrong. So the total speech act in the total speech situation is emerging from logic piecemeal as important in special cases: and thus we are assimilating the supposed constative utterance to the performative.

At least in some ways there is a danger of our initial and tentative distinction between constative and performative utterances breaking down.
I must explain again that we are floundering here. To feel the firm ground of prejudice slipping away is exhilarating, but brings its revenges.

Historically, from the point of view of the evolution of language, the explicitly performative must be a later development than certain more primary utterances, many of which at least are already implicit performatives, which are included in most or many explicit performatives as parts of a whole.
It seems much more likely that the "pure statement is a goal, an ideal, towards which the gradual development of science has given the impetus, as it has likewise also towards the goal or precision. Language as such and in its primitive stages is not precise, and it is also not, in our sense, explicit: precision in language makes it clearer what is being said - its meaning: explicitness, in our sense, makes clearer the force of the utterances, or how (in one sense) it is to be taken.