ABSTRACT
Stanley Cavell investigates and criticizes Austin’s treatment of the role of emotion in human speech, as that appears under the heading of the “perlocutionary” aspect or dimension of how we do things with words. In particular, Cavell questions Austin’s declaration that “the perlocutionary sense of ‘doing an action’ must somehow be ruled out as irrelevant to the sense in which an utterance, if the issuing of it is the ‘doing of an action,’ is a performative” (HDTW, 110);2 for that division between the perlocutionary and the performative is motivated, so Austin declares, by the thought that
[c]learly any, or almost any, perlocutionary act is liable to be brought off, in sufficiently special circumstances, by the issuing, with or without calculation, of any utterance whatsoever, and in particular by a straightforward constative utterance (if there is such an animal).
