Yet in the right circumstances you can fire someone or quit a job just by uttering the right sort of sentence. You cannot stand on your head by saying that you are standing on your head, and you cannot convince someone that you love them by saying that you are convincing them that you love them. It does seem remarkable that you can do something just by saying what you are doing. Such a sentence has a remarkable property: To utter it is (typically) to perform an act of the very sort named by its main verb. For example, an employer can fire someone by saying "You're fired," and an employee can quit by saying "I quit." In uttering such a sentence, one is not merely saying what one is doing, one is actually doing it. Obviously, that is not the business of interrogative and imperative sentences, but Austin argued that even certain declarative sentences are typically used to do something other than make statements. At the beginning of How to Do Things with Words (1962), John Langshaw Austin challenged the common assumption that "the business of can only be to 'describe' some state of affairs, or to 'state some fact'" (p.
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