Chicago, Illinois. March 26, 2009.

But that is quite often not the way it goes. A bowler who appeals to the umpire is not required to ‘I appeal’, the foreman of a jury, in announcing the verdict, is required to say either ‘I announce …’, nor yet ‘We acquit’ or ‘We convict’, and an umpire in giving a batsman out is not required to say anything at all (he makes a conventional gesture). The principal reason for this seems to be that in these genuinely ‘conventional’ cases what the speaker is doing in speaking (or in the case of the umpire, gesturing) is already made wholly clear and manifest, in the circumstances, by the conventional procedure itself. We already know that at this stage of the formal proceedings in court, the foreman of the jury is announcing their verdict; so there is simply no need for him to say overtly that he is doing so, or in any way to indicate that he is doing so in what he says. We he needs to say is only what the verdict is; the rest is already clear, in the nature of the case.

Excerpted from chapter VIII, “Words and Deeds,” from J.L. Austin, The Arguments of the Philosophers by Geoffrey James Warnock, philosopher of language. Published by Taylor & Francis, 1989.