 In his “A Plea for Excuses” (1957), Austin argues that the minimal requirement for an agent to be responsible for an action of theirs is that it be incorrect to characterize the action in one or another way as something for which they were not fully responsible—as something for which they have an excuse. We might, for example, characterize a happening as an accident, a mistake, involuntary, unintentional, inadvertent, or as due (in part) to clumsiness, lack of appreciation of circumstances, or incompetence. Where an act is performed, and where no excuse is available, the action is one for which the actor counts as fully responsible. Where one or another type of excuse is available, the specific type of excuses that are available mitigate in one or another specific way the subject’s responsibility for the occurrence of an action or its consequences, and so the extent to which the action is to be counted as free. An excuse may do this by mitigating in various ways the subject’s responsibility either for an action considered as a whole, or for proper sub-components of the action, or for consequences of the action, or by indicating ways in which a happening is not (a paradigmatic case of) an action. The varieties of pretending that Austin discusses in his “Pretending” (1958a) are of importance to him, at least in part, because they provide for some distinctive forms of excuse. For instance, one might seek to excuse what appeared to be an action of type A by claiming that the agent was only pretending to A, pretending to be A-ing, or pretending that they were A-ing. (One of Austin’s aims in the paper is to distinguish those ways of pretending.)