 Examples of performatives are: ‘I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth’—as uttered when smashing the bottle against the stem; ‘I give and bequeath my watch to my brother’—as occurring in a will (Austin 1962: 5). Performative are speech acts which bring about an outcome in the external world (e.g. that the name of the ship is the Queen Elizabeth or that my brother is the owner of what used to be my watch). Specifically, performatives are sayings which are also doings. In Searle’s terminology, merely saying something (‘I do’) counts as something else (becoming a wife). An important species of performatives are declarative speech acts (e.g. saying ‘I declare war’ in a certain context counts as going to war). A key point about performatives appears to be that it is by virtue of a convention that saying such and such in a given context brings the outcome about (Miller 1984). Accordingly, the outcome depends on collective acceptance (in the sense of compliance with the convention) and, indeed, to this extent the outcome is in part constituted by collective acceptance (in this sense). Searle himself speaks of constitutive rules at this point; rules that have the form ‘X counts as Y in context C’ (Searle 2010: 95).