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J. L. Austin (1911–1960)

Austin was the central figure of Oxford “ordinary-language” philosophy in the years after the war, and the originator of speech act theory. His guiding conviction was that the distinctions worn into everyday language over centuries of use are subtler and more reliable than the ones philosophers invent at their desks, and that patient attention to how words are actually used dissolves much that had looked like deep philosophical difficulty. From that method came his most consequential discovery: that to say something is very often to do something — to promise, warn, name, or pronounce — so that language is a form of action, not merely a picture of facts.

J. L. Austin (1911–1960). English philosopher, educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy there from 1952. During the Second World War he served in British military intelligence, where his work on the D-Day landings earned wide respect for its precision. His influence was exerted as much through teaching and his famous Saturday-morning discussion groups as through publication; he published relatively little in his lifetime and died of cancer at 48. His major works — How to Do Things with Words, Sense and Sensibilia, and the collected Philosophical Papers — were assembled largely from lecture notes after his death.

Key concepts

Performatives and constatives. Austin began by isolating a class of utterances — “I promise,” “I name this ship,” “I do” (at a wedding), “I bet” — that do not describe anything and are not true or false, but perform the act they name. He called these performatives and set them against constatives, the fact-stating utterances philosophers had treated as the whole of language. Performatives are not true or false but felicitous or infelicitous: they succeed or misfire depending on whether the right conventions, persons, and circumstances are in place.

The collapse into a general theory: locution, illocution, perlocution. As How to Do Things with Words proceeds, Austin finds the performative/constative line will not hold — stating is itself a kind of doing, subject to its own felicity conditions. He replaces it with a threefold analysis of every speech act: the locutionary act (saying something with a sense and reference), the illocutionary act (what one does in saying it — warning, ordering, promising), and the perlocutionary act (the effect brought about by saying it — persuading, alarming, deterring). The illocutionary dimension — force as distinct from meaning — is his lasting contribution to the philosophy of language.

Ordinary-language method (“linguistic phenomenology”). Austin’s method was to assemble, with great care and often collaboratively, the fine distinctions the language already draws in some domain — the many ways an action can go wrong, in “A Plea for Excuses” (doing something by mistake, by accident, inadvertently, unwittingly) — on the view that these distinctions have survived because they mark differences that matter. He half-jokingly called this “linguistic phenomenology.” It is not a claim that ordinary language is the last word, but that it is the first word, and a far better starting point than philosophers’ coinages.

The attack on sense-data. In Sense and Sensibilia, Austin dismantles the sense-datum theory of perception, taking A. J. Ayer’s version as his target. He argues that the argument from illusion trades on a false dichotomy between “material things” and “sense data,” and that the ordinary vocabulary of perception — looks, appears, seems — is more discriminating than the theory it is supposed to support. The tidy philosophical picture, he shows, rests on a handful of over-simple contrasts.

Where Austin stops

Austin’s method depends on the fine distinctions of a particular natural language, and its critics have pressed how far the results generalise. Where he takes the survival of a distinction in ordinary English as evidence that it marks something real, others note that ordinary usage also preserves confusions, superstitions, and dead metaphor; the method offers no principled way to sort the discriminations worth keeping from the debris. How much philosophical weight the sheer fact of ordinary usage can bear is left unsettled.

His central positive theory was also cut short. How to Do Things with Words ends mid-development, and the taxonomy of illocutionary forces with which it closes is admittedly provisional — Austin calls it a beginning. It fell to Searle to give speech act theory a systematic form built on constitutive rules, and to later writers to press the questions Austin left open: how illocutionary force is conventionally fixed, and whether his exclusion of “non-serious” utterances (on the stage, in a poem) can be sustained — the very exclusion Derrida seized upon.

Key works

See also: Ryle · Wittgenstein · Searle