J. L. Austin
John Langshaw Austin was an English philosopher of language and leading proponent of ordinary language philosophy, best known for developing the theory of speech acts.
Austin pointed out that we use language to do things as well as to assert things, and that the utterance of a statement like "I promise to do so-and-so" is best understood as doing something—here, making a promise—rather than making an assertion about anything; hence the title of one of his best-known works, How to Do Things with Words.
Austin, in formulating this theory of speech acts, mounts a significant challenge to the philosophy of language, far beyond merely elucidating a class of morphological sentence forms that function to do what they name.
Austin's work ultimately suggests that all speech and all utterance is the doing of something with words and signs, challenging a metaphysics of language that would posit denotative, propositional assertion as the essence of language and meaning.
Life
Austin was born in Lancaster, Lancashire, England, the second son of Geoffrey Langshaw Austin, an architect, and Mary Hutton Bowes-Wilson. In 1921 the family moved to Scotland, where Austin's father became the secretary of St Leonards School, St Andrews. Austin was educated at Shrewsbury School in 1924, earning a scholarship in Classics, and went on to study classics at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1929.In 1930 Austin received a First in Classical Moderations and in the following year won the Gaisford Prize for Greek prose. In finals in 1933 he received a first in Literae Humaniores. Literae Humaniores introduced Austin to serious philosophy and gave him a lifelong interest in Aristotle. Austin won a prize fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, that year, but aside from being friends with Isaiah Berlin, he did not like its lack of structure, and undertook his first teaching position in 1935, as fellow and tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford.
Austin's early interests included Aristotle, Kant, Leibniz, and Plato. His contemporary influences included G. E. Moore, John Cook Wilson and H. A. Prichard. These contemporary philosophers shaped their views about general philosophical questions on the basis of careful attention to the more specific judgements we make, as they took our specific judgements to be relatively more secure than our general judgements. According to Guy Longworth, writing in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "It's plausible that some aspects of Austin's distinctive approach to philosophical questions derived from his engagement with ."
During World War II, Austin joined the military—in July 1940—and married his student Jean Coutts. Austin served in the British Intelligence Corps, and was responsible for as many as 500 analysts. Known as "the Martians", the group's preparation for D-Day helped keep Allied casualties much lower than expected. Austin left the army with the rank of lieutenant colonel and was honoured for his intelligence work with an OBE, the French Croix de Guerre, and the U.S. Officer of the Legion of Merit.
After the war Austin became White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, as a Professorial Fellow of Corpus Christi College. Publishing little, his influence would largely make itself felt through his teaching in lectures and tutorials and, especially, his famous 'Saturday morning meetings'.
Austin visited Harvard and Berkeley in the mid-fifties, in 1955 delivering the William James Lectures at Harvard that would become How to Do Things With Words, and offering a seminar on excuses whose material would find its way into "A Plea for Excuses". It was at this time that he met and befriended Noam Chomsky. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1956 to 1957. In 1950 he published an English language translation of Gottlob Frege's Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik.
Before he could decide whether to accept an offer to move to Berkeley, Austin died on 8 February 1960 at the age of 48, shortly after being diagnosed with lung cancer. His wealth, after probate, was £15,049 0s. 5d.. At the time of his death, he was developing a semantic theory based on sound symbolism, using the English gl-words as data.
Work
''How to Do Things with Words''
How to Do Things with Words is perhaps Austin's most influential work. This work is based on a series of lectures that Austin delivered at Oxford University and then at Harvard University. A version of these lectures was published as a book. In contrast to the positivist view, he argues, sentences with truth-values form only a small part of the range of utterances.After introducing several kinds of sentences which he asserts are neither true nor false, he turns in particular to one of these kinds of sentences, which he calls performative utterances or just "performatives". These he characterises by two features:
- First, performative sentences—though they may take the form of a typical indicative sentence—are not used to describe, and are thus neither true nor false; i.e., they have no truth-value.
- Second, to utter one of these sentences in appropriate circumstances is not just to say something, but rather to thereby perform a certain kind of action.
The action that is performed when a "performative utterance" is issued belongs to what Austin later calls a speech-act. More particularly, the kind of action Austin has in mind is what he subsequently terms the illocutionary act. For example, if you say "I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth", and the circumstances are appropriate in certain ways, then you will have done something special: namely, you will have thus christened the ship. Other examples include "I take this man as my lawfully wedded husband", or "I bequeath this watch to my brother". In all three cases the sentence is not being used to describe or state what one is doing, but being used to actually do it.
After numerous attempts to find more characteristics of performatives, and after having met with many difficulties, Austin makes what he calls a "fresh start", in which he considers "more generally the senses in which to say something may be to do something, or in saying something we do something".
For example: John Smith turns to Sue Snub and asks "Is Jeff's shirt red?", to which Sue replies "Yes". John has undertaken a series of bodily movements which result in the production of a certain sound; Austin calls such a performance a phonetic act, and the resulting "certain sound" a phone. John's utterance also conforms to the lexical and grammatical conventions of English—that is, John has produced an English sentence; Austin calls this a phatic act, and labels such utterances phemes. John also referred to Jeff's shirt, and to the colour red. To use a pheme with a more or less definite sense and reference is to utter a rheme, and to perform a rhetic act. Note that rhemes are a sub-class of phemes, which in turn are a sub-class of phones. One cannot perform a rheme without also performing a pheme and a phone. The performance of these three acts is the performance of a locution—it is the act of saying something.
John has therefore performed a locutionary act. He has also done at least two other things: he has asked a question of, and elicited an answer from, Sue; in so doing, he has performed two further speech-acts, as Austin would have it:
- Asking a question is an example of the illocutionary act. To perform an illocutionary act is to use a locution with a certain force; that is, in contrast to a locution—the act of saying something—an illocutionary act is an act performed in saying something. Other examples would be making an assertion, giving an order, and promising to do something.
- Eliciting an answer is an example of what Austin calls a perlocutionary act: an act performed by the saying of something. Whereas illocutions and locutions are alternative descriptions of the utterance itself, perlocutions are classifiable by the further effects of an utterance. Other examples would be a heeded warning, or a successful attempt at persuasion.
In the theory of speech acts, attention has especially focused on the illocutionary act; much less on the locutionary and perlocutionary act; and only rarely on the subdivision of the locution into phone, pheme and rheme.
Performative utterance
According to Austin, a "performative utterance" refers to the action of "performing" or "doing" a certain action; for example, when people say "I promise to do so and so", they are generating the action of making a promise by so speaking. If this is accomplished without any flaw, the performative utterance is "happy" or "felicitous"; if, on the other hand, one fails to do as promised, it is "unhappy", or "infelicitous". Notice that performative utterance is not truth-valuable; i.e., the judgements "true" and "false" do not apply.Austin variously opposes different categories of utterance in order to analyze the differences, or lack thereof, between them: explicit vs. implicit or inexplicit performatives; explicit performatives vs. primitive or primary utterances or performatives; and pure performatives vs. half-descriptive vs. descriptive utterances.
In How to Do Things With Words, which records Austin's lectures on this topic, examples are offered for each of these distinctions:
- For explicit or pure performatives, Austin gives the example of "I apologize"—the saying of which explicitly performs the speech-act, such that it would be nonsensical for someone to ask: "Does he or she really?"
- As an example of a half-descriptive utterance, Austin gives the phrase "I am sorry": there is some uncertainty as to whether the speaker is thereby offering an apology, or merely stating a fact; it could be either, absent clarifying context.
- A entirely descriptive utterance might be a statement such as "I repent": here we have speech merely reporting upon our interlocutor's feeling.
- Implicit performatives are those wherein the performance of an action is implied, but not expressly established; an example Austin uses is the phrase "I shall be there": one may ask, in this case, if the speaker is promising to be there, stating an intention, or reporting a prediction.
- A primary performative admits of some ambiguity in interpretation: these may be taken to be either implicit performatives, or else entirely non-performative utterances. A similar situation obtains with a statement such as "there is a bull in that field", which Austin gives as an illustration of a primitive utterance—does the speaker mean to warn us of the bull and thereby keep us out of the field, or is it merely an observation?