J. L. Austin

Austin was born in Lancaster, England, the second son of Geoffrey Langshaw Austin (1884–1971), an architect, and Mary Hutton Bowes-Wilson (1883–1948; née Wilson).

John Langshaw Austin, OBE, FBA (26 March 1911 – 8 February 1960) was a British 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—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 providing his theory of speech acts, makes 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.

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 (Greek and Latin) and in the following year won the Gaisford Prize for Greek prose.

In finals in 1933 he received a first in Literae Humaniores (Philosophy and Ancient History).

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 (particularly the Theaetetus).

His contemporary influences included G. E. Moore, John Cook Wilson and H. A. Prichard.

These contemporary influences shaped their views about general philosophical questions on the basis of careful attention to the more specific judgements we make.

They took our specific judgements to be more secure than more 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" Moore, Wilson, and Prichard.

During World War II Austin joined the military in July 1940, and married his student Jean Coutts in spring 1941.

Austin served in the British Intelligence Corps, leading up to 500 analysts.

Known as "the Martians", the group's preparation for D-Day helped Allied casualties to be much lower than expected.

Austin left the army with the rank of lieutenant colonel and was honored for his intelligence work with an OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire), 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.

How to Do Things with Words (1955/1962) is perhaps Austin's most influential work.

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:

He goes on to say that when something goes wrong in connection with a performative utterance it is, as he puts it, "infelicitous", or "unhappy" rather than false.

The action which 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 performed the act of naming the ship.

Other examples include: "I take this man as my lawfully wedded husband," used in the course of a marriage ceremony, or "I bequeath this watch to my brother," as occurring in a will.

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 says 'Is Jeff's shirt red?', to which Sue replies 'Yes'.

John has produced a series of bodily movements which result in the production of a certain sound.

He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1956 to 1957.

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.

At the time of his death, he was developing a semantic theory based on sound symbolism, using the English gl-words as data.