J. L. Austin

J. L. Austin (1911-1960) was White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford from 1952 and the central figure of postwar Oxford philosophy. His best-known book, How to Do Things with Words (1962), grew out of the William James Lectures he gave at Harvard in 1955. Its starting point is simple. When the registrar asks and you say "I do", you are not describing a wedding, you are getting married. "I name this ship", "I bet you ten euros", "I promise" work the same way. Austin called such utterances performatives.

What Austin shares with Wittgenstein

Austin, Wittgenstein and Gilbert Ryle are often grouped together as ordinary language philosophers, though the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Austin warns that the label hides real differences. The family likeness is clear enough. Both distrust theories that start from how language must work and look instead at how words are actually used. Both treat speaking as doing. In PI §23 Wittgenstein lists giving orders, reporting an event, making a joke, thanking, cursing, greeting and praying as so many language games. Austin's speech acts start from the same insight. Whether Austin learned it from Wittgenstein is uncertain: he was developing his own method in the 1930s and 1940s, though he discussed the Philosophical Investigations in his Saturday morning sessions in Oxford.

What Austin did differently

Austin wanted to classify. He distinguished the locutionary act (saying something meaningful), the illocutionary act (what you do in saying it: warning, promising, ordering) and the perlocutionary act (what you bring about by saying it: alarming, persuading). He listed the conditions under which a performative misfires, and he sorted illocutionary forces into five families. He even hoped for a future science of language built on such patient work.

Wittgenstein would have been wary. In the same PI §23 he insists that the multiplicity of language games is not fixed once and for all: new ones arise, others become obsolete. His aim was not a map of language but the relief of a particular philosophical cramp, while Austin enjoyed the mapping for its own sake. Austin also said that ordinary language is not the last word, only "the first word", a reminder that he saw it as a starting point for discovery, not only as a cure for confusion.

What came after

John Searle turned Austin's ideas into a systematic theory of speech acts. Stanley Cavell, who studied with Austin at Harvard, did something rarer: he read Austin and Wittgenstein together, as two ways of taking ordinary words seriously. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a clear overview of Austin's work.