Analytic & pragmatist · 1911–1960
J. L. Austin
Oxford philosopher of language who founded speech-act theory
Many utterances do not describe anything but perform an act: saying “I promise” or “I do” at a wedding is making a promise or getting married. Careful study of ordinary words is the best starting point for philosophy.
Life and thought
John Langshaw Austin (1911–1960) studied classics at Oxford and spent his career there. In the Second World War he rose to lieutenant colonel in British military intelligence, helping prepare the D-Day landings. As White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy from 1952 he led the “Saturday mornings”, where Oxford philosophers took ordinary words apart with great care. He published little; his main books were edited from his lectures after he died of cancer at forty-eight.
In the 1955 William James Lectures at Harvard, published as How to Do Things with Words (1962), Austin noticed that many sentences describe nothing. Saying “I do” at a wedding, “I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth” or “I promise” does not report an act; it performs one. Such utterances are not true or false, but they can misfire: a promise is void if you are not in a position to make it. He went on to argue that every utterance does several things at once, and his student John Searle turned these lectures into a systematic theory of speech acts, now standard in linguistics.