J. L. Austin

John Langshaw Austin

Full name	John Langshaw Austin
Born	March 26, 1911
Died	February 8, 1960(1960-02-08) (aged 48)
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Ordinary language philosophy, Linguistic philosophy, Analytic philosophy
Main interests	Philosophy of language, Philosophy of mind, Ethics, Philosophy of perception
Notable ideas	Speech acts, Performative utterance Ordinary language philosophy
Influenced by G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, Gilbert Ryle
Influenced Paul Grice, H.L.A. Hart, John Searle, Stanley Cavell, R. M. Hare William Alston

John Langshaw Austin (March 26, 1911^[1] – February 8, 1960) was a British philosopher of language, born in Lancaster and educated at Shrewsbury School and Balliol College, Oxford University. Austin is widely associated with the concept of the speech act and the idea that speech is itself a form of action. Consequently, in his understanding language is not just a passive practice of describing a given reality, but a particular practice that can be used to invent and affect realities. His work in the 1950s provided both a theoretical outline and the terminology for the modern study of speech acts developed subsequently, for example, by John R. Searle, François Récanati, Kent Bach, Robert M. Harnish, and William P. Alston (the Oxford-educated American philosopher).

He occupies a place in philosophy of language alongside Wittgenstein and his fellow Oxonian Ryle in staunchly advocating the examination of the way words are ordinarily used in order to elucidate meaning, and avoid philosophical confusions. Unlike many ordinary language philosophers, however, Austin disavowed any overt indebtedness to Wittgenstein's later philosophy, calling Wittgenstein a "charlatan".^[2] His main influence, he said, was the exact and exacting common-sense philosophy of G. E. Moore. His training as a classicist and linguist influenced his later work.^[3]

Austin made another significant contribution to philosophy, as well, of a very different sort. In 1950, he published a translation of Gottlob Frege's Foundations of Arithmetic.^[4] Together with Peter Geach and Max Black's book Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, published in 1952, Austin's translation was what made Frege's writings available to the English-speaking world and thus helped establish Frege's important place in analytic philosophy. The translation is still widely used today.

Biography

The second son of Geoffrey Langshaw Austin (1884–1971), an architect, and his wife Mary Bowes-Wilson (1883–1948), Austin was born in Lancaster on 26 March 1911. During the Great War, the family fled to Scotland, where Austin's father became the secretary of St Leonard's School, St Andrews. Austin was educated at Shrewsbury School and Balliol College, Oxford, holding classical scholarships at both. He arrived at Oxford in 1929 to read Literae Humaniores ('Greats'), and in 1931 gained a First in classical moderations and also won the Gaisford Prize for Greek prose. Greats introduced him to serious philosophy and gave him a life-long interest in Aristotle. In 1933, he got first class honours in his Finals.^[3]

After serving in MI6 during World War II, Austin became White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford. He began holding his famous "Austin's Saturday Mornings" where students and colleagues would discuss language usages (and sometimes books on language) over tea and crumpets, but published little.^[5]

Austin visited Harvard several times in the mid-fifties, in 1955 delivering the William James Lectures 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".^[6] It was at this time that he met and befriended Noam Chomsky.

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

Austin died at the age of 48 of liver cancer. At the time, he was developing a semantic theory based on sound symbolism, using the English gl-words as data.

How to Do Things With Words

How to Do Things With Words is perhaps Austin's most influential work. In it he attacks what was in his time a predominant account in philosophy, namely, the view that the chief business of sentences is to state facts, being "true" when they succeed and "false" when they fail in that business. In contrast to this common 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:

• Again, though they may take the form of a typical indicative sentence, performative sentences are not used to describe (or "constate") and are thus not true or false; they have no truth-value.
• Second, to utter one of these sentences in appropriate circumstances is not just to "say" something, but rather to perform a certain kind of action.^[7]

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. ^{[8] [9]}

The action which is performed when a 'performative utterance' is issued belongs to what Austin later calls a speech-act ^[10] (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. Austin called such a performance a phonetic act, and called the act a phone. John’s utterance also conforms to the lexical and grammatical conventions of English – that is, John has produced an English sentence. Austin called 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, and he has elicited an answer from Sue.

Asking a question is an example of what Austin called an illocutionary act. Other examples would be making an assertion, giving an order, and promising to do something. To perform an illocutionary act is to use a locution with a certain force. It is an act performed in saying something, in contrast with a locution, the act of saying something.

Eliciting an answer is an example of what Austin calls a perlocutionary act, an act performed by saying something. Notice that if one successfully performs a perlocution, one also succeeds in performing both an illocution and a locution.

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.

Sense and Sensibilia

In the posthumously published Sense and Sensibilia^[11] Austin criticises sense-data theories of perception, particularly that of A. J. Ayer in The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge. Central to his case is an attack on a common argument from illusion (i.e., that cases of perceptual illusion show that on such occasions what we are directly aware of are mental images) and the "further bit of argument intended to establish that ...[we] always perceive sense-data."^[12] Austin argues that Ayer fails to understand the proper function of such words as "illusion", "delusion", "hallucination", "looks", "appears" and "seems", and uses them instead in a "special way...invented by philosophers."^[13] According to Austin, normally these words allow us to express reservations about our commitment to the truth of what we are saying, and that the introduction of sense-data adds nothing to our understanding of or ability to talk about what we see. Ayer responded to this critique in the essay "Has Austin refuted the sense-data theory?".^[14]

G. J. Warnock's Foreword – Having taken a course from Austin on this topic at Oxford in 1947, Sir Geoffrey Warnock (1923-95) says he put Austin's fragmentary lecture notes into sentence form, with the help of class notes from later students of the course, and claims to relate faithfully Austin's "argument" though not his exact wording.

Chapter 1 – Austin intends to debunk a theory of sense perception that dates back thousands of years (to Heraclitus) and picks recent expressions of it by Ayer, H. H. Price, and Warnock, because they express it fairly clearly.^[15] The theory states that we never see or directly perceive material objects but only sense-data or sense perceptions. Rather than start with the varied things we see — say, pens, rainbows, and after-images — philosophers tend to ask facilely for a general kind of thing and wind up unfair to the facts and to language while using "a certain special, happy style of blinkering philosophical English," Austin says.

Philosophical Papers

Austin's papers were collected and published posthumously as Philosophical Papers by J. O. Urmson and Geoffrey Warnock. The book originally contained ten papers, two more being added in the second edition and one in the third. His paper Excuses has had a massive impact ion criminal law theory.

"Are there A Priori Concepts?"

This early paper contains a broad criticism of Idealism. The question set dealing with the existence of a priori concepts is treated only indirectly, by dismissing the concept of concept that underpins it.

The first part of this paper takes the form of a reply to an argument for the existence of Universals: from observing that we do use words such as "grey" or "circular" and that we use a single term in each case, it follows that there must be a something that is named by such terms - a universal. Furthermore, since each case of "grey" or "circular" is different, it follows that universals themselves cannot be sensed.

Austin carefully dismantles this argument, and in the process other transcendental arguments. He points out first that universals are not "something we stumble across", and that they are defined by their relation to particulars. He continues by pointing out that, from the observation that we use "grey" and "circular" as if they were the names of things, it simply does not follow that there is something that is named. In the process he dismisses the notion that "words are essentially proper names", asking "...why, if 'one identical' word is used, must there be 'one identical object' present which it denotes".

In the second part of the article, he generalizes this argument against universals to address concepts as a whole. He points out that it is "facile" to treat concepts as if they were "an article of property". Such questions as "Do we possess such-and-such a concept" and "how do we come to possess such-and-such a concept" are meaningless, because concepts are not the sort of thing that one possesses.

In the final part of the paper, Austin further extends the discussion to relations, presenting a series of arguments to reject the idea that there is some thing that is a relation. His argument likely follows from the conjecture of his colleague, S. V. Tezlaf, who questioned what makes "this" "that".

"The Meaning of a Word"

The Meaning of a Word is a polemic against doing philosophy by attempting to pin down the meaning of the words used; for 'there is no simple and handy appendage of a word called "the meaning of the word (x)"'. Austin warns us to take care when removing words from their ordinary usage, giving numerous examples of how this can lead to error.

"Other Minds"

One of Austin's most highly acclaimed pieces.^[16] In it he criticizes the method which philosophers have used since Descartes to analyze and verify statements of the form “That person S feels X.” This method works from the following three assumptions:

(1) We can know only if we intuit and directly feel what he feels. (2) It is impossible to do so. (3) It may be possible to find strong evidence for belief in our impressions.

Although Austin agrees with (2), quipping that “we should be in a pretty predicament if I did”, he found (1) to be false and (3) to be therefore unnecessary. The background assumption to (1), Austin claims, is that if I say that I know X and later find out that X is false, I did not know it. Austin believes that this is not in line with the way we actually use language. He claims that if I was in a position where I would normally say that I know X, if X should turn out to be false, I would be speechless rather than self-corrective. He gives an argument that this is so by suggesting that believing is to knowing as promising is to intending— knowing and promising are the speech-act versions of believing and intending respectively.

"A Plea For Excuses"

"A Plea For Excuses" is both a demonstration by example, and a defense of the methods of ordinary language philosophy, which proceeds on the conviction that:

An example of such a distinction Austin describes in a footnote is that between the phrases "by mistake" and "by accident". Although their uses are similar, Austin argues that with the right examples we can see that a distinction exists in when one or the other phrase is appropriate.

Austin proposes some curious philosophical tools. For instance, he uses a sort of word game for developing an understanding of a key concept. This involves taking up a dictionary and finding a selection of terms relating to the key concept, then looking up each of the words in the explanation of their meaning. This process is iterated until the list of words begins to repeat, closing in a “family circle” of words relating to the key concept.

Works

Books

• Sense and Sensibilia. Ed. G. J. Warnock. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1964.
• Philosophical Papers. Ed. J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1961, 1979.
• How to do Things with Words: The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Ed. J. O. Urmson, Oxford: Clarendon, 1962. ISBN 0-674-41152-8

Papers

• "How to Talk: Some Simple Ways". Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. 53 (1953): 227-246.
• "Other Minds". In Austin, Philosophical Papers, ed. J. O. Urmson & G. J. Warnock). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961 [Originally published in 1946].
• "Performative Utterances". In Austin, Philosophical Papers, ed. J. O. Urmson & G. J. Warnock). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961.
• "A Plea for Excuses". In Austin, Philosophical Papers, ed. J. O. Urmson & G. J. Warnock). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961.
• "Performative-Constative". In The Philosophy of Language, ed. John R. Searle). Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971. 13-22.
• "Three Ways of Spilling Ink", The Philosophical Review, 75, no.4, (October 1966): 427-440.

In translation

• Otras mentes. In Austin, Ensayos filosóficos. Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1975. 87-117.
• Un alegato en pro de las excusas. In Austin, Ensayos filosóficos. Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1975. 169-92.
• Quand dire c'est faire Éditions du Seuil, Paris. Traduction française de "How to do things with words" par Gilles Lane, 1970.
• Palabras y acciones: Cómo hacer cosas con palabras. Buenos Aires: Paidós, 1971.
• Cómo hacer cosas con palabras.: Palabras y acciones. Barcelona: Paidós, 1982.
• Performativo-Constativo. In Gli atti linguistici. Aspetti e problemi di filosofia del linguagio. Milano: Feltrinelli, 1978. 49-60.
• Ensayos filosóficos. Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1975.
• Quando dire è fare (ed. Antonio Pieretti). Marietti, 1974.
• Come fare cose con le parole (eds. Carlo Penco & Marina Sbisà). Genova, Marietti, 1987.
• Saggi filosofici (ed. Paolo Leonardi). Milano, Guerini, 1990.

Secondary literature

• Berlin, Isaiah et al., ed. Essays on J.L. Austin. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1973.
• Cavell, Stanley. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (1979). New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. The major work by one of Austin's most prominent heirs. Takes ordinary language approaches to issues of skepticism, but also makes those approaches a subject of scrutiny.
• Fann, K.T., ed. Symposium on J.L. Austin. New York: Humanities Press, 1969.
• Kirkham, Richard (Reprint edition: March 2, 1995). Theories of Truth: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. ISBN 0-262-61108-2. Chapter 4 contains a detailed discussion of Austin's theory of truth.
• Passmore, John. A Hundred Years of Philosophy, rev. ed. New York: Basic Books, 1966. Chapter 18 includes a perceptive exposition of Austin's philosophical project.
• Putnam, Hilary. "The Importance of Being Austin: The Need of a 'Second Näivetē'" Lecture Two in The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body, and World New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. In arguing for "naive realism", Putnam invokes Austin's handling of sense-data theories and their reliance on arguments from perceptual illusion in Sense and Sensibilia, which Putnam calls "one of the most unjustly neglected classics of analytics philosophy" (25).
• Searle, John. Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
• Searle, John. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Searle's has been the most notable of attempts to extend and adjust Austin's conception of speech acts.
• Soames, Scott. Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century: Volume II: The Age of Meaning. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005. Contains a large section on ordinary language philosophy, and a chapter on Austin's treatment of skepticism and perception in Sense and Sensibilia.
• Warnock, G. J. J. L. Austin. London: Routledge, 1992.

Notes

See also

• Linguistics
• Pragmatics
• John Searle
• Adolf Reinach

References

• Pitcher, George. "Austin: a personal memoir". Essays on J.L. Austin, ed. Isaiah Berlin et al. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1973.
• Warnock, G.J. "John Langshaw Austin, a biographical sketch". Symposium on J. L. Austin, ed. K.T. Fann. New York: Humanities Press, 1969.
• Warnock, G.J. "Saturday Mornings". Essays on J.L. Austin, ed. Isaiah Berlin et al. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1973.