J. L. Austin
| J. L. Austin | |
|---|---|
| Institutions | University of Oxford |
| Nationality | British |
| Death date | 1960-02-08 |
| Birth date | 1911-03-26 |
| Known for | Speech act theory; Performative utterances; Ordinary language method |
| Fields | Philosophy of language; Ordinary language philosophy |
| Notable works | How to Do Things with Words; Sense and Sensibilia |
| Wikidata | Q272615 |
John Langshaw Austin (1911–1960) was a British philosopher of language and a leading figure in the Oxford “ordinary language” school. He is best known for developing the theory of speech acts – the idea that when people speak, they are often performing actions, not just stating facts. In his famous 1955 lectures (published posthumously as How to Do Things with Words), Austin showed that utterances like “I promise” or “I apologize” do something (making a promise or an apology) rather than describe something. This insight reshaped modern thought about meaning and communication. Austin’s work stressed that ordinary language is rich with subtle distinctions, and he urged philosophers to take everyday speech seriously in solving philosophical problems.
Early Life and Education
Austin was born on March 26, 1911, in Lancaster, England. His family moved to Scotland when he was young. He won a scholarship to study Classics at Shrewsbury School, excelling in Greek and Latin. In 1929 he went to Balliol College, Oxford, to read Classics, but he soon became interested in philosophy. He earned first-class honors in Literae Humaniores (the classics course that includes philosophy) in 1933. He was elected to a prize fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, but preferred teaching and in 1935 became a fellow and tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford.
Austin’s early philosophical influences included Aristotle and Plato, but also contemporary Oxford thinkers like G.E. Moore and H.A. Prichard, who emphasized clarity, common sense, and careful attention to language. During World War II (1940–1945), Austin served as an officer in British military intelligence. Stationed in the U.K. as part of the analysis team preparing for D-Day, he rose to lieutenant-colonel and was honored with an OBE and other awards for his work. He married his student Jean Coutts in 1941 and the couple had four children.
After the war, Austin returned to Oxford. In 1952 he was appointed the prestigious White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford and became a fellow of Corpus Christi College. He published relatively little, but became widely influential through his teaching, lectures, and the weekly discussion seminars he organized. In 1955 he delivered the William James Lectures at Harvard University (later published as How to Do Things with Words). Austin died in Oxford of lung cancer on February 8, 1960, at the age of 48.
Major Works and Ideas
Austin’s most famous work is How to Do Things with Words (1962), a collection of lectures that laid out his theory of speech acts. He argued that many sentences do not merely describe the world (and so cannot be judged true or false) but actually perform actions. Such performative utterances include phrases like “I promise”, “I apologize”, “I name this ship...”, or “I do” (as in wedding vows). When properly uttered under the right conditions, each act performs exactly what it declares: saying “I promise to help” is literally making the promise. Austin showed that these utterances require certain circumstances (or “felicity conditions”) to succeed. For example, “I now pronounce you married” only works if the speaker is a duly authorized officiant. If those conditions fail (for instance, if the officiant is not a real priest), the performative utterance is infelicitous or “unsuccessful,” rather than false.
He introduced a now-famous distinction among three aspects of any speech act. The locutionary act is simply the act of saying a sentence with a certain meaning (the utterance itself). The illocutionary act is the intended function of that utterance – for example, asserting, questioning, commanding, promising, or warning. The perlocutionary act is the effect the utterance has on listeners or the situation – such as persuading, enlightening, amusing, or irritating someone. Austin insisted that each spoken sentence often involves all three aspects: by speaking (locution), the speaker conventionally performs an act (illocution), producing some effect (perlocution). These distinctions between locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts became central in later philosophy of language and linguistics.
Austin also coined the term “descriptive fallacy.” This capture a key idea: it is a mistake to treat every utterance as if it were a factual statement. For example, the word “thank you” is not meant to describe anything; it functions as an act of gratitude. Interpreting it as a proposition to evaluate as true or false is to commit the descriptive fallacy. This concept was partly a critique of logical positivism (the dominant view in early 20th-century analytic philosophy) which held that meaningful sentences must be truth-evaluable. Austin argued that humans use language in many ways beyond making truth-claims – to ask, warn, promise, command, and more – and so these non-constative uses deserve philosophical attention.
Another of Austin’s important works is Sense and Sensibilia (1962), a posthumous collection of papers on perception and skepticism. In it he critically examined “sense-datum” theories of perception that were common at the time. He demonstrated that ordinary speech about perception already makes distinctions that such theories blur. For instance, he pointed out differences between how we talk about “how things look” versus “how things are,” showing that confusion often arises by mixing up appearance and reality in language. These ordinary distinctions, Austin argued, can undercut skeptical arguments about illusion or hallucination that rely on treating appearances and reality as straightforwardly comparable.
In his essay “Other Minds” (1946), Austin explored how we talk about knowing other people’s mental states. He attacked a traditional view of knowledge that was inspired by Descartes: the idea that to know someone is feeling or thinking something, we would have to somehow “intuit” their state directly – which of course we can’t do. Austin argued instead that ordinary language reveals a different story. We don’t usually say “I know X” in strict factive sense if it later turns out we were wrong; rather, we would say we “think” or “believe.” He showed that our everyday use of terms like “know” and “think” implies that knowledge claims are retracted silently when disconfirmed. This meant belief and knowledge act like promise and intention: when I say “I will do this,” I mean it, but if I fail, I don’t always angrily proclaim “I never promised!” – similarly, “I know” may simply drop away rather than declare itself false. This pragmatic angle on knowledge helped dissolve a philosophical problem by showing how language already handles it.
In 1956 Austin gave the presidential address of the Aristotelian Society, later published as “A Plea for Excuses.” In it he defended the ordinary language method. He argued that our common language has evolved fine-grained distinctions that solve many problems on their own. For example, we distinguish between “doing something by mistake” and “by accident” even though these may seem synonymous – the difference shows up in actual usage. Austin illustrated a playful technique: take a word (like “know”) and look up its dictionary definition, then look up all the words in that definition, and repeat until words reappear. The result is a “family circle” of language that reveals how ordinary usage is interconnected. This method avoids inventing new concepts in an “armchair,” and instead trusts that language itself has survived only useful distinctions over time.
Method
Austin was a central figure in ordinary language philosophy, a movement that held philosophical puzzles often dissolve when one carefully examines everyday language use. He believed philosophers should pay close attention to how words function in ordinary contexts, and that many so-called problems arise from misusing or over-systematizing language. For Austin, ordinary words had been tested by generations of use; they contained subtle distinctions and connections that armchair definitions often miss or destroy. He famously quipped that twisting words out of their normal setting was likely to create confusion rather than clarity.
His approach was painstakingly analytical and concrete. One biographer relates that Austin “was constitutionally unable to refrain from applying the same standards of truth and accuracy to a philosophical argument, sentence by sentence, as he would have applied to any other serious subject.” In practice, this meant whenever Austin encountered a philosophical claim, he would break it down into the simplest utterances and ask: Is this true? Is this what we actually mean? What contexts or intentions are at work here? He urged philosophers to either use ordinary vocabulary truthfully or to be ready to build a technical vocabulary with real care.
Austin stressed that general philosophical questions should be tied to ordinary assertions people already regard as true. For example, if philosophers ask “What is knowledge?”, Austin would look at all the ordinary things people say involving “know” or “know-how” and see what patterns emerge. He warned that trying to impose simple labels on complicated situations is a mistake; “fact is richer than diction,” he said. By entertaining multiple scenarios and grilling our everyday claims, one can often find that apparent philosophical conundrums vanish or become reformulated. This method was a hallmark of his famous Saturdays Morning seminars, where he and colleagues would dissect key philosophical works (like Aristotle’s Ethics or Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations) with rigorous attention to each phrase.
Overall, Austin’s method combined respect for common sense with analytic precision. He opposed the idea of starting from axioms or abstract definitions. Instead, he “dissolved” problems by showing that the way we normally talk about them already contains the distinction needed. Many of his colleagues at Oxford (like Gilbert Ryle and P.F. Strawson) followed the same approach, but Austin’s charm and wit in examples made his lectures particularly vivid. If anything, he was skeptical of grand theory: he preferred to solve puzzle after puzzle, trusting that the accumulation of clarified language use would be more reliable than speculative system-building.
Influence
Austin’s influence on philosophy and beyond has been vast. His speech act theory laid the groundwork for later developments in logic, linguistics, and communication theory. John Searle, one of his students, built on Austin’s ideas in Speech Acts (1969), introducing formal classifications of speech acts and arguing more systematically about their rules. Linguists created the field of pragmatics around understanding how context affects meaning, and the terms “illocutionary act” and “perlocutionary effect” are now standard in textbooks. Even outside philosophy, literary theorists and gender theorists took up Austin’s ideas: for example, Judith Butler’s notion of “performativity” (in gender studies) is inspired in part by the idea that saying something can instantiate an act.
In legal theory and ethics, Austin’s analysis of promises, excuses, and speech acts has had a subtle legacy. His essay “A Plea for Excuses” influenced thinking about the difference between an excuse and a justification in moral practice. Some legal scholars note that Austin showed how certain defenses (like “I didn’t mean to do it”) work by referencing ordinary distinctions of intent and responsibility etched in language. In general, his classroom and published lectures helped shape many Oxford philosophers of the next generation. Aside from Searle, Stanley Cavell (an American philosopher) adopted Austin’s ordinary language style to address skepticism and other issues in The Claim of Reason. The “Saturday Morning” sessions he led at Oxford created a community of thinkers who would carry these methods forward.
Austin’s thinking also seeped into popular culture of philosophy. The idea that “words do things” became a catchphrase for describing political speech, social rituals, and even computer science fields like human-computer interaction (where speech act models help design natural language systems). His most famous phrase, the title How to Do Things with Words, is often cited whenever the action-oriented nature of language is discussed. In recent decades there has been a modest resurgence of interest in his work, partly because some scholars feel analytic philosophy’s turn to language problems resonates well with Austin’s commonsense approach. New books and articles continue to appear, exploring and extending Austin’s thought in contemporary contexts.
Critiques
Although respected, Austin’s ideas also faced criticism. Some philosophers felt that ordinary language philosophy merely chased trivial puzzles without offering a unified theory. Critics in the late 1950s and 60s questioned whether carefully parsing words actually solved anything important. As ordinary language philosophy grew influential at Oxford, opponents like Ernest Gellner and others satirized it. Gellner, in his 1959 book Words and Things, attacked Austin and colleagues for what he saw as pointless nitpicking. The debate became heated: philosopher Gilbert Ryle even refused to formally review Gellner’s book, and letters flew between Gellner and Bertrand Russell in The Times. Many took the point: critics said breaking down every shade of language use left little room for big ideas like ethics or metaphysics.
Specific aspects of Austin’s account also drew criticism. Jacques Derrida famously challenged Austin’s insistence on strict conditions for successful speech acts. Derrida argued that Austin underestimated how any utterance can be iterated in new situations. For example, saying “I apologize” in the language of Shakespeare or quoting someone else complicates whether it counts as a true apology. Derrida suggested that Austin’s sharp separation between “serious” uses of language (like real promises) and fictional or ritual language (like drama) was not so clear-cut, since words can migrate between contexts. John Searle, Austin’s student, engaged this debate in responses, but many thinkers felt Derrida exposed limits in Austin’s framework.
Other philosophers noted that Austin’s success conditions for speech acts depend on attentive hearers. Kent Bach and Robert Harnish, for example, later argued that an utterance only “takes effect” if listeners correctly infer the speaker’s intention. In other words, if I say “I promise to call you,” and the listener ignores me, the promise (as a speech act) isn’t fully performed. This points to a dependence on social conventions and recognition beyond the speaker’s words. Likewise, some critics from linguistics and pragmatic theory have tried to formalize or alter Austin’s categories, arguing that his examples (which often involved legal or official settings) do not easily handle casual conversation or cross-cultural differences.
More broadly, logical positivists regarded Austin’s performatives as meaningless in a strict sense (since, by their lights, only truth-conditional statements count as genuine propositions). Austin himself turned this around with the “descriptive fallacy,” but the tension remained: undecided whether performatives have any truth content. His tentative proposal that performatives are evaluated as “happy” or “unhappy” (felicitous or infelicitous) was criticized as vague or inadequate. By the late 1960s, many analytic philosophers had little patience for ordinary language approach, feeling it lacked the logical rigor they sought.
In summary: Austin’s work was sometimes dismissed as a collection of linguistic curiosities. Scholars argued it risked missing deeper structures in language or reality. Others felt his reliance on English usage made his conclusions culturally limited. Nevertheless, his defenders point out that he was aware of his own provisional findings and valued humility in philosophy.
Legacy
Today J. L. Austin is regarded as one of the great 20th-century philosophers of language. His insight that “to say something is to do something” remains a cornerstone in both philosophy and linguistics. How to Do Things with Words is a classic text in analytic philosophy and is still taught in philosophy courses around the world. The terminology he introduced (speech act, performative, locutionary/illocutionary/perlocutionary act, felicity conditions, etc.) has entered the standard vocabulary of pragmatics, semantics, and discourse analysis.
Austin’s broader legacy in ordinary language philosophy has had a mixed history. The movement he helped lead waned in popularity after his death, as many philosophers shifted to more formal or technical methods. However, interest in his work never disappeared. In fields like cognitive science and artificial intelligence, speech act theory underlies research on human-computer dialogue. In literary and cultural studies, the notion of performativity (closely related to Austin’s ideas) has proved powerful in understanding rituals, gender, and social communication.
In philosophy, a few later thinkers (like Stanley Cavell and John Searle) carried on Austin’s torch, and more recently new philosophical schools have revisited ordinary-language themes. Some see in Austin a precursor to pragmatic and contextualist approaches to meaning that are popular today. Academic books and biographies continue to examine his life and work; for example, a 2023 biography portrayed his dual career as philosopher and wartime intelligence officer. Overall, Austin’s combination of clear examples and respect for common sense has proven enduring.
Selected Works:.
- Philosophical Papers (1961) – posthumous collection of Austin’s essays.
- How to Do Things with Words (1962) – his main lectures on speech acts (William James Lectures, 1955).
- Sense and Sensibilia (1962) – essays on perception and skepticism.
- “Other Minds” (1946) – essay on knowledge of others’ mental states.
- “A Plea for Excuses” (1956) – Aristotle Society presidential address on linguistic distinctions in blame and responsibility.
Timeline:.
- 1911: Born in Lancaster, England.
- 1933: Graduated Oxford (Balliol College) with first-class honors in Classics and Philosophy.
- 1935: Elected Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford.
- 1940–45: Served in British military intelligence during World War II (rising to lieutenant-colonel).
- 1941: Married Jean Coutts.
- 1952: Appointed White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford.
- 1955: Gave Harvard William James Lectures (later How to Do Things with Words).
- 1956–57: President of the Aristotelian Society.
- 1960: Died in Oxford on February 8, aged 48.