John Langshaw Austin

Western Philosophy 20th-century philosophy
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Name: John Langshaw Austin
Birth: March 28, 1911
Death: February 8, 1960
School/tradition: Linguistic philosophy, Analytic philosophy
Main interests
Philosophy of language, Philosophy of mind, Ethics, Ordinary language philosophy
Notable ideas
Speech acts, Intentionality
Influences	Influenced
G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, Gilbert Ryle	John Searle, R.M. Hare

John Langshaw Austin — more commonly known as J.L Austin — (March 28, 1911 – February 8, 1960) was a philosopher of language who, among other things, developed much of the current theory of speech acts and who pointed out that language is used for much more than making statements.

Life and Work

Austin was born in Lancaster and educated at Balliol College, Oxford. After serving in MI6 during World War II, Austin became White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford. He occupies a place in philosophy of language alongside Wittgenstein in staunchly advocating the examination of the way words are used in order to elucidate meaning. Unlike many ordinary language philosophers, however, Austin disavowed any considerable indebtedness to Wittgenstein's later philosophy. His main influence, he said, was the exact, exacting, and common-sense philosophy of G. E. Moore; he was also much influenced by H.A. Prichard, even if mostly to disagree.

Austin was greatly admired as a teacher, but he put most of his efforts into teaching and thus published little of his philosophical work during his brief lifetime. After his death, his students gathered his papers and lectures in books that were published posthumously, including Philosophical Papers (1961) and Sense and Sensibilia (1962).

Austin fits within the school of British-American analytic philosophy of the 20th Century (to some extent that tradition is also Austrian-German). But that school has two main sub-branches: The first was the logical positivist or logical empiricist branch that stretches back to Russell and beyond that to Gottlob Frege (for logic) and Ernst Mach (for positivism), and that was embodied to a great extent in Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. It was more fully developed by the Vienna Circle and its members. Its gospel tract was A.J. Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic, and its greatest exponents were probably Rudolf Carnap and Carl Hempel.

Sir Isaiah Berlin wrote that weekly discussions began sometime in 1936-37 at Oxford; they were suggested by Austin who remained their leading spirit until war brought them to an end. They can be seen as beginning a second branch of analytic philosophy, usually known as ordinary language philosophy. This movement was taken up especially after the end of WWII, centering most fully in Oxford; in fact it has sometimes been known as "Oxford philosophy." Although he was at Cambridge, Wittgenstein's later work, especially the Blue and Brown Books and his Philosophical Investigations, can be seen as seminal for this form of post-positivist analytic philosophy (but not for Austin himself). Austin can be seen as possibly the leading exponent of that form of analytic philosophy, a movement that can be traced at least partly back to G. E. Moore. For those philosophers who were attracted to analytic philosophy but who deplored what they saw as being the mistakes and narrowness of logical positivism or logical empiricism, the work of Austin and his fellows was often seen as a breath of new and invigorating air.

Berlin wrote that Austin

"had a passion for accurate, factual information, rigorous analysis, testable conclusions, ability to put things together and to take them to pieces again, and deststed vagueness, obscurity, abstraction, evasion of issues by escape into metaphor or rhetoric or jargon or metaphysical fantasy. He was from the beginning determined to try to reduce whatever could be so reduced to plain prose." (From "Austin and the Early Beginnings of Oxford Philosophy," in Essays on J.L. Austin, pp. 1-2.)

A few pages later Berlin wrote:

"Of course, he had a very clear, acute, and original intellect, and because, when he spoke, there appeared to be nothing between him and the subject of his criticism or exposition — no accumulation of traditional commentary, no spectacles provided by a particular doctrine — he often produced the feeling that the question was being posed clearly for the first time: that what had seemed blurred, or trite, or a play of convential formulae in the books had suddenly been washed away: the problems stood out in sharp relief, clear, unanswered, and important, and the methods used to analyse it had a surgical sharpness, and were used with fascinating assurance and apparently effortless skill." (Ibid., 5)

How to Do Things With Words

How to Do Things With Words is perhaps Austin's most influential work. In it he points out that philosophers of language gave most of their attention to those sentences which state some fact, but that these form only a small part of the range of tasks that can be performed by saying something. Indeed, there is an important class of utterances – Austin calls them performative utterances – that do not report a fact, but instead are themselves the performance of some action (speech act). For example, in the appropriate circumstances to say “I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth” is to do nothing less than to name the ship. Other examples include: "I take this man as my lawfully wedded husband," or "I bequeath this watch to my brother." All three examples demonstrate that the sentence is not used to describe or state that one is 'doing' something, but to actually 'do' it.

In the second half of the book, Austin produces a useful way of analysing utterances.

Consider what happens when John Smith turns to Sue Snub and says "Is Jeff’s shirt red?", to which Sue replies "Yes." Firstly, 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 color 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, the performance of an illocution. Other examples would be making an assertion, giving an order, and promising to do something. 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 focused on the locution, illocution and perlocution, rather than the phone, pheme and rheme.

Sense and sensibilia

In the posthumously published Sense and sensibilia, Austin famously criticises sense-data theories of perception, particularly that of Alfred Jules Ayer in The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge. Austin argues that Ayer fails to understand the proper function of words such as "illusion," "hallucination," "looks," "appears," and "seems". He argues that 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 or ability to talk about what we see. Ayer responded to this critique in the essay "Has Austin refuted the sense-data theory?", which can be found in Metaphysics and Common Sense (1969).

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.

Are there A Priori Concepts

This early paper contains a broad criticism of Idealism. The question set, 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. The argument he is criticising proceeds from the observation that we do use words such as "grey" or "circular"; and that since we use a single term in each case, 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 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 generalises this argument against universals to 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.

The Meaning of a Word

His paper 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 one down a philosophical garden path.

A Plea For Excuses

A Plea For Excuses is both a demonstration by example, and a defence of, linguistic philosophy:

...our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connections they have found worth marking, in the lifetime of many generations: these surely are likely to be more numerous, more sound, since they have stood up to the long test of survival of the fittest, and more subtle, at least in all ordinary and reasonable practical matters, than any that you or I are likely to think up in our armchair of an afternoon – the most favorite alternative method. (p. 182)

He 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. Then, iterating this process until the list of words begins to repeat, closing in a “family circle” of words relating to the key concept.

References

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Books by Austin

• Philosophical Papers. Ed. J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1st ed., 1961; 2nd ed., 1970.
• Sense and sensibilia. 1962. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• How to do things with Words: The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Ed. J. O. Urmson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. 2nd Ed., Ed. by J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975.

Notable papers by Austin

• "Performative Utterances," In Austin, Philosophical Papers. Ed. J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock. Oxford, 1961.
• "A Plea for Excuses". In Austin, Philosophical Papers. Ed. J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock. Oxford, 1961.
• "Performative-Constative," In The Philosophy of Language. Ed. John R. Searle. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971. 13-22.

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.

Books about and studies of Austin

There are numerous books about and studies of Austin and his work. Here are some of them:

• K.T. Fann, ed., Symposium on J.L. Austin. New York: Humanities Press, Inc., 1969.
• Sir Isaiah Berlin and others, Essays on J.L. Austin. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973.

See also

• Linguistics
• Pragmatics
• John Searle
• Adolf Reinach

Related reading

• Kirkham, Richard (Reprint edition: March 2, 1995). Theories of Truth. The MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-61108-2. Originally published 1992. Chapter 4 contains a detailed discussion of Austin's theory of truth.

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