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John Langshaw Austin

The English philosopher John Langshaw Austin (1911-1960) taught a generation of Oxford students a rigorous style of philosophizing based on language analysis.

John Langshaw Austin was born in Lancaster on March 26, 1911. In 1924 he entered Shrewsbury School with a scholarship in classics. His distinguished work enabled him to win a scholarship in classics to Balliol College, Oxford. To his studies in classics and linguistics Austin now added philosophy. After taking first honors, he competed successfully for a fellowship at All Souls College. In 1935 Austin gave up this research fellowship to become teaching fellow and tutor at Magdalen College.

During World War II Austin had a commission in military intelligence. He quickly displayed an extraordinary talent for analyzing and relating vast numbers of facts about the capacities of the enemy. His responsibilities steadily increased, and prior to the Normandy invasion he was the chief organizer of all the intelligence available to the Allied armies. Of his work it has been said that "he more than anybody was responsible for the life-saving accuracy of the D-Day intelligence." He retired as a lieutenant colonel, honored with the Order of the British Empire, the French Croix de Guerre, and the American Legion of Merit.

In 1945 Austin resumed teaching at Oxford, and in 1952 he was elected to the White's chair of philosophy. Austin's primary dedication was to teaching, and as a result he published very little. In his lifetime only seven short papers appeared. He once remarked to a friend: "I had to decide early on whether I was going to write books or to teach people how to do philosophy usefully."

Early in his career Austin devised a philosophical technique which grew directly out of his classical and linguistic studies. Philosophical work, he argued, could well begin with a thorough examination of the linguistic resources available. These would be the terms and usages of ordinary language rather than those of a technical vocabulary. Austin did not hold that an appeal to the usages of ordinary language should be the last word in philosophical arguments, but he did insist that "it is the first word." Any distinction which has become fixed in everyday language, surviving centuries of use and succeeding in the competition with alternative distinctions, may well be thought to point toward some real distinction in experience. Detailed investigation of such distinctions can hardly fail to get a philosophical discussion off to a productive start. As Austin put it, "we are using a sharpened awareness of words to sharpen our perception of, though not as the final arbiter of, the phenomena." With ingenuity, subtlety, and wit, Austin developed strategies to collect and classify the abundance of words, idioms, and metaphors which are ordinarily invoked in discussions having a philosophical interest.

Austin's last work, How to Do Things with Words, published posthumously, was based on the William James lectures which he gave at Harvard University in 1955. In it he was moving toward a more general theory of types of linguistic utterance. But his death cut short these efforts at generalization, and it is not yet clear whether, as he believed, his technique can be used by others with the same impressive results.

His death came with little warning on Feb. 8, 1960, at only 48. He was survived by his wife, Jean Courts Austin, whom he had married in 1941, and their four children.

Further Reading

K. T. Fann, ed., Symposium on J. L. Austin (1969), contains several interesting biographical essays and a number of distinguished critical essays, most of them by friends or former students of Austin. G. J. Warnock, English Philosophy since 1900 (1958), includes a section on Austin.

Additional Sources

Warnock, G. J. (Geoffrey James), J.L. Austin, London; New York: Routledge, 1989.

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: John Langshaw Austin

(born March 28, 1911, Lancaster, Lancashire, Eng. — died Feb. 8, 1960, Oxford) British philosopher. He taught at Oxford from 1945 until his death. He was a leading member of the "ordinary language," or "Oxford," movement of analytic philosophy, which was characterized by its belief that philosophical problems frequently arise through inattention to or misunderstandings of ordinary uses of language; accordingly, such problems can be resolved through consideration of the ordinary uses of the terms by which the relevant philosophical concepts are expressed. Ordinary-language analyses by Austin and his followers frequently took the form of asking "what one would say" in various concrete situations. Austin was also the inventor of speech act theory, through which he attempted to account for the various "performative" aspects of conveyed linguistic meaning. Several of his essays and lectures were published posthumously in Philosophical Papers (1961), Sense and Sensibilia (1962), and How to Do Things with Words (1962). See also analytic philosophy.

For more information on John Langshaw Austin, visit Britannica.com.

Philosophy Dictionary: John Langshaw Austin

Austin, John Langshaw (1911-60) British linguistic philosopher. Austin was educated and taught at Oxford, where he worked all his life except for a distinguished period in the Intelligence service during the Second World War. He had a classical and scholarly background, and his translation of Frege's Grundlagen der Arithmetik in 1950 was the first and seminal introduction of Frege to Englishspeaking philosophers. Austin was the major figure of the movement known as linguistic philosophy, or Oxford or ‘ordin-ary language’ philosophy, and he was frequently, but unfairly, charged with believing that ferocious attention to the niceties of everyday language exhausted the proper method of philosophy. In fact his method was more Aristotelian, holding that close attention to the concepts and distinctions that have become embodied in the language is the beginning, if not the end, of philosophy, whilst airy recommendations about how we should think about something frequently fall short of the skill and delicacy with which we do think about it. The major works illustrating his method arose out of papers and lectures, and were published after his death. They include Sense and Sensibilia (1962), How to Do Things with Words (1962), and the collected Philosophical Papers (1961). His work on the way language actually works pioneered the theory of speech acts, as well as introducing many of its terms, such as locutionary act and illocutionary act.

Columbia Encyclopedia: Austin, John Langshaw,

1911–60, British philosopher. A graduate of Oxford, he was a fellow of All Souls (1933–35) and Magdalen (1935–52) colleges before he became White's professor of moral philosophy (1952–60), also at Oxford. He strongly influenced analytic philosophy, urging that the use of words be closely examined and holding that the distinctions of ordinary language are more subtle than is usually realized. In How to Do Things with Words (1962), he distinguished between constative utterances (statements or reports that can be found true or false) and performative utterances (such as promises, warnings, and commands). He went on to refine his system of classification; it became the basis for speech act theory. His other writings include Philosophical Papers (1961) and Sense and Sensibilia (1962).

Bibliography

See studies by I. Berlin et al. (1973) and G. J. Warnock (1989).

Wikipedia: J. L. Austin

Western Philosophy 20th-century philosophy

Name	John Langshaw Austin
Birth	March 28, 1911
Death	February 8 1960 (aged 48)
School/tradition	Linguistic philosophy, Analytic philosophy
Main interests	Philosophy of language, Philosophy of mind, Ethics, Ordinary language philosophy
Notable ideas	Speech acts, Intentionality
Influences	Moore, Russell, Ryle
Influenced	Searle, Hare, Butler, Lyotard, Habermas, Cavell

John Langshaw Austin (March 28, 1911 – February 8, 1960) was a British philosopher of language, born in Lancaster and educated at 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. His work in the 1950s provided the early underpinnings for the modern theory of speech acts developed subsequently by the Oxford-educated American philosopher John R. Searle.

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 overt indebtedness to Wittgenstein's later philosophy.^[1] His main influence, he said, was the exact and exacting common-sense philosophy of G. E. Moore.

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

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 at his time a predominant account in philosophy, namely, the view that the chief business of sentences is to state facts, and thus to be true or false based on the truth or falsity of those facts. In contrast to this common view, he argues, truth-evaluable sentences form only a small part of the range of utterances. After introducing several kinds of sentences which he assumes are indeed not truth-evaluable, he turns in particular to one of these kinds of sentences, which he deems performative utterances. These he characterises by two features:

First, to utter one of these sentences is not just to "say" something, but rather to perform a certain kind of action.
Second, these sentences are not true or false; rather, when something goes wrong in connection with the utterance then the utterance is, as he puts it, "infelicitous", or "unhappy."

The action which performative sentences 'perform' when they are uttered belongs to what Austin later calls a speech act (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 -- the title is an allusion to the novel Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen -- Austin 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 of or ability to talk about what we see. Ayer responded to this critique in the essay "Has Austin refuted the sense-data theory?".

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 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 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 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.

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 to error.

A Plea For Excuses

A Plea For Excuses is both a demonstration by example, and a defense 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.^[2]

”

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.

References

Books

Sense and sensibilia. 1959. 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 0674411528

Papers

"How to Talk: Some Simple Ways", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol.53, (1953), pp.227-246.
"Other Minds". In Austin, J.L. (Urmson, J.O. & Warnock, G.J. eds.) Philosophical Papers, Oxford University Press, (Oxford), 1961 [Originally published in 1946].
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.
"Three Ways of Spilling Ink", The Philosophical Review, Vol.75, No.4, (October 1966), pp.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.

Notes

^ . The Wittgenstein scholar Grayling (Grayling, A.C., Wittgenstein, Oxford University Press, (Oxford), 1988, p.114) is certain that, despite the fact that Wittgenstein’s work might have possibly played some "second or third-hand [part in the promotion of] the philosophical concern for language which was dominant in the mid-century", neither Gilbert Ryle nor any of those in the so-called "Ordinary language philosophy" school that is chiefly associated with J.L. Austin (and, according to Grayling, G.E. Moore, C.D. Broad, Bertrand Russell and A.J. Ayer) were Wittgensteinians. More significantly, Grayling asserts that "most of them were largely unaffected by Wittgenstein’s later ideas, and some were actively hostile to them".
^ A Plea for excuses, in Austin, J. L., Philosophical Papers, p. 182

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J. L. Austin

Persondata
NAME	Austin, John Langshaw
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Austin, J. L.
SHORT DESCRIPTION	English philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH	March 28, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH	Lancaster
DATE OF DEATH	February 8, 1960
PLACE OF DEATH

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