J. L. Austin | |
|---|---|
_1951.jpg) | |
| Born | 26 March 1911 Lancaster, England |
| Died | 8 February 1960(1960-02-08) (aged 48) Oxford, England |
| Alma mater | Balliol College, Oxford |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Analytic Ordinary language philosophy /linguistic philosophy Correspondence theory of truth[1] |
Main interests | Philosophy of language,philosophy of mind,ethics,philosophy of perception |
Notable ideas | Speech acts,performative utterance,descriptive fallacy,linguistic phenomenology[2] |
John Langshaw AustinOBE FBA (26 March 1911 – 8 February 1960) was an Englishphilosopher of language and leading proponent ofordinary language philosophy, best known for developing the theory ofspeech acts.[5]
Austin pointed out that we use language todo things as well as toassert things, and that the utterance of a statement like "I promise to do so-and-so" is best understood asdoing something—here,making a promise—rather than making an assertion about anything; hence the title of one of his best-known works,How to Do Things with Words (1955).
Austin, in formulating this theory of speech acts, mounts a significant challenge to the philosophy of language, far beyond merely elucidating a class ofmorphological sentence forms that function to do what they name.
Austin's work ultimately suggests that all speech and all utterance is the doing of something with words and signs, challenging ametaphysics of language that would posit denotative, propositional assertion as the essence of language andmeaning.
Austin was born inLancaster, Lancashire, England, the second son of Geoffrey Langshaw Austin (1884–1971), anarchitect, and Mary Hutton Bowes-Wilson (1883–1948;née Wilson). In 1921 the family moved toScotland, where Austin's father became the secretary ofSt Leonards School,St Andrews. Austin was educated atShrewsbury School in 1924, earning a scholarship inClassics, and went on to study classics atBalliol College, Oxford, in 1929.
In 1930 Austin received a First in Classical Moderations (Greek and Latin) and in the following year won theGaisford Prize for Greek prose. In finals in 1933 he received a first in Literae Humaniores (Philosophy and Ancient History).[6] Literae Humaniores introduced Austin to serious philosophy and gave him a lifelong interest inAristotle.[7] Austin won a prize fellowship atAll Souls College, Oxford, that year, but aside from being friends withIsaiah Berlin, he did not like its lack of structure,[8] and undertook his first teaching position in 1935, as fellow and tutor atMagdalen College, Oxford.
Austin's early interests includedAristotle,Kant,Leibniz, andPlato (particularly theTheaetetus). His contemporary influences includedG. E. Moore,John Cook Wilson andH. A. Prichard. These contemporary philosophers shaped their views about general philosophical questions on the basis of careful attention to the more specific judgements we make, as they took our specific judgements to be relatively more secure than our general judgements. According to Guy Longworth, writing inThe Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "It's plausible that some aspects of Austin's distinctive approach to philosophical questions derived from his engagement with [Moore, Wilson, and Prichard]."[9]
DuringWorld War II, Austin joined the military—in July 1940—and married his student Jean Coutts (in the spring of 1941). Austin served in theBritish Intelligence Corps, and was responsible for as many as 500 analysts. Known as "the Martians", the group's preparation forD-Day helped keep Allied casualties much lower than expected.[8] Austin left the army with the rank oflieutenant colonel and was honoured for his intelligence work with an OBE (Officer of theOrder of the British Empire), the FrenchCroix de Guerre, and the U.S. Officer of theLegion of Merit.[7][3][10]
After the war Austin becameWhite's Professor of Moral Philosophy atOxford, as a Professorial Fellow ofCorpus Christi College. Publishing little, his influence would largely make itself felt through his teaching in lectures and tutorials and, especially, his famous 'Saturday morning meetings'.[7]
Austin visitedHarvard andBerkeley in the mid-fifties, in 1955 delivering theWilliam James Lectures at Harvard that would becomeHow to Do Things With Words, and offering a seminar on excuses whose material would find its way into "A Plea for Excuses".[11][12] It was at this time that he met and befriendedNoam Chomsky.[13] He was president of theAristotelian Society from 1956 to 1957.[14]
Before he could decide whether to accept an offer to move to Berkeley, Austin died on 8 February 1960 at the age of 48, shortly after being diagnosed withlung cancer.[15][8] His wealth, afterprobate, was £15,049 0s. 5d. (equivalent to £438,000 in 2023).[16][7] At the time of his death, he was developing asemantic theory based onsound symbolism, using theEnglish gl-words as data.[17]
How to Do Things with Words (1955/1962) is perhaps Austin's most influential work. This work is based on a series of lectures that Austin delivered at Oxford University (1951-1954) and then at Harvard University (1955). A version of these lectures was published as a book.[18][19] In contrast to thepositivist view, he argues, sentences withtruth-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 callsperformative utterances or just "performatives". These he characterises by two features:
When something goes wrong in connection with a performative utterance it is—in Austin's words—infelicitous orunhappy, rather thanfalse.[21][a]
The action that is performed when a "performative utterance" is issued belongs to what Austin later calls aspeech-act.[22] More particularly, the kind of action Austin has in mind is what he subsequently terms theillocutionary act. For example, if you say "I name this ship theQueen Elizabeth", and the circumstances are appropriate in certain ways, then you will have done something special: namely, you will have thus christened 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 todescribe orstate what one is doing, but being used toactually 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 asks "Is Jeff's shirt red?", to which Sue replies "Yes". John has undertaken a series of bodily movements which result in the production of a certain sound; Austin calls such a performance aphonetic act, and the resulting "certain sound" aphone. John's utterance also conforms to the lexical and grammatical conventions of English—that is, John has produced an English sentence; Austin calls this aphatic act, and labels such utterancesphemes. 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 arheme, and to perform arhetic 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 alocution—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 of, and elicited an answer from, Sue; in so doing, he has performed two further speech-acts, as Austin would have it:
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.
According to Austin, a "performative utterance" refers to the action of "performing" or "doing" a certain action; for example, when people say "I promise to do so and so", they are generating the action of making a promiseby so speaking. If this is accomplished without any flaw (in this case: if the promise is fulfilled), the performative utterance is "happy" or "felicitous"; if, on the other hand, one fails to do as promised, it is "unhappy", or "infelicitous". Notice that performative utterance is not truth-valuable; i.e., the judgements "true" and "false" do not apply.
Austin variously opposes different categories of utterance in order to analyze the differences, or lack thereof, between them:explicit vs.implicit orinexplicit performatives;explicit performatives vs.primitive orprimary utterances or performatives; andpure performatives vs.half-descriptive vs.descriptive utterances.
InHow to Do Things With Words (edited byJ. O. Urmson & Marina Sbisà),[24] which records Austin's lectures on this topic, examples are offered for each of these distinctions:
Most examples given in the book are of explicit performatives, because they are easy to identify and observe; identifying other performatives requires comparison and contrast with explicit performatives.
In the posthumously publishedSense and Sensibilia (the title is Austin's own, and wittily echoes the title ofSense and Sensibility,Jane Austen's first book, just as his name echoes hers),[25] Austin criticizes the claims put forward byA. J. Ayer'sThe Foundations of Empirical Knowledge (1940), and to a lesser extent,H. H. Price'sPerception (1932) andG. J. Warnock'sBerkeley (1953), concerning thesense-data theory. He states that perceptual variation, which can be attributed to physical causes, does not involve a figurative disconnection between sense and reference, due to an unreasonable separation of parts from the perceived object. Central to his argument, he shows that "there is no one kind of thing that we 'perceive' but many different kinds, the number being reducible if at all by scientific investigation and not by philosophy" (Austin 1962a, 4).
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."[26] 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.
As an example, Austin examines the word 'real' and contrasts the ordinary meanings of that word based on everyday language and the ways it is used by sense-data theorists. In order to determine the meaning of 'real' we have to consider, case by case, the ways and contexts in which it is used. By observing that it is (i) a substantive-hungry word that is sometimes (ii) an adjuster-word,[27] as well as (iii) a dimension-word[28] and (iv) a word whose negative use "wears the trousers,"[29] Austin highlights its complexities. Only by doing so, according to Austin, can we avoid introducing false dichotomies.
Austin's papers were collected and published posthumously asPhilosophical Papers byJ. O. Urmson andGeoffrey 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 on criminal law theory.[citation needed]
Chapters 1 and 3 study how a word may have different, but related, senses. Chapters 2 and 4 discuss the nature of knowledge, focusing onperformative utterance. Chapters 5 and 6 study thecorrespondence theory, where a statement is true when it corresponds to a fact. Chapters 6 and 10 concern the doctrine ofspeech acts. Chapters 8, 9, and 12 reflect on the problems that language encounters in discussing actions and considering the cases of excuses, accusations, and freedom.
This early paper contains a broad criticism ofidealism. The question set dealing with the existence ofa priori concepts is treated only indirectly, by dismissing the concept ofconcept that underpins it.
The first part of this paper takes the form of a reply to an argument for the existence ofuniversals: 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 asomething that is named by such terms—a universal. Furthermore, since each case of "grey" or "circular" is different, it follows that universalsthemselves cannot be sensed.
Austin carefully dismantles this argument, and in the process othertranscendental arguments. He points out first that universals are not "something we stumble across", and that they aredefined 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 does not necessarily follow that theseare actually things that exist, in any sense but the nominal. 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 addressconcepts 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 something that is a relation. His argument likelyfollows from the conjecture of his colleague S. V. Tezlaf, who questioned what makes "this" "that".[citation needed]
The Meaning of a Word is a polemic against doingphilosophy by attempting to pin down themeaning of the words used, arguing that 'there isno 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.
InOther Minds, one of his most highly acclaimed pieces,[30] Austin criticizes the method that philosophers have used sinceDescartes to analyze and verify statements of the form "That person S feels X." This method works from the following three assumptions:
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 consistent 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 intending is to promising— knowing and promising are the speech-act versions of believing and intending respectively.
A Plea for Excuses is both a demonstration by example, and a defense of the methods ofordinary language philosophy, which proceeds on the conviction that:"...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 favourite alternative method."[31]
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 a "family circle" of words relating to the key concept.
Austin's early interests included Aristotle, Kant, Leibniz, and Plato (especiallyTheaetetus). His more contemporary influences included especially G.E. Moore, John Cook Wilson, and H.A. Prichard. . . . It's plausible that some aspects of Austin's distinctive approach to philosophical questions derived from his engagement with the last three. All three philosophers shaped their views about general philosophical questions on the basis of careful attention to the more specific judgments we make.
Austin met Noam Chomsky on a visit to Harvard in 1955, during which he gave the William James lectures... Chomsky was immediately sympathetic to central aspects of Austin's thinking about language use and truth. In particular, he found common cause with the view that ordinary assessment as to truth depends on specific features of the occasions on which we speak...
He returned from America in early 1959 and by early December was diagnosed with lung cancer. By February 1960, just a few weeks short of his 49th birthday, he was dead...
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