J.L. Austin

1911-1960 · English · Philosophy of Language, Epistemology, Speech-Act Theory, Ordinary Language Philosophy, Philosophy of Action

We are using a sharpened awareness of words to sharpen our perception of, though not as the final arbiter of, the phenomena.

During the war, J.L. Austin ran the intelligence that mapped the Normandy beaches; a brigadier later said he was, more than anyone, responsible for the life-saving accuracy of the D-Day intelligence. The same forensic patience went into his philosophy. At Oxford he became the central figure of "ordinary language" philosophy, convinced that the distinctions ordinary speakers draw without thinking — the inherited acumen of generations — are evidence any theory must answer to. He called this fieldwork in philosophy, and ran it in famous Saturday morning gatherings of young dons, publishing…

Topics J.L. Austin addresses

• speech-act theory
• performative utterances
• illocutionary acts
• locutionary acts
• perlocutionary acts
• illocutionary force
• felicity conditions
• the performative/constative distinction
• uptake
• misfire and abuse
• the descriptive fallacy
• ordinary language philosophy
• fieldwork in philosophy
• what we should say when
• ordinary language as evidence
• linguistic phenomenology
• excuses
• mistake versus accident
• inadvertently versus intentionally
• the argument from illusion
• sense-data and their critique
• material things
• anti-skepticism
• the dream argument

Converse with J.L. Austin on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in J.L. Austin's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.