John Langshaw Austin was a
BritishThe English are a nation and ethnic group native to England, who speak English. The English identity is of early mediaeval origin, when they were known in Old English as the Anglecynn. England is now a country of the United Kingdom, and the majority of English people in England are British Citizens...
philosopher of languagePhilosophy of language is the reasoned inquiry into the nature, origins, and usage of language. As a topic, the philosophy of language for analytic philosophers is concerned with four central problems: the nature of meaning, language use, language cognition, and the relationship between language...
, born in
LancasterLancaster is the county town of Lancashire, England. It is situated on the River Lune and has a population of 45,952. Lancaster is a constituent settlement of the wider City of Lancaster, local government district which has a population of 133,914 and encompasses several outlying towns, including...
and educated at
Shrewsbury SchoolShrewsbury School is a co-educational independent school for pupils aged 13 to 18, founded by Royal Charter in 1552. The present campus to which the school moved in 1882 is located on the banks of the River Severn in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England...
and
Balliol College, Oxford UniversityBalliol College , founded in 1263, is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England but founded by a family with strong Scottish connections....
. Austin is widely associated with the concept of the speech act and the idea that speech is itself a form of action. Consequently, in his understanding, language is not just a passive practice of describing a given reality, but a particular practice that can be used to invent and affect realities. His work in the 1950s provided both a theoretical outline and the terminology for the modern study of
speech actSpeech Act is a technical term in linguistics and the philosophy of language. The contemporary use of the term goes back to John L. Austin's doctrine of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts...
s developed subsequently, for example, by John R. Searle (the Oxford-educated American philosopher), François Récanati,
Kent BachKent Bach is an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University. His primary areas of research include the philosophy of language, linguistics and epistemology...
, Robert M. Harnish, and William P. Alston.
He occupies a place in philosophy of language alongside
WittgensteinLudwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He was professor in philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1939 until 1947...
and his fellow Oxonian,
RyleGilbert Ryle , was a British philosopher, a representative of the generation of British ordinary language philosophers that shared Wittgenstein's approach to philosophical problems, and is principally known for his critique of Cartesian dualism, for which he coined the phrase "the ghost in the...
, in staunchly advocating the examination of the way words are
ordinarilyOrdinary language philosophy is a philosophical school that approaches traditional philosophical problems as rooted in misunderstandings philosophers develop by distorting or forgetting what words actually mean in everyday use....
used in order to elucidate meaning, and avoid philosophical confusions. Unlike many ordinary language philosophers, however, Austin disavowed any overt indebtedness to Wittgenstein's later philosophy, calling Wittgenstein a "charlatan". His main influence, he said, was the exact and exacting common-sense philosophy of G. E. Moore. His training as a classicist and linguist influenced his later work.
Austin made another significant contribution to philosophy, as well, of a very different sort. In 1950, he published a translation of
Gottlob FregeFriedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege was a German mathematician, logician and philosopher. He is considered to be one of the founders of modern logic, and made major contributions to the foundations of mathematics. He is generally considered to be the father of analytic philosophy, for his writings on...
's
Foundations of ArithmeticDie Grundlagen der Arithmetik is a book by Gottlob Frege, published in 1884, in which he investigates the philosophical foundations of arithmetic. In a tour de force of literary and philosophical merit, Frege demolished other theories of number and developed his own theory of numbers...
. Together with
Peter GeachPeter Thomas Geach is a British philosopher. His areas of interest are the history of philosophy, philosophical logic, and the theory of identity.He was educated at Balliol College, Oxford...
and
Max BlackMax Black was a British-American philosopher, who was a leading influential figure in analytic philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century. He made contributions to the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mathematics and science, and the philosophy of art, also publishing studies...
's book
Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, published in 1952, Austin's translation was what made Frege's writings available to the English-speaking world and thus helped establish Frege's important place in
analytic philosophyAnalytic philosophy is a generic term for a style of philosophy that came to dominate English-speaking countries in the 20th century...
. The translation is still widely used today.
Biography
The second son of Geoffrey Langshaw Austin (1884–1971), an architect, and his wife Mary Bowes-Wilson (1883–1948), Austin was born in
LancasterLancaster is the county town of Lancashire, England. It is situated on the River Lune and has a population of 45,952. Lancaster is a constituent settlement of the wider City of Lancaster, local government district which has a population of 133,914 and encompasses several outlying towns, including...
. In 1922 the family moved to Scotland, where Austin's father became the secretary of St Leonard's School,
St AndrewsSt Andrews is a university town and former royal burgh on the east coast of Fife in Scotland. The town is named after Saint Andrew the Apostle.St Andrews has a population of 16,680, making this the fifth largest settlement in Fife....
. Austin was educated at
Shrewsbury SchoolShrewsbury School is a co-educational independent school for pupils aged 13 to 18, founded by Royal Charter in 1552. The present campus to which the school moved in 1882 is located on the banks of the River Severn in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England...
and
Balliol College, OxfordBalliol College , founded in 1263, is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England but founded by a family with strong Scottish connections....
, holding classical scholarships at both. He arrived at Oxford in 1929 to read
Literae HumanioresLiterae Humaniores is the name given to an undergraduate course focused on Classics at Oxford and some other universities.The Latin name means literally "more humane letters", but is perhaps better rendered as "Advanced Studies", since humaniores has the sense of "more refined" or "more learned",...
('Greats'), and in 1931 gained a First in classical moderations and also won the
Gaisford PrizeThe Gaisford Prize is a prize in the University of Oxford, founded in 1855 in memory of Dr Thomas Gaisford . For most of its history, the prize was awarded for Classical Greek Verse and Prose...
for Greek prose. Greats introduced him to serious philosophy and gave him a life-long interest in Aristotle. In 1933, he got first class honours in his Finals.
After serving in MI6 during
World War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, Austin became
White's Professor of Moral PhilosophyEndowed in 1621 by Thomas White , DD, Canon of Christ Church, the White's Chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford is, according to the website of the Oxford Centre for Ethics and Philosophy of Law, perhaps the most prestigious chair of moral philosophy in the world.Under the original...
at
OxfordThe University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...
. He began holding his famous "Austin's Saturday Mornings" where students and colleagues would discuss language usages (and sometimes books on language) over tea and crumpets, but published little.
Austin visited Harvard and Berkeley in the mid-fifties, in 1955 delivering the William James Lectures at Harvard that would become How to Do Things With Words, and offering a seminar on excuses whose material would find its way into "A Plea for Excuses". It was at this time that he met and befriended
Noam ChomskyAvram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
.
He was president of the
Aristotelian SocietyThe Aristotelian Society for the Systematic Study of Philosophy was founded at a meeting on 19 April 1880, at 17 Bloomsbury Square which resolved "to constitute a society of about twenty and to include ladies; the society to meet fortnightly, on Mondays at 8 o'clock, at the rooms of the Spelling...
from 1956 to 1957.
Austin died at the age of 48 of
lung cancerLung cancer is a disease characterized by uncontrolled cell growth in tissues of the lung. If left untreated, this growth can spread beyond the lung in a process called metastasis into nearby tissue and, eventually, into other parts of the body. Most cancers that start in lung, known as primary...
. At the time, he was developing a
semantic theorySemantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata....
based on
sound symbolismSound symbolism or phonosemantics is a branch of linguistics and refers to the idea that vocal sounds have meaning. In particular, sound symbolism is the idea that phonemes carry meaning in and of themselves.-Origin:...
, using the English gl-words as data.
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 in his time a predominant account in philosophy, namely, the view that the chief business of
sentenceIn the field of linguistics, a sentence is an expression in natural language, and often defined to indicate a grammatical unit consisting of one or more words that generally bear minimal syntactic relation to the words that precede or follow it...
s is to state facts, being "true" when they succeed and "false" when they fail in that business. In contrast to this common view, he argues, sentences with truth-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 calls
performative utteranceThe notion of performative utterances was introduced by language philosopher J. L. Austin. According to his original conception, it is a sentence which does something in the world rather than describing something about it...
s or just "performatives". These he characterises by two features:
- Again, though they may take the form of a typical indicative sentence, performative sentences are not used to describe (or "constate") and are thus not true or false; they have no truth-value.
- Second, to utter one of these sentences in appropriate circumstances is not just to "say" something, but rather to perform a certain kind of action.
He goes on to say that when something goes wrong in connection with a performative utterance it is, as he puts it, "infelicitous", or "unhappy" rather than false.
The action which is performed when a 'performative utterance' is issued belongs to what Austin later calls a
speech-actSpeech Act is a technical term in linguistics and the philosophy of language. The contemporary use of the term goes back to John L. Austin's doctrine of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts...
(more particularly, the kind of action Austin has in mind is what he subsequently terms the
illocutionary actIllocutionary act is a term in linguistics introduced by John L. Austin in his investigation of the various aspects of speech acts. We may sum up Austin's theory of speech acts with the following example...
). 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
phaticIn linguistics, a phatic expression is one whose only function is to perform a social task, as opposed to conveying information.-History:The term was coined by anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski in the early 1900s from Greek phanein: to show oneself, appear.-Understanding:The utterance of a...
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
rhemeRheme may refer to:* Rheme in Peirce's semiotics, a sign that represents its object in respect of quality* Topic–comment, a concept in linguistics...
, 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 actIllocutionary act is a term in linguistics introduced by John L. Austin in his investigation of the various aspects of speech acts. We may sum up Austin's theory of speech acts with the following example...
. 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 actA perlocutionary act is a speech act, as viewed at the level of its psychological consequences, such as persuading, convincing, scaring, enlightening, inspiring, or otherwise getting someone to do or realize something...
, 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 Austin criticises sense-data theories of perception, particularly that of A. J. Ayer in
The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge. Central to his case is an attack on a common
argument from illusionThe argument from illusion is an argument for the existence of sense-data. It is posed as a criticism of direct realism. Naturally occurring illusions best illustrate the argument's points, a notable example concerning a stick: I have a stick, which appears to me to be straight, but when I hold it...
(i.e., that cases of perceptual illusion show that on such occasions what we are directly aware of are mental images) and the "further bit of argument intended to establish that ...[we]
always perceive sense-data." 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." 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. Ayer responded to this critique in the essay "Has Austin refuted the sense-data theory?".
- G. J. Warnock's Foreword – Having taken a course from Austin on this topic at Oxford in 1947, Sir Geoffrey Warnock
Sir Geoffrey James Warnock was a philosopher and Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University. Before his knighthood , he was commonly known as G. J. Warnock.- Life :...
(1923-95) says he put Austin's fragmentary lecture notes into sentence form, with the help of class notes from later students of the course, and claims to relate faithfully Austin's "argument" though not his exact wording.
- Chapter 1 – Austin intends to debunk a theory of sense perception that dates back thousands of years (to Heraclitus
Heraclitus of Ephesus was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, a native of the Greek city Ephesus, Ionia, on the coast of Asia Minor. He was of distinguished parentage. Little is known about his early life and education, but he regarded himself as self-taught and a pioneer of wisdom...
) and picks recent expressions of it by Ayer, H. H. PriceHenry Habberley Price was a Welsh philosopher, known for his work on perception. He also wrote on parapsychology....
, and Warnock, because they express it fairly clearly. The theory states that we never see or directly perceive material objects but only sense-data or sense perceptions. Rather than start with the varied things we see — say, pens, rainbows, and after-images — philosophers tend to ask facilely for a general kind of thing and wind up unfair to the facts and to language while using "a certain special, happy style of blinkering philosophical English," Austin says.
Philosophical Papers
Austin's papers were collected and published posthumously as
Philosophical Papers by
J. O. UrmsonJames Opie Urmson was a philosopher and classicist who spent most of his professional career at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He was a prolific author and expert on a number of topics including British analytic/linguistic philosophy, George Berkeley, ethics, and Greek philosophy . His nom de...
and
Geoffrey WarnockSir Geoffrey James Warnock was a philosopher and Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University. Before his knighthood , he was commonly known as G. J. Warnock.- Life :...
. 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.
"Are there A Priori Concepts?"
This early paper contains a broad criticism of
IdealismIn philosophy, idealism is the family of views which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing...
. The question set dealing with the existence of
a prioriThe terms a priori and a posteriori are used in philosophy to distinguish two types of knowledge, justifications or arguments...
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
UniversalsIn metaphysics, a universal is what particular things have in common, namely characteristics or qualities. In other words, universals are repeatable or recurrent entities that can be instantiated or exemplified by many particular things. For example, suppose there are two chairs in a room, each of...
: 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 argumentsA transcendental argument is a deductive philosophical argument which takes a manifest feature of experience as granted, and articulates that which must be the case so that experience as such is possible...
. He points out first that universals are not "something we stumble across", and 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 generalizes this argument against universals to address
conceptThe word concept is used in ordinary language as well as in almost all academic disciplines. Particularly in philosophy, psychology and cognitive sciences the term is much used and much discussed. WordNet defines concept: "conception, construct ". However, the meaning of the term concept is much...
s 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. His argument likely follows from the conjecture of his colleague, S. V. Tezlaf, who questioned what makes "this" "that".
"The Meaning of a Word"
The Meaning of a Word is a polemic against doing
philosophyPhilosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
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.
"Other Minds"
One of Austin's most highly acclaimed pieces. In it he criticizes the method which philosophers have used since Descartes to analyze and verify statements of the form “That person S feels X.” This method works from the following three assumptions:
(1) We can know only if we intuit and directly feel what he feels.
(2) It is impossible to do so.
(3) It may be possible to find strong evidence for belief in our impressions.
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 in line 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"
"A Plea For Excuses" is both a demonstration by example, and a defense of the methods of ordinary language philosophy, which proceeds on the conviction that:
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 in a “family circle” of words relating to the key concept.
Books
- Sense and Sensibilia. Ed. G. J. Warnock. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1964.
- Philosophical Papers. Ed. J. O. Urmson
James Opie Urmson was a philosopher and classicist who spent most of his professional career at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He was a prolific author and expert on a number of topics including British analytic/linguistic philosophy, George Berkeley, ethics, and Greek philosophy . His nom de...
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
James Opie Urmson was a philosopher and classicist who spent most of his professional career at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He was a prolific author and expert on a number of topics including British analytic/linguistic philosophy, George Berkeley, ethics, and Greek philosophy . His nom de...
, Oxford: Clarendon, 1962. ISBN 0-674-41152-8
Papers
- "How to Talk: Some Simple Ways". Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. 53 (1953): 227-246.
- "Other Minds". In Austin, Philosophical Papers, ed. J. O. Urmson
James Opie Urmson was a philosopher and classicist who spent most of his professional career at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He was a prolific author and expert on a number of topics including British analytic/linguistic philosophy, George Berkeley, ethics, and Greek philosophy . His nom de...
& G. J. Warnock. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961 [Originally published in 1946].
- "Performative Utterances". In Austin, Philosophical Papers, ed. J. O. Urmson
James Opie Urmson was a philosopher and classicist who spent most of his professional career at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He was a prolific author and expert on a number of topics including British analytic/linguistic philosophy, George Berkeley, ethics, and Greek philosophy . His nom de...
& G. J. Warnock. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961.
- "A Plea for Excuses". In Austin, Philosophical Papers, ed. J. O. Urmson
James Opie Urmson was a philosopher and classicist who spent most of his professional career at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He was a prolific author and expert on a number of topics including British analytic/linguistic philosophy, George Berkeley, ethics, and Greek philosophy . His nom de...
& G. J. Warnock. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 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, 75, no.4, (October 1966): 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.
- Quando dire è fare (ed. Antonio Pieretti). Marietti, 1974.
- Come fare cose con le parole (eds. Carlo Penco & Marina Sbisà). Genova, Marietti, 1987.
- Kako delovati rečima. Novi Sad, Matica Srpska, 1994.
- Saggi filosofici (ed. Paolo Leonardi). Milano, Guerini, 1990.
Secondary literature
- Berlin, Isaiah
Sir Isaiah Berlin OM, FBA was a British social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas of Russian-Jewish origin, regarded as one of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century and a dominant liberal scholar of his generation...
et al., ed. Essays on J.L. Austin. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1973.
- Cavell, Stanley. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (1979). New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. The major work by one of Austin's most prominent heirs. Takes ordinary language approaches to issues of skepticism, but also makes those approaches a subject of scrutiny.
- Fann, K.T., ed. Symposium on J.L. Austin. New York: Humanities Press, 1969.
- Kirkham, Richard (Reprint edition: March 2, 1995). Theories of Truth: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. ISBN 0-262-61108-2. Chapter 4 contains a detailed discussion of Austin's theory of truth.
- Passmore, John. A Hundred Years of Philosophy, rev. ed. New York: Basic Books, 1966. Chapter 18 includes a perceptive exposition of Austin's philosophical project.
- Putnam, Hilary. "The Importance of Being Austin: The Need of a 'Second Näivetē'" Lecture Two in The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body, and World New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. In arguing for "naive realism", Putnam invokes Austin's handling of sense-data theories and their reliance on arguments from perceptual illusion in Sense and Sensibilia, which Putnam calls "one of the most unjustly neglected classics of analytics philosophy" (25).
- Searle, John. Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
- Searle, John. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Searle's has been the most notable of attempts to extend and adjust Austin's conception of speech acts.
- Soames, Scott. Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century: Volume II: The Age of Meaning. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005. Contains a large section on ordinary language philosophy, and a chapter on Austin's treatment of skepticism and perception in Sense and Sensibilia.
- Warnock, G. J. J. L. Austin. London: Routledge, 1992.
See also
- Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
- Pragmatics
Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics which studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, and linguistics. It studies how the...
- John Searle
John Rogers Searle is an American philosopher and currently the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.-Biography:...
- Semantics
Semantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata....
- Adolf Reinach
Adolf Bernhard Philipp Reinach , German philosopher, phenomenologist and law theorist.-Life and Works:...
- Word
In language, a word is the smallest free form that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content . This contrasts with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning but will not necessarily stand on its own...