J. L. Austin
Overview
 
John Langshaw Austin was a British
English people
The 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 language
Philosophy of language
Philosophy 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 Lancaster
Lancaster, Lancashire
Lancaster 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 School
Shrewsbury School
Shrewsbury 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 University
Balliol College, Oxford
Balliol 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 act
Speech act
Speech 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.
Quotations

The Nicomachean Ethics is only intended as a guide for politicians, and they are only concerned to know what is good, not what goodness means...and in any case one can know what things are good without knowing the analysis of 'good' --J.L. Austin, Philosophical Papers, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford, 1979) 22.

Why should it not be the whole function of a word to denote many things? --Austin, Papers 38.

In one sense 'there are' both universals and material objects, in another sense there is no such thing as either: statements about each can usually be analysed, but not always, nor always without remainder. -- Austin, Papers 43n.

But surely, speaking carefully, we do not sense 'red' and 'blue' any more than 'resemblance' (or 'qualities' any more than 'relations'): we sense something of which we might say, if we wished to talk about it, that 'this is red.' --Austin, Papers 49.

It may justly be urged that, properly speaking, what alone has meaning is a sentence. --Austin, Papers 56.

Faced with the nonsense question 'What is the meaning of a word?' and perhaps dimly recognizing it to be nonsense, we are nevertheless not inclined to give it up. --Austin, Papers 58.

Ordinary language blinkers the already feeble imagination. --Austin, Papers 68.

[I]f we say that I only get at the symptoms of his anger, that carries an important implication. But is this the way we do talk? --Austin, Papers 107.

But suppose we take the noun 'truth': here is a case where the disagreements between different theorists have largely turned on whether they interpreted this as a name of a substance, of a quality, or of a relation. --Austin, Papers 73.

We become obsessed with 'truth' when discussing statements, just as we become obsessed with 'freedom' when discussing conduct...Like freedom, truth is a bare minimum or an illusory ideal. --Austin, Papers 130.

 
x
OK