约翰·奥斯丁

John Langshaw Austin (26 March 1911 – 8 February 1960) was an English philosopher of language and leading proponent of ordinary language philosophy, best known for developing the theory of speech acts.

Austin pointed out that we use language to do things as well as to assert things, and that the utterance of a statement like "I promise to do so-and-so" is best understood as doing 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 of morphological 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 a metaphysics of language that would posit denotative, propositional assertion as the essence of language and meaning.

Life

Austin was born in Lancaster, Lancashire, England, the second son of Geoffrey Langshaw Austin (1884–1971), an architect, and Mary Hutton Bowes-Wilson (1883–1948; née Wilson). In 1921 the family moved to Scotland, where Austin's father became the secretary of St Leonards School, St Andrews. Austin was educated at Shrewsbury School in 1924, earning a scholarship in Classics, and went on to study classics at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1929.

In 1930 Austin received a First in Classical Moderations (Greek and Latin) and in the following year won the Gaisford Prize for Greek prose. In finals in 1933 he received a first in Literae Humaniores (Philosophy and Ancient History).……

Work

How to Do Things with Words

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. In contrast to the positivist 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 utterances or just "performatives". These he characterises by two features:

Quotes

"The theory of truth is a series of truisms." —Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. xxiv (1950). Philosophical Papers, p. 121. Oxford University Press, second edition (1970).

"Sentences are not as such either true or false." —Sense and Sensibilia (1962), p. 111.

"It is, of course, not really correct that a sentence ever is a statement: rather, it is used in making a statement, and the statement itself is a 'logical construction' out of the makings of statements." —How to Do Things with Words, Lecture 1, page 1 footnote 1. Oxford at the Clarendon press (1955).

"Going back into the history of a word, very often into Latin, we come back pretty commonly to pictures or models of how things happen or are done.……

Publications

Papers and articles

1930s–1940s, "The Line and the Cave in Plato's Republic", reconstructed from notes by J. O. Urmson, in Philosophical Papers 1979

1938ms, extracts in: Price, A. (2018) "J. L. Austin's Lecture Notes on the Nicomachean Ethics: Making Sense of Aristotle on Akrasia." In Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, V. 55.

1939ms/1967, "Agathon and Eudaimonia in the Ethics of Aristotle" in J. M. E. Moravcsik (ed.), Aristotle: a collection of critical essays, New York: Doubleday. Reprinted in Philosophical Papers 1970

1939, "Are There A Priori Concepts?" Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 18: 83–105. Reprinted in Philosophical Papers 1961

1940ms, "The Meaning of a Word" in Philosophical Papers 1961, Reprinted in C. E.……