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John Langshaw "J. L." Austin (26 March 1911 – 8 February 1960) was a British philosopher of language and leading proponent of ordinary language philosophy, perhaps 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 — making a promise — rather than making an assertion about anything. Hence the name of one of his best-known works How to Do Things with Words.

Austin was born in Lancaster, England, the second son of Geoffrey Langshaw Austin, an architect, and his wife Mary Hutton Bowes-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, and went on to study Classics at Balliol College, Oxford in 1929.

In 1933, he received a First in Literae Humaniores (Classics and Philosophy) as well as the Gaisford Prize for Greek prose and first class honours in his finals. He undertook his first teaching position in 1935, as fellow and tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford.

Austin's early interests included Aristotle, Kant, Leibniz, and Plato (especially the Theaetetus). His more contemporary influences included especially G. E. Moore, John Cook Wilsonand H. A. Prichard. The contemporary influences shaped their views about general philosophical questions on the basis of careful attention to the more specific judgements we make. They took our specific judgements to be more secure than more general judgements. It's plausible that some aspects of Austin's distinctive approach to philosophical questions derived from his engagement with the last three.

During World War II Austin served in the British Intelligence Corps. It has been said of him that, "he more than anybody was responsible for the life-saving accuracy of the D-Day intelligence". Austin left the army with the rank of lieutenant colonel and was honored for his intelligence work with an OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire).

After the war Austin became White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, as a Professorial Fellow of Corpus Christi College. He began holding his famous "Austin's Saturday Mornings" where students and colleagues would discuss language usages 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".

Austin died at the age of 48 of lung cancer.

How to Do Things with Words

How to Do Things with Words (1955/1962) is perhaps Austin's most influential work. 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:

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.

How to Do Things With Words is based on lectures given at Oxford between 1951 and 1954, and then at Harvard in 1955.

Список литературы

1. Остин / О.А.Назарова // Новая философская энциклопедия: в 4 т. / пред. науч.-ред. совета В. С. Стёпин. — 2-е изд., испр. и доп. — М. : Мысль, 2010.

2. Остин, Джон Лэнгшо // Энциклопедия «Кругосвет».

3. Остин Дж.Л. Слово как действие. – В кн.: Новое в зарубежной лингвистике. Вып. XVII. М., 1986

4. Остин Дж.Л. Чужое сознание. – В кн.: Философия, логика, язык. М., 1987

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