J.L. Austin

Not only when doing philosophy, but even in the most casual conversation, Austin spoke and thought with great precision, and he did not tolerate looseness in his students or colleagues. The worst condemnation that he could make of something he was reading would be to shake his head sadly and say in his thin, precise way, “It’s just loose.” Indeed, on several occasions he said to me in tones more of sadness than anger, “There is a lot loose thinking in this town.”

—John Searle

…he did not join at any time in the general deference to Wittgenstein. The personal atmosphere surrounding Wittgenstein's work strongly repelled him; and it is of course crucial also that Wittgenstein rejected, deliberately and on principle, exactly that ideal of finality, of definite, clearly and fully stated solutions, which Austin regarded as alone worth seriously striving for. That Wittgenstein influenced his views has been sometimes suggested, but is certainly untrue.

—Geoffrey Warnock on Austin

In the course of our conversation, I let it be known that I thought words were tools, with manifold uses. Austin said, 'Let's see what Witters has to say about that', and he reached for his copy of the Philosophical Investigations. He read, among others, section 23, where Wittgenstein lists some of the uses of language—giving orders, speculating about an event, play-acting, making a joke, and so on. Austin remarked that these things are all quite different, and can't just be lumped together like that. He then expressed doubts about the tool-hood of words: 'Are you quite sure that "tool" is the right word? Mightn't they be more like something else—utensils, for example?' He suggested that we try to determine what the various possibilities were; accordingly, he leafed through the Concise Oxford Dictionary picking out candidates, while I wrote them down. My list contained about thirty words, including 'appliance', 'apparatus', 'utensil', 'implement', 'contrivance', 'instrument', 'tool', 'machine', 'gadget', 'contraption', 'piece of equipment', 'mechanism', 'device', and 'gimmick'. I seem to remember that 'gewgaw' even had a half-serious day in court. We tried to think of examples of each of these, and to determine what the important differences amongst them were. I think we decided that words were probably more like instruments than anything else on the list.

—George Pitcher, on meeting with Austin at Harvard in 1955

Key Themes, Austin: • Shares W.’s interest in the many uses of

language that an overt focus on truth conditions and verification leaves out.

• Thinks W. is too “loose”; wants to say something more systematic about the things we do with language.

HTW, pp.2–3 Three stages of recent trends in philosophical thinking about language:

1. An idealized conception of language as consisting of declarative sentences and as being used only to make true or false statements.

2. The idea that some purported statements are actually nonsensical for reasons that aren’t obviously grammatical.

3. The idea that language—including declarative sentences—has perfectly good, and not nonsensical uses other than making statements.

frege russell

wittgenstein carnap ayer

wittgenstein again stevenson hare austin

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“Certainly there are a great many uses of language. It's rather a pity that people are apt to invoke a new use of language whenever they feel so inclined, to help them out of this, that, or the other well-known philosophical tangle; we need more of a framework in which to discuss these uses of language; and also I think we should hot despair too easily and talk, as people are apt to do, about the infinite uses of language. Philosophers will do this when they have listed as many, let us say, as seventeen; but even if there were something like ten thousand uses of language, surely we could list them all in time. This, after all, is no larger than the number of species of beetle that entomologists have taken the pains to list.”

—Austin, “Performative Utterances”

Wittgenstein, PI, §23: 1. Giving orders, and obeying them— 2. Describing the appearance of an object, or giving its measurements 3. Constructing an object from a description (a drawing)— 4. Reporting an event— 5. Speculating about an event— 6. Forming and testing a hypothesis— 7. Presenting the results of an experiment in tables and diagrams 8. Making up a story; 9. and reading it— 10.Play-acting— 11. Singing catches— 12. Guessing riddles— 13. Making a joke; 14. telling it— 15. Solving a problem in practical arithmetic— 16. Translating from one language into another— 17. Asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying.

Lecture 1 Performative Utterances vs. Constative Utterances

pp.9–10

Performatives are not “merely the outward and visible sign, for convenience or other record or for information, of an inward and spiritual act…”

“Accuracy and morality alike are on the side of the plain saying that our word is our bond.”

Lectures 2–4 Felicity Conditions and the varieties of Infelicity

Categories of Felicity Condition

Categories of Felicity Condition

Kinds of Infelicity

Some Key Points: •If an act is infelicitous in A or B ways, then it is not the act it purports to be at all, whereas Γ-type infelicities don’t cancel the act, but merely make it an abuse.

•Austin is a conventionalist: what matters for the performance of a speech act is that the speaker acts according to publicly defined conventions. The speaker’s mental states are of secondary concern.

Some Key Points: •Performatives are a species within the genus of conventional acts/procedures more generally. They needn’t be linguistic.

•Even statements have felicity conditions. •Performatives needn’t be explicit, they can also be implicit.

Some Key Points: •Some performatives require action on the part of the hearer as well as the speaker. E.g.: promising, placing a bet, etc. As Austin sometimes puts it, fully felicitous speech acts require “uptake” on the part of the addressee.

Some Key Points: •Like all conventions, felicity conditions do not have perfectly sharp boundaries of application.They shade into one another. And sometimes it’s unclear whether they apply at all, e.g. p.31: “Can I baptize a dog, if it is admittedly rational?”

Some Key Points: •Austin often talks about speech in legal contexts and other highly ritualized settings.

•This is important, because legal contexts are situations in which detailed rules govern what we can do.

•But we should keep in mind that a lot of what we do with speech isn’t so rigidly defined.

•For example: what is going on when we communicate across international borders?

Some Key Points: • Statements do several different things. Austin names three (pp.48–52): Entailment“‘All men blush’ entails ‘some men blush’”. Implication“My saying ‘the cat is on the mat’ implies that I believe it is” Presupposition“‘All Jack’s children are bald’ presupposes that Jack has some children.”

Some Key Points: “In conclusion, we see that in order to explain what can go wrong with statements we cannot just concentrate on the proposition involved (whatever it is) as has been done traditionally. We must consider the total situation in which the utterance is issued—the total speech act—if we are to see the parallel between statements and performative utterances, and how each can go wrong” (52).

Lectures 5–7

Guiding Questions:

Is the constative–performative distinction a legitimate and useful one?

Is there even a good way to draw it?

Why the Performative/Constative Isn’t Useful: Even statements have felicity conditions, and can go wrong in ways other than being false.

The distinction can’t be drawn in terms of grammar or vocabulary (64–66)

Force is signaled in speech in many ways other than explicit performatives locutions (73–77)

The Transition into Speech-Act Theory (p.91):

“It is time to make a fresh start on the problem. We want to consider more generally the senses in which to say something may be to do something, or in saying something we do something…”

What do we do in speaking? The Phonetic Act‘the act of uttering certain noises’

The Phatic Act ‘the act of uttering certain vocables or words, i.e. noises of certain types belonging to and as belonging to a certain vocabulary’

The Rhetic Act‘the act of using that pheme or its constituents with a certain more or less definite ‘sense’ and a more or less definite ‘reference’ (which together are equivalent to ‘meaning’)’

(p.93).

What do we do in speaking? The Locutionary ActThe sum of the phonemic, phatic, and rhetic acts. The act of “saying something”.

The Illocutionary ActAn act of doing something additional to the locutionary act in speaking. (98–99)

The Perlocutionary ActAn act of doing something additional to the locutionary and illocutionary acts by speaking. (100–101)

A Big, Hard Question: How exactly should the illocution/perlocution distinction be drawn?

• “the perlocutionary act always includes some consequences…some of which may be ‘unintentional’” (107).

• “any, or almost any, perlocutionary act is liable to be brought off, in sufficiently special circumstances, by the issuing, with or without calculation, or any utterance whatsoever” (110)

• But illocutionary acts sometimes require responses—e.g., securing uptake.

• Often an illocutionary act is an attempt to perform some perlocutionary act

• For example: to argue is to attempt to convince, and to request is to attempt to produce an action (or at least a commitment to act).

• But, says Austin, some illocutionary acts don’t aim at any perlocutionary effect—e.g., greeting and stating.

• And illocutionary acts require producing some effects—e.g., uptake.

• We perform illocutionary acts in speaking, and perlocutionary acts by speaking.

We normally report illocutionary acts like this: In saying …, she was _ing (or she _ed).

We normally report perlocutionary acts like this: By saying …, she was _ing (or she _ed).

• But there are many exceptions, and other ways of using ‘in’ and ‘by’ (see ch.9).

• Also, Austin’s intuitions about these things seems more robust than mine.

What Austin seems to be getting at: Illocutions and perlocutions bear two different kinds of relationship to linguistic and social conventions.

To perform an illocutionary act just is to say something in the appropriate circumstances—meeting the felicity conditions constitutes the illocution, and doesn’t merely cause it to happen.

By contrast, perlocutionary acts are merely caused (perhaps reliably, perhaps not) by meeting the appropriate felicity conditions.

A Noteworthy Claim Joking, acting, and other “aetiolations or parasitic uses” … “have nothing to do with the illocutionary act” and do not aim at any perlocutionary effect (104)

A Noteworthy Claim Statements can exhibit all three categories of infelicity (138–9). • Dishonesty is a Γ-infelicity • Presupposition failure is an A-infelicity • Misspeaking is a B-infelicity

Austin’s Five Categories of Illocution (151)