Austin, John Langshaw

« traditional problem of the nature of action.

Austin was sure that to plunge in at the deep end by asking 'What is anaction?' was mere folly.

The way to start was by a close examination of the language ordinarily used for discussingaction; a sub-area of this vocabulary is that which is concerned with the defects that actions may exhibit; theymay, for example, be unintended, mistakes, inadvertences, involuntary or clumsy.

As a deliberate illustration of hisgeneral ideas, he set out to examine some of these terms in a paper called 'A Plea for Excuses' ([1956a] 1961 ).

His technique, as usual, was to take a real or imaginary situation and ask what we should say about it.

Thus, take asituation in which you and I keep a donkey each in the same field and I, wishing to shoot mine, instead shoot yours.If I (a) fire accurately at your donkey, thinking it is mine, or (b) fire at mine, but the bullet ricochets and hits yours,which, if either, would you call a mistake or an accident? Or are the terms interchangeable? Austin had an unusualfacility for bringing out differences which we implicitly observe in our daily use of language, but which we do notordinarily make explicit and which we may fail to notice in philosophical discussion.

'A Plea for Excuses' also contains a short but illuminating account of his methods of work at a more general level.

Another important illustration of thisaspect of Austin's work is the paper 'Ifs and Cans' ([1956b] 1961 ).

Here he typically approaches the problem of the freedom of the will by a careful examination of such expressions as 'I could have…' and, especially, 'I could have if Ihad chosen…', rather than by an immediate attempt on the big question.

He brings out defects in the account givenby G.E.

Moore in his Ethics (1912 ), and by others, of the way such expressions are used in real life.

Notably he brings out the inadequacy of the traditional accounts of hypotheticals.

In the sentence, 'There are biscuits on thesideboard if you want some', for example, the truth of the conseqent should not be taken to follow from the truth ofthe antecedent.

What is the force of 'if I choose'? Does it give a necessary or sufficient condition of one's beingable to act, or does it function in some way more similar to that of 'if you want some' in the example above? 3 Philosophical linguistics Austin thought that ordinary language did not provide us with ready-made distinctions for use in discussing the nature of language, and that many of the technical terms already existing in philosophywere ill-suited to this purpose.

Here was an area in which he thought that technical terms were necessary, not as asubstitute for existing linguistic resources, but as a supplement to them.

One of his most disliked targets was thedistinction commonly made between the descriptive and evaluative uses of language, which he thought to blur ahost of more effective distinctions that needed to be made.

He started to remedy the situation by drawingattention to what he first called the performatory, later the performative, use of language.

It was introduced in thepaper 'Other Minds' with great brevity; a performative utterance is typically couched in an indicative sentence but is neither a description nor an evaluation, nor is it true or false; rather, one utters a formula or performs a ritual inappropriate circumstances which itself counts as the performance of an act which would not be naturally regardedas a linguistic act, provided that the utterer is in a position to make the utterance.

Thus to say 'I promise' is tomake a promise, not to talk about one, and to say 'I name this ship "Generalissimo Stalin"' is, if one is a dulyauthorized person, to give a ship a name.

There are many types of action that can be best performed by suchspecified formulas, such as making contracts, making appointments and christening.

Making a promise, for example,is more like shaking hands over a bargain in a recognized context, than describing anything whatsoever.

In hisposthumously published William James Lectures, How to Do Things with Words (1962b ), based on earlier lectures given at Oxford over a series of years with the title 'Words and Deeds', Austin set out to provide an ambitiousclassification of types of force of linguistic utterances on a far wider scale.

Thus at a higher level he distinguishedbetween different types of force, such as locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary force.

The locutionary forceis roughly the sense and reference of the utterance, the illocutionary force is what one is doing in making anutterance with a given locutionary force, and the perlocutionary force is the effect that is intended to be achievedby an utterance with a given illocutionary force.

Thus the locutionary force of 'The bull is charging' is simply thepredication of something of an animal; the illocutionary force may be that of a warning, a comment on the sceneryor an exclamation; and if the illocutionary force is that of warning, the perlocutionary effect intended may well beto make somebody run for it.

Not all these forces are always present; I may utter a sentence without evenlocutionary force merely to test a microphone or to give an example in a philosophical paper.

So Austin furtherdistinguishes the merely phonetic act of making a noise vocally and the phatic act of uttering an intelligiblesentence (as when I say 'The bull is charging' merely to test a microphone) from each other and from the otherforces .

These and other distinctions have been widely used, sometimes with modifications, and also, needless tosay, widely criticized (for example, Searle 1969 ).

Their influence is apparent in theoretical linguistics as well as in philosophy.

What is certain is that this work has had profound effects on philosophical linguistics.

One notablefeature is the way that Austin chose to present his classification of utterances as arising from a criticism and,eventually, the abandonment of the performative as a special type of utterance and its subsumption under thedoctrine of illocutionary forces.

Thus what had been counted as the action performed by the utterance of aperformative now becomes the illocutionary force of that utterance, and the performative is no longer treated asimportantly different from other speech acts having an illocutionary force.

This may accurately reflect the historicaldevelopment of Austin's views, but it appears to some to involve a denaturing of the performative (Warnock 1973 ; Urmson 1977 ).

In particular Austin now includes as performatives utterances which seem to lack the formulaic or ritual character early ascribed to performatives.. »