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How to Do Things with Words: Second Edition (William James Lectures)

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The ancient Greeks constantly harped on the contrast between words and actions, provoking Housman's parody in his Fragment of a Greek Tragedy
`Oh! I am smitten with a hatchet's jaw,
And that in deed and not in word alone.'
It seems a simple and basic distinction, but when one thinks about it it's not so simple as it looks. If I say `John promises to do that' I am simply reporting John's action of promising; but if I say `I promise to do that' I am actually doing the promising by saying so. Certain forms of words are actions as well, and not just in the trivial sense that to say something is to perform the act of saying something. Moreover, forms of words that seem very similar in meaning turn out not to behave in identical ways. `Apologise' behaves much like `promise', in the sense that when I say `I apologise for my behaviour' I am performing the act of apologising. However when I say `I am sorry for my behaviour' I may or may not be apologising - I may be reporting my feeling of sorrow, as if I had said `I am sad about my behaviour.'

The general idea is very easy to grasp, but the amount of variety in the ordinary expressions we use can seem mind-boggling. What's the story on `bequeath' for instance? If I say in my will `I bequeath you 1 million $' and if I have 1 million $ to bequeath you then I am performing the act of bequeathing by saying so. However if I don't have it I am bequeathing you nothing , whatever I say. Similarly, if I say `I anoint you Archbishop of Peoria' simply saying so doesn't make you that. In the first place I need the authority to perform this act, in the second place I need something to anoint you with, and in the third place you need to be willing to be so anointed. However even if all these conditions are present I will still not have anointed you Archbishop unless I also say so. It all goes on and on. If I am your commanding officer and I say `I reprimand you' I am thereby carrying out the act of reprimanding. However if I say `I insult you' and leave it at that I have done no insulting. Again, if one says `In saying that he made a mistake' this does not mean that the person's act consisted of something called `making a mistake'. And so on.

The series of twelve lectures in this book hauls us through any amount of fine and subtle detail about these so-called `performative utterances'. Normally the best way to read a book is to start at the beginning, but that's not what I'd recommend here. Once you have the general idea (even from this short review) I'd say start at the last lecture, go on to the second-last, and only then go back to the start. If you plough through it starting at page 1 it seems a bit of a catalogue of instances, almost as if linguistic philosophy is reduced to sweeping up after some majestic cavalcade of lexicography has passed by. Austin is always Austin of course, not just lucid and brilliant but witty too - there is one of his inimitable mixed metaphors somewhere, something about letting cards out of the bag or putting cats on the table. However after a while one yearns for a top-down perspective, for generalisation. That comes in the final two chapters. The most important statement in the book is in chapter XI, where he says that `...what we have to study is not the sentence but the issuing of an utterance in a speech situation.' That may not be Austin's most felicitous expression, at least not when quoted out of context, but it enshrines his basic argument, one that holes much ordinary linguistic philosophy below the water-line, that verbal expressions on their own do not enable us to understand what is said. Indeed I wish he had gone further in pointing out that non-verbal factors, such as tone of voice or facial expression, can cast doubt on what the verbal expression is ostensibly saying. I could, for example, say `Oh I do apologise' in such a manner as to make it very clear that I mean nothing of the kind.

In the last chapter Austin produces a short set of categories of expression in an attempt to classify the mass of detail in the foregoing chapters. He does not profess to think them anything but provisional, and the terms he coins are monstrosities - behabitives, expositives, verdictives, exercitives and commissives. Be not afraid. He explains them with all his characteristic clarity, and when you have seen the outlines of the wood you can go back to the beginning and inspect the trees individually. As always, Austin is a spoiler, and rightly so. He trains his guns on the illegitimate tyranny of `true and false' that has bedevilled so much philosophical thinking, saying that these terms constitute `a dimension of assessment' and do not stand in some supposedly unique relationship to `facts'. This is only a review, and if you want to know how he means that you have to read him for himself. For me, Austin's way of putting things is enjoyable and his thinking is liberating to the mind. Much philosophy is, in another of his great expressions, barking up the wrong gum tree, and I am only too grateful that Austin lived long enough to save us from the same fate.

This book presents Austin's (at the time) groundbreaking ideas on the performative aspects of speech, and his concept of speech-acts. This book was, I understand, incredibly influential in the field of linguistics, though it is now somewhat outdated. It is also fairly lucid, and should be readable by anyone who remembers basic grammar. That said, it is rather technical and pedantic, and a lot of the book seems more like a grammatical exposition than philosophy. This is just Austin's style of course, but it can wear on those without a specific interest in linguistics or in the philosophy of language. Outside the philosophy of language, the book has implications on the issues of truth/falsehood, and on the role of linguistic/performative standards in morality (anyone who has read Searle's influential essay, "How to Derive 'Ought' from 'Is'", can see it stemming largely from a single disagreement with this book).

At many points, J.L. Austin's How to do Things with Words reads more like a linguistic textbook than a philosophy text. Whether you count this as a benifit or a distraction will depend on your disposition (it certainly beats reading Kant), but whatever your views on the subject, the work is a useful introduction to Speech Act Theory. How to do Things with Words examines a part of language that philosophy has traditionaly ignored, what he dubs the performative utterance. There are certain instances in language where to say something is do perform the very act you say, promising being the perinial example. If I say, under ordinary circumstances, "I promise to do x" then I have promised to do x. Using this seemingly magical fact as his starting point, Austin goes reach profound conclusions about the nature of language and philosophy. Though the tasks Austin sets out to accomplish are largely left uncompleted (he himself admits this) the book will give you the grounding you need to pursue other works in the field, such as those of Searle or Grice. Happy reading!

As an avid newcomer to the rich and variegated world of contemporary philosophy, I am digesting all the "essential" works I can lay my hands on, and gathered that this one was such. However, once I was done with it I'm afraid I was just glad it was relatively short.

To begin with, I found Austin's writing style to be quite staccato; indeed, almost "hard on the eyes." It reads like "legalese" more than anything else I've come across in philosophy so far (it is not hard to adduce possible legal applications inherent in the subject of Performatives, so perhaps should be expected). He navigates through his chosen topic of speciality like a fly or mosquito constantly lighting and alighting on various surfaces in search of a tasty morsel but never quite finding anything to chew on. Instead of using his narrative to draw out actual philosophical *insights*, he spends most of the time on quasi-Aristotelian cataloguing of genus and differentia, while making very little of it in the process. I am really pretty puzzled by those other reviewers who speak of Austin's "argument" on Performatives: the structure of his "argument," as such, is broadly elliptical: he seems to come to some tentative conclusions every so often, then revises them again, and so on and so on such that at the end of the book I just wondered what, precisely, was said overall.

The main accomplishment, really, is in coming up with some putatively cardinal categories of illocutionary acts, such as "exercitive," "verdictive," "behabitive," etc. This seems fair enough, but for a far more elegant as well as penetrating analysis of the varieties of speech acts, I would point the interested reader instead to Searle's essay "A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts," which is available in his _Expression and Meaning._ Put to very interesting use there is Searle's concept of illocutionary "point," or "direction of force;" that is, either "word-to-world" or "world-to-word." I was thinking based on Austin's work that performatives was just a dry subject, but Searle's "Taxonomy..." is, on the contrary, very interesting reading and should, I believe, be thought to have superseded this one in quality. Austin's treatise, however, is still justly celebrated at least as the first major work, ever, on the subject.

Along with his crucial essay "Performative Utterances," J. L. Austin's HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS stands as one of the most influential philosophical works of the twentieth century. By "influence" I mean actual, concrete alteration in the ways that people thought within the philosophical discipline. If you read extensively in works in philosophy of language in the analytic tradition from the interwar period and the period immediately after WW II, the writing about what constitutes "making sense" in language is absolutely nutty. Reading Carnap, Russell, A. J. Ayer, Feigl, and the early Wittgenstein, you get a picture of language that is unrecognizable. The theory of language they espoused, widely known as Logical Positivism, privileges the kind of sentences used in scientific discourse, sentences that are open to verification by scientific standards.

Now, to be fair, most people don't realize that the so-called Logical Positivists did not write off the world of nonverifiable discourse as worthless. This came out as early as Wittgenstein of the TRACTATUS period, where he stated that the things that one could not "speak" about (i.e., state in verifiable discourse) were more important than those about which one could. Similarly, most philosophers are unaware that Rudolph Carnap loved the writings of Soren Kierkegaard, though he would classify all his writings as "nonsense" by his theory of language, just as his love of Beethoven could not be justified by the same standards. Many non-philosophers rightfully felt that there was something batty about this whole way of looking at language, of dismissing not only most ordinary language, but also the language of politics, aesthetics, religion, and ethics. Most people felt uneasy with a theory of meaning that transformed the "real" meaning of "murder is wrong" to "I feel that murder is wrong."

The theory of meaning put forward by the logical positivists began to unravel due to the work of the so-called ordinary language philosophers, as well as Wittgenstein in his later period during which he returned to Cambridge to teach philosophy. Gilbert Ryle and J. L. Austin did some of the most important immediate work in showing many of the shortcomings of logical positivism.

Austin did this by showing a wide range of sentences that simply fell outside the theory of meaning put forward by the logical positivists. Carnap and Ayer and Co. had no way to account for sentences like "I do" as uttered in a wedding ceremony. Austin was able to identify a number of sentences that he christened "performative utterances," that were not referential in their meaning, but were themselves actions. This was a small initial move, but this drove a wedge into the verificationist theory of meaning.

A couple of readers have labeled this book difficult. That baffles me. This is one of the most clearly written, easy-to-read works of philosophy that I have ever read. It is a model of clarity and exceptionally easy to understand as long as you have some understanding of the larger philosophical context. If you are unaware of the strain of philosophy that runs from Gottlob Frege to his two major students (the early) Wittgenstein and Carnap, and the work of the nonpopular work by Bertrand Russell and the group influenced by their work you may lack the grasp of the context. But given the context, this is as easy to read as any work of philosophy you will encounter. The book had a huge impact not only in undermining the logical positivists but in making Anglo-American philosophers attentive to the complexity of human language. If you compare the work of the logical positivists with that of various linguists like Ferdinand de Saussure, it is clear what a truncated conception of language they were working with. Austin, Ryle, and especially the later Wittgenstein got English language philosophers onto a more promising path of understanding language. Additionally, specific works of philosophy such as John Searle's SPEECH ACTS are direct offshoots from Austin's work.

J. L. Austin is not a major philosopher. He will not be remembered in the same way as Wittgenstein or John Rawls or even (the early) Bertrand Russell, but he is a philosopher who left some important philosophical work that will long be studied. This book is one of them; the other are the essays collected in his PHILOSOPHICAL PAPERS. And he will always be important for understanding the development of the philosophy of language in the English speaking world in the second half of the Twentieth Century.

The editors have done some great work carefully spacing the lectures and making notes where necessary. The introduction both clarifies and, where necessary, admits that clarification is impossible. This is an extensive and, at times, troublesome collection of lectures, and it's been well cared-for in this edition.

A seminal work for any student of life or philosopher of language. Austin's little book set the pace for many, underlining one of our clearest and simplest facts: that our linguistic practices are not only informed by but inform our states of affairs and social norms. A must read!

This book is based on lectures given by Austin in Harvard, and right off the bat, let me tell you that it does shape the tone of the book. Indeed, the text is at times very humorous, which is not usual in such writings, and it is quite refreshing.

It's relatively short, and while some parts left me confused and dubious as to my understanding of what was being explained, most of it is very good, and it is the foundation of the über famous "illocutory acts" and "perlocutory acts" and all that jazz.

I think I came across a reference to this work while reading Goffmann's "Interaction Theory," I had also been pondering the relationship between linguistics and philosophy, so when I saw that this was 150 pges long I thought- why not. I note many of the reviewers discuss this book as being more about "grammar," then "linguistics," which I guess assumes that is book is 'really' about linguistics, but to me it seems more like philosophy then anything else. Isn't all of philosophy linguistics these days? I don't know, I'm a casual reader. Although this book is short, I didn't find it particularly accessible. Would not recommend this for the casual reader- students of philosophy and linguistics ONLY!!!

While I commend J.L. Austin's attempt in How to Do Things With Words to liberate language from the metaphysical pretensions that the logical positivists imposed upon it by investing it with a certain phenomenological value, i.e., via the notion of "the speech act," I cannot help but wonder if Austin's reevaluation of the nature of language carries with it certain puzzling implications, particularly with regard to speaker, she who commits the speech act.

Austin's argument concerning the characteristics of a performative utterance are informed by a specific assumption concerning the origin and evolution of language: to wit, that language in its primitive stage was simply a collection of one-word utterances that are inherently ambiguous in terms of their individual senses. Thus, in order to refine the sense of these one-word utterances, a whole array of supplementary parts of speech evolved, and language became consequently more complex and sophisticated (71). In Austin's nomenclature, the force of a given one-word utterance was too diffuse vis-à-vis the context in which it is uttered and thus quite ambiguous from the addressee's position. In other words, a primitive one-word utterance does not provide the addressee any certainty about how she is to construe it. Therefore, the increasingly sophisticated iterations of language indicate an ongoing effort to refine the sense of an utterance, to give the force of the utterance a more specific and unambiguous valence.

However, Austin also maintains that an unintended consequence of this evolution of language is that it reaches a point where it becomes too sophisticated and thereby re-introduces the very uncertainty it was originally intended to mitigate. He claims that the various parts of speech, and the words that comprise them "lend themselves to equivocation and inadequate discrimination; and moreover, we use them for other purposes, e.g., insinuation," and thus concludes that "the trouble about all these devices has been principally their vagueness of meaning and uncertainty of sure reception" (76). In other words, there is a definite yet non-localizable threshold that an utterance must not cross if it is to remain teleologically oriented toward the clarity and accurate construal on the part of the addressee.

The speech act therefore always navigates between the Scylla and Charybdis of inadequately directed signifying force resulting from the primitiveness of the utterance on one hand, and the over-complexity of the utterance on the other. As a result, the clarity of a given utterance depends almost exclusively on the intention of the speaker; she must in some way remain cognizant of the above-mentioned threshold and therefore deploy the force of her utterance in a way that avoids being too diffuse or unmanageably polyvalent. This is not to claim, however, that the clarity of a given utterance is reducible to some Aristotelian mean; rather the clarity of an utterance depends on how well it reflects the earnestness or sincerity of the speaker. This notion of the speaker's earnestness is deduced from the circumstances surrounding the utterance, as well as the utterance's delivery, e.g., the enveloping context, the speaker's particular emphases, diction and enunciation, etc. The addressee thereby "triangulates" the speaker's specific intention through interpreting the above-mentioned features of the utterance. In short, it is absolutely essential to Austin's project that the speaker mean what she says.

It appears then that Austin's fundamental supposition is tautological: the addressee deduces/approximates the speaker's degree of sincerity through the amount of sincerity the speaker conveys in her utterance, which in turn reflects ipso facto the speaker's sincerity (as a subjective condition). In short, the speaker is found to be in earnest because she is in earnest. Only an utterance of the utmost sincerity-what Austin terms an "explicit performative"-carries with it the closest thing to a guarantee in terms of a clear and accurate construal. This further implies that clarity of utterance is ultimately an ethical consideration, rather than a linguistic or grammatical one, because the speaker's responsibility to her addressee obliges her to be earnest and therefore quite literal in her expression (see Habermas on this point). Unless of course the context in which the utterance is made is one in which it is assumed, either through mutual agreement or convention, that explicit or pure performatives are not necessarily expected nor pertinent, e.g., a comical monologue, a play, etc.

Thus, while Austin's argument in How to Do Things with Words is elegantly schematic, it nevertheless implies a somewhat simplistically idealized and unitary notion of the speaker's subjectivity. In other words, Austin's claims cannot adequately accommodate instances of insincerity that, while perhaps unanticipated, are not exactly inappropriate-such as ironical observations on an immediate situation-because such self-abrogation of the speaker's sincerity renders the utterance "infelicitous" almost to the point of being diabolically caustic with regard to the addressee's apprehension.