How to Do Things with Words: Second 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!

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 car

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!

The mysterious force of language revealed by Austin is one of the most important discoveries in the modern language theories.

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).