How to Do Things with Words

Contents

How to Do Things with Words is a collection of lectures by the British philosopher J. L. Austin that introduced speech act theory and reshaped analytic philosophy, linguistics, and legal theory. The work connects ideas found in the writings and institutions associated with Oxford University, Harvard University, Cambridge University, Princeton University, University of Chicago and traces influences from figures linked to Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, G. E. Moore, John Locke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The book's arguments engaged scholars at Columbia University, Yale University, University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, University of Toronto and institutions such as the British Academy, Royal Society, American Philosophical Association, Society for Applied Linguistics.

Introduction

Austin's lectures, later published, argue that certain utterances do not merely describe states of affairs but perform actions, a claim that repositioned debates at Princeton Theological Seminary, King's College London, Wesleyan University, New York University, University of Edinburgh and among commentators like Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty and Donald Davidson. The text is often taught alongside works by Saussure-associated scholars, critics from The University of Paris, and analyses by Hannah Arendt, John Searle, Paul Grice, Wilfrid Sellars and Elizabeth Anscombe. Austin’s distinctions influenced practitioners at Blackstone Group-affiliated legal scholars, theologians at Union Theological Seminary, and policy analysts at Brookings Institution and RAND Corporation.

Austin developed his ideas amid debates that involved the legacies of Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Thomas Aquinas, René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, Augustine of Hippo and later analytic figures such as Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and G. E. Moore. The lectures respond to linguistic inquiries in departments at University College London, University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, and intersect with work by Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, Michael Halliday, John Lyons, Dell Hymes and Benjamin Lee Whorf. Austin’s context includes interaction with contemporaries at Birkbeck, University of London, London School of Economics, University of Manchester and critics linked to Sigmund Freud, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s students and interpreters across Europe and North America.

Austin distinguishes locutionary acts, illocutionary acts and perlocutionary acts, categories echoed and revised by John Searle, Paul Grice, Geoffrey Leech, Herbert Paul Grice, R. M. Hare and commentators at Yale University and Oxford University. The framework influenced analytic work by Hilary Putnam, Saul Kripke, Donald Davidson, W. V. O. Quine, Jerome Bruner, Ray Jackendoff and computational linguists at MIT and Carnegie Mellon University. Austin’s felicity conditions were debated by scholars at Stanford University, Princeton University, University of California, Los Angeles and in journals associated with Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press, prompting responses from Jürgen Habermas, Jurgen Habermas-linked theorists, Judith Butler, Simone de Beauvoir-influenced feminists, and legal theorists at Harvard Law School and Yale Law School.

Austin’s paradigmatic examples—such as performative utterances like “I do” in marriage ceremonies—connected to institutional practices in Westminster Abbey, St Paul's Cathedral, Hagia Sophia, Notre-Dame de Paris and civil systems in England and Wales, Scotland, United States, France and Germany. Applications appear in analyses by scholars at Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins University, Mayo Clinic on consent language, in programming language theory at Bell Labs, IBM and Google, and in rhetoric taught at Sorbonne University, Columbia University, University of Melbourne and University of Sydney. Austin’s ideas shaped criticism in theatrical contexts linked to Royal Shakespeare Company, Comédie-Française, Broadway, Lincoln Center, and informed policy drafting at United Nations, European Commission, World Bank, International Monetary Fund and treaty language such as the Treaty of Versailles and later international agreements.

Critics from schools associated with Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes questioned Austin’s stability of meaning, while philosophers at Harvard University, Oxford University and Cambridge University defended and revised his claims; notable interlocutors include John Searle, Peter Strawson, Graham Harman and Brentano-influenced analysts. Feminist and postcolonial scholars influenced by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, bell hooks, Edward Said and Judith Butler critiqued institutional and power dimensions, prompting replies from legal theorists at Columbia Law School, University of Chicago Law School, Harvard Law School and scholars working with Critical Legal Studies. Responses produced refinements adopted in pragmatics research at Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Institute for Advanced Study and language policy units at UNESCO.