J. L. Austin

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Lore & Background

Austin was born in Lancaster, Lancashire, England, the second son of Geoffrey Langshaw Austin (1884–1971), an architect, and Mary Hutton Bowes-Wilson (1883–1948). In 1921 the family moved to Scotland, where Austin's father became the secretary of St Leonards School, St Andrews. Austin was educated at Shrewsbury School in 1924, earning a scholarship in Classics, and went on to study classics at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1929. In 1930 Austin received a First in Classical Moderations (Greek and Latin) and in the following year won the Gaisford Prize for Greek prose. In finals in 1933 he received a first in Literae Humaniores (Philosophy and Ancient History). Austin won a prize fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, that year, but aside from being friends with Isaiah Berlin, he did not like its lack of structure, and undertook his first teaching position in 1935, as fellow and tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford. During World War II, Austin joined the military in July 1940 and married his student Jean Coutts in the spring of 1941. Austin served in the British Intelligence Corps, and was responsible for as many as 500 analysts. Known as "the Martians", the group's preparation for D-Day helped keep Allied casualties much lower than expected. Austin left the army with the rank of lieutenant colonel and was honoured for his intelligence work with an OBE, the French Croix de Guerre, and the U.S. Officer of the Legion of Merit. After the war Austin became White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, as a Professorial Fellow of Corpus Christi College. Publishing little, his influence would largely make itself felt through his teaching in lectures and tutorials and, especially, his famous 'Saturday morning meetings'. Austin visited Harvard and Berkeley in the mid-fifties, in 1955 delivering the William James Lectures at Harvard that would become How to Do Things with Words, and offering a seminar on excuses whose material would find its way into "A Plea for Excuses". It was at this time that he met and befriended Noam Chomsky. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1956 to 1957. In 1950 he published an English language translation of Gottlob Frege's Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik. Before he could decide whether to accept an offer to move to Berkeley, Austin died on 8 February 1960 at the age of 48, shortly after being diagnosed with lung cancer.

Reader's Guide

Austin's work challenges the positivist view that sentences with truth-values form only a small part of the range of utterances. In How to Do Things with Words (1955/1962), he introduced performative utterances—sentences that are neither true nor false but perform an action, such as "I promise to do so-and-so" or "I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth." He later developed a three-part framework of speech acts: the locutionary act (the act of saying something, subdivided into phonetic, phatic, and rhetic acts), the illocutionary act (an act performed in saying something, like asking a question or making a promise), and the perlocutionary act (an act performed by saying something, like eliciting an answer or a heeded warning). Austin's work ultimately suggests that all speech and all utterance is the doing of something with words and signs, challenging a metaphysics of language that would posit denotative, propositional assertion as the essence of language and meaning. His influence spread through his teaching and Saturday morning meetings at Oxford, and his work remains foundational in linguistics, philosophy, and communication studies.

Did You Know?

• During WWII, Austin led a group of up to 500 analysts known as 'the Martians' whose D-Day preparation work helped keep Allied casualties much lower than expected.
• Austin was awarded the OBE, the French Croix de Guerre, and the U.S. Officer of the Legion of Merit for his intelligence work.
• Austin met and befriended Noam Chomsky during his 1955 visit to Harvard.
• At the time of his death, Austin was developing a semantic theory based on sound symbolism, using the English gl-words as data.