J.L. Austin

J.L. Austin (John Langshaw Austin, 1911–1960) was a British philosopher of ordinary language and the principal architect of speech act theory. His posthumously published lectures How to Do Things with Words (1962) demolished the assumption that the primary function of language is to make true or false statements, revealing instead that language is saturated with performative utterances — statements that do not describe the world but act upon it. Austin introduced the distinction between locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts, and the concept of felicity conditions, which specifies the social circumstances under which speech acts succeed or fail. He belongs to the Oxford ordinary language tradition alongside Gilbert Ryle, but where Ryle dissected the category mistakes of Cartesian philosophy, Austin dissected the hidden action-structure of apparently descriptive language.

Austin died at 48, leaving John Searle to systematize his framework. What Austin might have done with Habermas's communicative action theory, or with natural language processing, remains one of the more tantalizing counterfactuals in twentieth-century philosophy.