J. L. Austin

John Langshaw Austin (1911–1960) was a British philosopher of language who founded speech act theory — the study of how utterances perform actions rather than merely describe states of affairs. His lectures, published posthumously as How to Do Things with Words (1962), demolished the assumption that the primary function of language is to state facts that are true or false.

Austin introduced the distinction between performative utterances (which do things, like promising or marrying) and constative utterances (which state facts), and later developed the more general framework of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts that was systematized by John Searle.

Austin's work belongs to the tradition of Ordinary Language Philosophy, which held that philosophical problems are often confusions about how language is actually used. His method was to examine what speakers do with words, not what words mean in abstraction.

Austin's genius was to notice that philosophers had spent millennia studying the least interesting thing language does. The question 'is it true?' is not the master question of language. The question 'what does it do?' is — and that question opens onto politics, power, and the construction of social reality.