Austin, John Langshaw

Oxford philosopher of language

[Archive rare] (ENG) John Langshaw Austin - Extrait d'un cours à Göteborg

Artesquieu · Jun 9, 2022 · partial coverage

• J. L. Austin
• performative utterances
• speech acts
• philosophy of language
• ordinary language philosophy
• promise
• homage
• Alma
• rare archive
• Gothenburg

Coverage note: full (a very short extract of about a dozen lines; the audio quality is poor, so a few words in the captions are garbled and left out)

Core ideas

The narrator first sets the context: Austin invented the term performative for utterances that cannot be called true or false in the ordinary sense because they constitute an action rather than report a fact. To promise something is, he says, rather like naming a ship or baptizing a child: one can do it "happily or unhappily", that is, one can fulfil the action or fail to fulfil it. The only surviving recording of Austin lecturing, made in Gothenburg in 1959, is of poor quality, but the extract that follows shows him at work.

In it Austin makes a point about explicit performatives. Even in ceremonies or rituals that are not verbal at all, we have devices that make explicit what act is being performed. If someone appears before you and bows deeply from the waist, it may be quite uncertain what he is doing: bending to look at the flowers or to tie a shoelace, or perhaps some form of embarrassment or homage. To clear up this ambiguity, we invent a little device such as raising the hat or saying "salaam", accompanying the bow so as to make the act explicitly and unambiguously one of doing homage. Raising the hat does not describe what we are doing; it merely makes explicit that the bow is an act of homage. In the same way, putting "I promise that" at the head of a performative utterance makes explicit what one is doing, and the utterance itself performs the act.

The narrator adds that Austin came to doubt whether even ordinary statements of fact are always simply true or false: he began to suspect that they can also be subject to "happiness or unhappiness", like performatives. The recording ends on the example of Lord Raglan and the battle of the Alma, which Austin calls "a soldier's battle if ever there was one": Raglan was in command of the British but not of the French, and none of his orders were ever transmitted, so it is hard to say whether he "won" the battle; in some contexts it is perfectly justifiable to say so, perhaps as an exaggeration, but one might not want to dwell on his having won it if there were questions about giving the "old fool" a medal.

Excerpts