H. P. Grice, "The Austinian Code"

Austin: English philosopher, a leading exponent of postwar “linguistic” philosophy. Educated primarily as a classicist at Shrewsbury and Balliol, Oxford, he taught philosophy at Magdalen College. During World War II he served at a high level in military intelligence, which earned him the O.B.E., Croix de Guerre, and Legion of Merit. In 1952 he became White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, and in 1955 and 1958 he held visiting appointments at Harvard and Berkeley, respectively. In his relatively brief career, Austin published only a few invited papers; his influence was exerted mainly through discussion with his colleagues, whom he dominated more by critical intelligence than by any preconceived view of what philosophy should be. Unlike some others, Austin did not believe that philosophical problems all arise out of aberrations from “ordinary language,” nor did he necessarily find solutions there; he dwelt, rather, on the authority of the vernacular as a source of nice and pregnant distinctions, and held that it deserves much closer attention than it commonly receives from philosophers. It is useless, he thought, to pontificate at large about knowledge, reality, or existence, for example, without first examining in detail how, and when, the words ‘know’, ‘real’, and ‘exist’ are employed in daily life. In Sense and Sensibilia (1962; compiled from lecture notes), the sense-datum theory comes under withering fire for its failings in this respect. Austin also provoked controversy with his well-known distinction between “performative” and “constative” utterances (‘I promise’ makes a promise, whereas ‘he promised’ merely reports one); he later recast this as a threefold differentiation of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary “forces” in utterance, corresponding (roughly) to the meaning, intention, and consequences of saying a thing, in one context or another. Though never very stable or fully worked out, these ideas have since found a place in the still-evolving study of speech acts.