Literature/1955/Austin

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Austin, J. L. (1955). How to Do Things with Words. The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955, ed. by J. O. Urmson. Oxford: Clarendon, 1962.

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• How to Do Things With Words is perhaps Austin's most influential work. In it he attacks what was in his time a predominant account in philosophy, namely, the view that the chief business of sentences is to state facts, being "true" when they succeed and "false" when they fail in that business. In contrast to this common view, he argues, sentences with truth-values form only a small part of the range of utterances. After introducing several kinds of sentences which he asserts are neither true nor false, he turns in particular to one of these kinds of sentences, which he calls performative utterances or just "performatives". These he characterises by two features:
  • Again, though they may take the form of a typical indicative sentence, performative sentences are not used to describe (or "constate") and are thus not true or false; they have no truth-value.
  • Second, to utter one of these sentences in appropriate circumstances is not just to "say" something, but rather to perform a certain kind of action.

w: Verbal behavior

w: Speech act

See also

• Quine, Willard (1960). Word and Object. MIT Press. ^{[^]}
• Gellner, Ernest (1959). Words and Things: A Critical Account of Linguistic Philosophy and a Study in Ideology. London: Gollancz. ^{[^]}
• Literature/1958/Polanyi ^{[^]}
• Cherry, Colin (1957). On Human Communication: A Review, a Survey, and a Criticism . The M.I.T. Press, 1966. ^{[^]}
• Chomsky, Noam (1957). Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton. ^{[^]}
• Literature/1957/Grice ^{[^]}
• Russell, Bertrand (1957). "Mr Strawson on Referring." Mind 66: 385-389. ^{[^]}
• Skinner, B. F. (1957). Verbal Behavior. Acton, Massachusetts: Copley Publishing Group. ^{[^]}
• Literature/1956/Miller ^{[^]}
• Austin, J. L. (1955). How to Do Things with Words. The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955, ed. by J. O. Urmson. Oxford: Clarendon, 1962. ^{[^]}
• Black, Max (1954). "Metaphor." Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 55, pp. 273-294. ^{[^]}
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1953). Philosophical Investigations. Blackwell Publishing. ^{[^]}
• Literature/1952/Hare ^{[^]}
• Literature/1951/Lewin ^{[^]}
• Strawson, Peter (1950). "On Referring." Mind, vol. 59, no. 235, pp. 320-344. ^{[^]}
• Ryle, Gilbert (1949). The Concept of Mind. University Of Chicago Press. ^{[^]}
• Frankl, Viktor (1946). Man's Search for Meaning. Beacon Press, 1959. ^{[^]}
• Huxley, Aldous (1940). Words and Their Meanings. The Ward Ritchie Press, 1940. ^{[^]}
• Richards, I. A. (1936). The Philosophy of Rhetoric. Oxford University Press. ^{[^]}
• Korzybski, Alfred (1933). Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. 5th ed., Institute of General Semantics, 1994. ^{[^]}
• Ogden, C. K. & I. A. Richards (1923). The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. ^{[^]}
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1922). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Frank P. Ramsey & C. K. Ogden, trans., Kegan Paul, 1922. ^{[^]}
• Welby, Victoria Lady (1911). Significs and Language: The Articulate Form of Our Expressive and Interpretive Resources. H. Walter Schmitz, ed., John Benjamins, 1985. ^{[^]}
• Russell, Bertrand (1905). "On Denoting." Mind, vol. 14, pp. 479-493. ^{[^]}