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J. L. Austin Quotes

John Langshaw Austin was a British philosopher of language and leading proponent of ordinary language philosophy, perhaps best known for developing the theory of speech acts.Austin pointed out that we use language to do things as well as to assert things, and that the utterance of a statement like "I promise to do so-and-so" is best understood as doing something — making a promise — rather than making an assertion about anything. Hence the name of one of his best-known works How to Do Things with Words. Austin, in providing his theory of speech acts, makes a significant challenge to the philosophy of language, far beyond merely elucidating a class of morphological sentence forms that function to do what they name. Austin's work ultimately suggests that all speech and all utterance is the doing of something with words and signs, challenging a metaphysics of language that would posit denotative, propositional assertion as the essence of language and meaning. Wikipedia  

✵ 26. March 1911 – 8. February 1960

Works
J. L. Austin: 23   quotes 1   like

Famous J. L. Austin Quotes

“Ordinary language blinkers the already feeble imagination.”

J. L. Austin

Source: Philosophical Papers (1979), p. 68.

“In one sense 'there are' both universals and material objects, in another sense there is no such thing as either: statements about each can usually be analysed, but not always, nor always without remainder.”

J. L. Austin

Source: Philosophical Papers (1979), p. 43.

“Going back into the history of a word, very often into Latin, we come back pretty commonly to pictures or models of how things happen or are done. These models may be fairly sophisticated and recent, as is perhaps the case with 'motive' or 'impulse', but one of the commonest and most primitive types of model is one which is apt to baffle us through its very naturalness and simplicity.”

J. L. Austin

Austin (1956) " A Plea for Excuses http://www.ditext.com/austin/plea.html", in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1956-7.

“If we say that I only get at the symptoms of his anger, that carries an important implication. But is this the way we do talk?”

J. L. Austin

Source: Philosophical Papers (1979), p. 107.

“It may justly be urged that, properly speaking, what alone has meaning is a sentence.”

J. L. Austin

Source: Philosophical Papers (1979), p. 56.

“However well equipped our language, it can never be forearmed against all possible cases that may arise and call for description: fact is richer than diction.”

J. L. Austin

Source: Philosophical Papers (1979), p. 195.

J. L. Austin Quotes about the truth

“We become obsessed with 'truth' when discussing statements, just as we become obsessed with 'freedom' when discussing conduct…Like freedom, truth is a bare minimum or an illusory ideal.”

J. L. Austin

Source: Philosophical Papers (1979), p. 130.

“Like 'real', 'free' is only used to rule out the suggestion of some or all of its recognized antitheses. As 'truth' is not a name of a characteristic of assertions, so 'freedom' is not a name for a characteristic of actions, but the name of a dimension in which actions are assessed.”

J. L. Austin

Source: Philosophical Papers (1979), p. 180.

“But suppose we take the noun 'truth': here is a case where the disagreements between different theorists have largely turned on whether they interpreted this as a name of a substance, of a quality, or of a relation.”

J. L. Austin

Source: Philosophical Papers (1979), p. 73.

“What is truth?”

J. L. Austin

said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.
"Truth", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 24, Issue 1, 9 July 1950 https://academic.oup.com/aristoteliansupp/article-abstract/24/1/111/1779429

J. L. Austin Quotes

“Ordinary language is not the last word: in principle it can everywhere be supplemented and improved upon and superseded. Only remember, it is the first word.”

J. L. Austin

Source: Philosophical Papers (1979), p. 185.

“J. L. Austin; James Opie Urmson, Geoffrey James Warnock eds. (1979) Philosophical Papers, 3rd ed. New York: Oxford.”

J. L. Austin

Philosophical Papers (1979)

“Faced with the nonsense question 'What is the meaning of a word?' and perhaps dimly recognizing it to be nonsense, we are nevertheless not inclined to give it up.”

J. L. Austin

Source: Philosophical Papers (1979), p. 58.

Question

“There are more ways of killing a cat than drowning it in butter; but this is the sort of thing (as the proverb indicates) we overlook: there are more ways of outraging speech than contradiction merely.”

J. L. Austin book How to Do Things with Words

John Langshaw Austin, Marina Sbisà (1975) How to Do Things with Words. p. 48.

Way , Cats

“Why should it not be the whole function of a word to denote many things?”

J. L. Austin

Source: Philosophical Papers (1979), p. 38.

“The Nicomachean Ethics is only intended as a guide for politicians, and they are only concerned to know what is good, not what goodness means…and in any case one can know what things are good without knowing the analysis of 'good”

J. L. Austin

Source: Philosophical Papers (1979), p. 22.

“Infelicity is an ill to which all acts are heir which have the general character of ritual or ceremonial, all conventional acts.”

J. L. Austin

Austin (1975, p. 18–19) as cited in: James Loxley (2006) Performativity. p. 81.

“Let us distinguish between acting intentionally and acting deliberately or on purpose, as far as this can be done by attending to what language can teach us.”

J. L. Austin

Source: Philosophical Papers (1979), p. 273.

“Words are not (except in their own little corner) facts or things: we need therefore to prise them off the world, to hold them apart from and against it, so that we can realize their inadequacies and arbitrariness, and can relook at the world without blinkers.”

J. L. Austin

Source: Philosophical Papers (1979), p. 182.

World

“But surely, speaking carefully, we do not sense 'red' and 'blue' any more than 'resemblance' (or 'qualities' any more than 'relations'): we sense something of which we might say, if we wished to talk about it, that 'this is red.”

J. L. Austin

Source: Philosophical Papers (1979), P. 49.

Sense

“Sentences are not as such either true or false”

J. L. Austin

Austin (1962) Sense and Sensibilia p. 111.

Falseness

“Faced with the nonsense question "What is the meaning of a word?"”

J. L. Austin

and perhaps dimly recognizing it to be nonsense, we are nevertheless not inclined to give it up.

p. 58
Philosophical Papers (1979)

Question

“We speak of people "taking refuge" in vagueness — the more precise you are, in general the more likely you are to be wrong, whereas you stand a good chance of not being wrong if you make it vague enough.”

J. L. Austin

Sense and Sensibilia (1962), p. 125

Chance , Making love , People

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