J.L. Austin

John Langshaw Austin was an English philosopher of language, born in 1911 and died in 1960, who pioneered ordinary language philosophy and is most renowned for his theory of speech acts. Austin's key insight was that language serves purposes beyond making assertions, illustrated by expressions such as I promise to do so-and-so, which he characterized as doing something, here making a promise, rather than making an assertion about anything. His groundbreaking 1955 lectures, published as How to Do Things with Words, argue that utterances themselves can constitute actions, challenging the traditional philosophical view that treated denotative, propositional assertion as the essence of language and meaning, and proposing instead that speech can involve doing something with words, not merely describing it.