J.L. Austin

J.L. Austin was the Oxford philosopher who founded ordinary language philosophy and invented speech act theory — the study of what we do with words when we speak. Where his contemporaries dismissed everyday language as philosophically crude, Austin argued that careful attention to how words are ordinarily used could dissolve philosophical puzzles and reveal genuine distinctions that abstraction had obscured.

His posthumously published How to Do Things with Words distinguished performative utterances — in which saying something is doing something (promising, apologising, declaring) — from constative ones, and introduced the concepts of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts. This framework transformed philosophy of language and linguistics, influencing Grice, Searle, and the entire tradition of pragmatics. Sense and Sensibilia demolished the sense-data theory of perception through painstaking conceptual analysis. Austin's Saturday morning seminars at Oxford were legendary for their exacting standards.