How to Do Things with Words: Second Edition (The William James Lectures)

The ancient Greeks constantly harped on the contrast between words and actions, provoking Housman's parody in his Fragment of a Greek Tragedy`Oh! I am smitten with a hatchet's jaw,And that in deed and not in word alone.'It seems a simple and basic distinction, but when one thinks about it it's not so simple as it looks. If I say `John promises to do that' I am simply reporting John's action of promising; but if I say `I promise to do that' I am actually doing the promising by saying so. Certain forms of words are actions as well, and not just in the trivial sense that to say something is to perform the act of saying something. Moreover, forms of words that seem very similar in meaning turn out not to behave in identical ways. `Apologise' behaves much like `promise', in the sense that when I say `I apologise for my behaviour' I am performing the act of apologising. However when I say `I am sorry for my behaviour' I may or may not be apologising - I may be reporting my feeling of sorrow, as if I had said `I am sad about my behaviour.'The general idea is very easy to grasp, but the amount of variety in the ordinary expressions we use can seem mind-boggling. What's the story on `bequeath' for instance? If I say in my will `I bequeath you 1 million $' and if I have 1 million $ to bequeath you then I am performing the act of bequeathing by saying so. However if I don't have it I am bequeathing you nothing , whatever I say. Similarly, if I say `I anoint you Archbishop of Peoria' simply saying so doesn't make you that. In the first place I need the authority to perform this act, in the second place I need something to anoint you with, and in the third place you need to be willing to be so anointed. However even if all these conditions are present I will still not have anointed you Archbishop unless I also say so. It all goes on and on. If I am your commanding officer and I say `I reprimand you' I am thereby carrying out the act of reprimanding. However if I say `I insult you' and leave it at that I have done no insulting. Again, if one says `In saying that he made a mistake' this does not mean that the person's act consisted of something called `making a mistake'. And so on.The series of twelve lectures in this book hauls us through any amount of fine and subtle detail about these so-called `performative utterances'. Normally the best way to read a book is to start at the beginning, but that's not what I'd recommend here. Once you have the general idea (even from this short review) I'd say start at the last lecture, go on to the second-last, and only then go back to the start. If you plough through it starting at page 1 it seems a bit of a catalogue of instances, almost as if linguistic philosophy is reduced to sweeping up after some majestic cavalcade of lexicography has passed by. Austin is always Austin of course, not just lucid and brilliant but witty too - there is one of his inimitable mixed metaphors somewhere, something about letting cards out of the bag or putting cats on the table. However after a while one yearns for a top-down perspective, for generalisation. That comes in the final two chapters. The most important statement in the book is in chapter XI, where he says that `...what we have to study is not the sentence but the issuing of an utterance in a speech situation.' That may not be Austin's most felicitous expression, at least not when quoted out of context, but it enshrines his basic argument, one that holes much ordinary linguistic philosophy below the water-line, that verbal expressions on their own do not enable us to understand what is said. Indeed I wish he had gone further in pointing out that non-verbal factors, such as tone of voice or facial expression, can cast doubt on what the verbal expression is ostensibly saying. I could, for example, say `Oh I do apologise' in such a manner as to make it very clear that I mean nothing of the kind.In the last chapter Austin produces a short set of categories of expression in an attempt to classify the mass of detail in the foregoing chapters. He does not profess to think them anything but provisional, and the terms he coins are monstrosities - behabitives, expositives, verdictives, exercitives and commissives. Be not afraid. He explains them with all his characteristic clarity, and when you have seen the outlines of the wood you can go back to the beginning and inspect the trees individually. As always, Austin is a spoiler, and rightly so. He trains his guns on the illegitimate tyranny of `true and false' that has bedevilled so much philosophical thinking, saying that these terms constitute `a dimension of assessment' and do not stand in some supposedly unique relationship to `facts'. This is only a review, and if you want to know how he means that you have to read him for himself. For me, Austin's way of putting things is enjoyable and his thinking is liberating to the mind. Much philosophy is, in another of his great expressions, barking up the wrong gum tree, and I am only too grateful that Austin lived long enough to save us from the same fate.

We live in language, listening and speaking with each other. Every human invention happens in language. Our concerns, our institutions, our dreams, our families and communities, and our projects are constructed first in language. This book is about how that happens (not just in English, but in every language).Here is the fundamental structure of the language of business, innovation, design, politics, social relations, the construction of trust in our communities, and much more.Our children study language throughout their school years, and no one ever teaches them that if they want to cause something to happen, they must make a request or an offer. If, in our notes and letters, meetings and speeches, arguments and efforts to convince and market, we don't do the action of uttering or communicating a request or an offer, then whatever actions that occur afterwards are all but accidental. "Requests" and "Offers" are two classes of Professor Austin's performative verbs. We teach our children how to be politically correct in their speaking, but not how to make things happen. How can that be?I think that should be enough to build more interest in this wonderful little book. I recommend it highly.However, there are two more things that I want to say about the book.First, I urge the potential reader not to be deceived. This jewel is walking around in a disguise. The book is assembled from talks that Austin gave in 1955 at Harvard University. The language of "the analytic philosophy of language" has served as a successful strategy for hiding the profound relevance of Austin's work for our everyday lives.From the picture of him available on the Internet, John Langshaw Austin was the perfect 20th Century Oxford Don -- a super-geek. What is not visible there is that he was an enormously pragmatic and wise man. For a key example, during World War II, Austin led the Allied intelligence efforts leading up to D Day.Second, and much more important for our world today, in this little book, Austin opens for us the language of the era that we have now entered -- the era of services. For the last few decades the economy of the United States has been predominantly an economy of services. Over 90% of the exchanges that make up our economy come from services. (Remember that inside manufacturing, agribusiness, and extraction industries are vast service networks.) Our business leaders have not yet discovered that the language that we currently use for understanding what we do in business is archaic and obsolete. We speak of inputs, processes, and outputs, flows of things and data, resources, assets, and information.Services are not constructed in the same way that clocks and automobiles are constructed. They are not things. They are social constructions, built in networks of requests and promises, and in trusting relationships between people speaking and listening to each other, today increasingly through electronic media.This is a book about the language of service.I recommend it.

If, on one hand, i liked the scientific and technical approach to the main issues of the book, on the other it dealt with grassroots grammar and I had already studied that at school. Still, it works very well as a philosophycal tool.

very interesting ideas

For me this is a book that challenges our conception of the effects that words, sentences and speech may have beyond the paper. Some parts are hard to understand at first since I guess that the author addresses people with some background in thesw topics, but it’s only about reading twice some sentences and thinking about them instead of moving forward before really understanding.

Das Buch ist ganz neu und gut qualitativ

Livre reçu dans un état impeccable, merci!

本書は随分前に出版されたものですが、ポライトネスの学習のために読んでみることにしました。Performative(遂行文：その文を発することが、その文の表す行為の遂行となる文. ex. I promise to marry you. )とはどのようなものか、その基準は何か、どのような分類ができ、どのような動詞がそれぞれの分類に含まれるのか等、新しい知見を得ることができました。