Austin and Speech Act Theory

J.L. Austin (1911–1960), a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and a central figure in the mid-twentieth-century movement known as ordinary language philosophy, developed speech act theory chiefly through the William James Lectures he delivered at Harvard University in 1955, later edited from his lecture notes and published posthumously in 1962 as How to Do Things with Words by his student J.O. Urmson. Austin's starting observation was that a great many utterances do not merely describe or report some state of affairs, and so are not properly evaluable as true or false, but instead perform an action in the very act of being uttered — a class he termed performative utterances, in contrast to ordinary fact-stating constative utterances. His paradigm examples include "I do" (spoken during a marriage ceremony), "I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth" (spoken while smashing a bottle against the hull), "I give and bequeath my watch to my brother" (in a will), and "I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow" — utterances that do not describe an independently existing marrying, naming, bequeathing, or betting, but rather constitute the very performance of that act.