A new model of illocutionary force
type: CreativeWork
description: In a series of lectures delivered in the early 1950s and later compiled and released in print as How to do things with Words , J.L. Austin elaborated on the idea that the capacity of language to describe the world was, despite the pre-eminence habitually granted to it by philosophy, really just one among several capacities and that, more generally, language endows its users with the tool to perform certain kinds of acts, called illocutionary acts or, later, speech acts . Speaking, Austin argued, was really a form of action; to say something is always just as much to do something. In the course of the lectures, Austin introduced some relatively well-known theoretical ideas, such as the category of performative utterances. The final lecture describes a taxonomy of utterances according to their illocutionary force. This taxonomy has for most thinkers proven less interesting than some of the moves he makes to get there. Comparatively few thinkers (Searle is the obvious exception, and there are a few others) have shown any interest developing, applying or criticising Austin’s taxonomy. The initial isolation of the class of performative utterances, on the other hand, despite the fact that it turns out to be for Austin essentially no more than a piece of intellectual scaffolding, has provoked an ongoing debate and numerous elaborations in fields as diverse as sociology, literary criticism and gender theory, as well as analytic philosophy. This paper has three chapters. Chapter One comprises a summary of How to do things with Words, followed by a brief discussion of some issues arising from it. The summary is expository, although rather than being comprehensive it focusses on matters relevant to the following chapters. The brief discussion that closes the chapter looks at a question in analytic philosophy (whether someone who makes a promise simultaneously states that they are promising), raises the question of the precise sense in which illocutionary acts are acts at all, …
abstract: In a series of lectures delivered in the early 1950s and later compiled and released in print as How to do things with Words , J.L. Austin elaborated on the idea that the capacity of language to describe the world was, despite the pre-eminence habitually granted to it by philosophy, really just one among several capacities and that, more generally, language endows its users with the tool to perform certain kinds of acts, called illocutionary acts or, later, speech acts . Speaking, Austin argued, was really a form of action; to say something is always just as much to do something. In the course of the lectures, Austin introduced some relatively well-known theoretical ideas, such as the category of performative utterances. The final lecture describes a taxonomy of utterances according to their illocutionary force. This taxonomy has for most thinkers proven less interesting than some of the moves he makes to get there. Comparatively few thinkers (Searle is the obvious exception, and there are a few others) have shown any interest developing, applying or criticising Austin’s taxonomy. The initial isolation of the class of performative utterances, on the other hand, despite the fact that it turns out to be for Austin essentially no more than a piece of intellectual scaffolding, has provoked an ongoing debate and numerous elaborations in fields as diverse as sociology, literary criticism and gender theory, as well as analytic philosophy. This paper has three chapters. Chapter One comprises a summary of How to do things with Words, followed by a brief discussion of some issues arising from it. The summary is expository, although rather than being comprehensive it focusses on matters relevant to the following chapters. The brief discussion that closes the chapter looks at a question in analytic philosophy (whether someone who makes a promise simultaneously states that they are promising), raises the question of the precise sense in which illocutionary acts are acts at all, …
author: Abbott, Simon
language: eng
date published: 2015
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:23:00Z
provider: University of Cape Town
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Social Anthropology

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/13647