Philosophy08 Dec 2009 11:35 am
One of the most important works of “ordinary language” philosophy was J. L. Austin’s 1955 lecture series How to Do Things with Words. It was in these lectures that Austin introduced his theory of “performative utterances.”
Before Austin, philosophers who studied language assumed that it had a single function: stating facts about the world. (The “world” was broadly defined, and could include dreams and imaginings and fantasies and the rest.) Austin suggested that doing so left a very important piece of the puzzle unaccounted for: words that actually did something. Unlike other kinds of sentences, these weren’t “true” or “false,” any more than running or sleeping or taking a shower is “true” or “false.” They are simply actions.
Examples of “performative utterances” are easy to find: “We’ll name him Roger”; “I hereby pronounce you man and wife” and “I leave all of my worldly possessions to John Jones” all qualify. Put that way, it’s shocking that it took philosophers thousands of years to notice…
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It goes beyond just saying or describing something. Hence, when there is something wrong with the utterance it’s not “true” or “false,” the statement is, in a sense, either “happy” or “unhappy.”
I bet you a dollar it will rain tomorrow.