Author: J. L. Austin

How to Do Things with Words is a set of lectures published after Austin died, and its opening move is that a great many sentences describe nothing and so cannot be true or false: I promise, I name this ship, I apologise. Saying them performs the act. He called those performatives and then spent the remaining lectures taking his own distinction apart, which is the part philosophers still argue about. He led ordinary language philosophy at Oxford on the view that the distinctions built into everyday speech are usually finer than the ones philosophers invent. He worked in British military intelligence on the Normandy landings. He died in 1960 at forty-eight.