How to Pronounce J. L. Austin
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Mar 26, 1911 Lancaster, England, United Kingdom Died on 08 Feb 1960 (aged 48)
English philosopher
AriesJ. L. Austin - Place of Birth, Date of Birth, Age, Wiki, Facts, Net Worth, Birthday, Biography and Family
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About J. L. Austin
- John Langshaw Austin (26 March 1911 – 8 February 1960) was a British philosopher of language and leading proponent of ordinary language philosophy, perhaps best known for developing the theory of speech acts.Austin pointed out that we use language to do things as well as to assert things, and that the utterance of a statement like "I promise to do so-and-so" is best understood as doing something — making a promise — rather than making an assertion about anything.
- Hence the name of one of his best-known works How to Do Things with Words.
- Austin, in providing his theory of speech acts, makes a significant challenge to the philosophy of language, far beyond merely elucidating a class of morphological sentence forms that function to do what they name.
- Austin's work ultimately suggests that all speech and all utterance is the doing of something with words and signs, challenging a metaphysics of language that would posit denotative, propositional assertion as the essence of language and meaning.
