AUSTIN. How To Do Things With Words.pdf

J. L. AUSTIN

HOW TO DO THINGS

WITH WORDS

The William James Lectures

delivered at Harvard University

OXFORD

AT THE CLARENDON PRESS

1962

Oxford University Press, Amen House, London, E .C .q

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0 Oxford University Press 1962

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

EDITOR'S PREFACE

as the William James Lectures at Harvard Univer-

sity in 1955. In a short note, Austin says of the

views which underlie these lectures that they 'were

formed in 1939. I made use of them in an article on

"Other Minds" published in the Proceedings ofthe Aristo-

telian Society, Supplementary Volume XX (Ig46), pages

173 K, and I surfaced rather more of this iceberg shortly

afterwards to several societies. . ' In each of the years

1952-4 Austin delivered lectures at Oxford under the

title 'Words and Deeds', each year from a partially re-

written set of notes, each of which covers approximately

the same ground as the William James Lectures. For

the William James Lectures a new set of notes was again

prepared, though sheets of older notes were incorporated

here and there; these remain the most recent notes by

Austin on the topics covered, though he continued to

lecture on 'Words and Deeds' at Oxford from these notes,

and while doing so made minor corrections and a number

of marginal additions.

The content of these lectures is here reproduced in

print as exactly as possible and with the lightest editing.

If Austin had published them himself he would certainly

have recast them in a form more appropriate to print; he

would surely have reduced the recapitulations of previous

T HE lectures here printed were delivered by Austin

Editor's Preface

lectures which occur at the beginning of the second

and subsequent lectures; it is equally certain that Austin

as a matter of course elaborated on the bare text of his

notes when lecturing. But most readers will prefer to

have a close approximation to what he is known to have

written down rather than what it might be judged that he

would have printed or thought that he probably said in

lectures; they will not therefore begrudge the price to be

paid in minor imperfections of furm and style and incon-

sistencies of vocabulary.

But these lectures as printed do not exactly reproduce

Austin's written notes. The reason for this is that while

for the most part, and particularly in the earlier part of

each lecture, the notes were very full and written as

sentences, with only minor omissions such as particles

and articles, often at the end of the lecture they became

much more fragmentary, while the marginal additions

were often very abbreviated. At these points the notes

were interpreted and supplemented in the light of re-

maining portions of the 1952-4 notes already mentioned.

A further check was then possible by comparison with

notes taken both in America and in England by those

who attended the lectures, with the B.B.C. lecture on

'Performative Utterances' and a tape-recording of a

lecture entitled 'Performatives' delivered at Gothenberg

in October 1959. More thorough indications of the use

of these aids are given in an appendix. While it seems

possible that in this process of interpretation an occasional

sentence may have crept into the text which Austin

Editor's Preface

vii

would have repudiated, it seems very unlikely that at

any point the main lines of Austin's thought have been

misrepresented.

The editor is grateful to all those who gave assistance

by the loan of their notes, and for the gift of the tape-

recording. Heis especially indebted to Mr. G. J.Warnock,

who went through the whole text most thoroughly and

saved the editor from numerous mistakes; as a result

of this aid the reader has a much improved text.

J. 0. URMSON

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