Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: How to Do Things With Words (William James Lectures) by J.L. Austin ISBN: 0-674-41152-8 Publisher: Harvard University Press Pub. Date: 01 September, 1975 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.50 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (5 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Ehhh...
Comment: As an avid newcomer to the rich and variegated world of contemporary philosophy, I am digesting all the "essential" works I can lay my hands on, and gathered that this one was such. However, the best thing I can say about it is that it is quite short.
To begin with, I found Austin's writing style to be quite staccato; indeed, almost "hard on the eyes." It reads like "legalese" more than anything else I've come across in philosophy so far (it is not hard to adduce possible legal applications inherent in the subject of Performatives, so perhaps should be expected). He navigates through his chosen topic of speciality like a fly or mosquito constantly lighting and alighting on various surfaces in search of a tasty morsel but never quite finding anything to chew on. Instead of using his narrative to draw out actual philosophical *insights*, he spends most of the time on quasi-Aristotelian cataloguing of genus and differentia, while making very little of it in the process. I am really pretty puzzled by those other reviewers who speak of Austin's "argument" on Performatives: the structure of his "argument," as such, is broadly elliptical: he seems to come to some tentative conclusions every so often, then revises them again, and so on and so on such that at the end of the book I just wondered what, precisely, was said overall. I feel I actually learned more about Performatives and Illocutionary Acts in the single chapter on them in Lycan's excellent "Philosophy of Language" text. I found this book rather more tedious than anything else, and it seems very strange that that should be so, given that I am VERY interested in philosophy of language generally. But maybe this just isn't my topic (while such as semantic rigidity and natural kinds, on the other hand, ARE).
I do give this as much as three stars because it is still, I guess, the definitive work on the subject, and if you're at least into philosophy of language in general it is on your "need to have read" list. Hopefully when you do, your experience of it will be richer than was mine.
Rating: 3
Summary: The Importance of Being Earnest to Austin's S. A. Theory
Comment: While I commend J.L. Austin's attempt in How to Do Things With Words to liberate language from the metaphysical pretensions that the logical positivists imposed upon it by investing it with a certain phenomenological value, i.e., via the notion of "the speech act," I cannot help but wonder if Austin's reevaluation of the nature of language carries with it certain puzzling implications, particularly with regard to speaker, she who commits the speech act.
Austin's argument concerning the characteristics of a performative utterance are informed by a specific assumption concerning the origin and evolution of language: to wit, that language in its primitive stage was simply a collection of one-word utterances that are inherently ambiguous in terms of their individual senses. Thus, in order to refine the sense of these one-word utterances, a whole array of supplementary parts of speech evolved, and language became consequently more complex and sophisticated (71). In Austin's nomenclature, the force of a given one-word utterance was too diffuse vis-à-vis the context in which it is uttered and thus quite ambiguous from the addressee's position. In other words, a primitive one-word utterance does not provide the addressee any certainty about how she is to construe it. Therefore, the increasingly sophisticated iterations of language indicate an ongoing effort to refine the sense of an utterance, to give the force of the utterance a more specific and unambiguous valence.
However, Austin also maintains that an unintended consequence of this evolution of language is that it reaches a point where it becomes too sophisticated and thereby re-introduces the very uncertainty it was originally intended to mitigate. He claims that the various parts of speech, and the words that comprise them "lend themselves to equivocation and inadequate discrimination; and moreover, we use them for other purposes, e.g., insinuation," and thus concludes that "the trouble about all these devices has been principally their vagueness of meaning and uncertainty of sure reception" (76). In other words, there is a definite yet non-localizable threshold that an utterance must not cross if it is to remain teleologically oriented toward the clarity and accurate construal on the part of the addressee.
The speech act therefore always navigates between the Scylla and Charybdis of inadequately directed signifying force resulting from the primitiveness of the utterance on one hand, and the over-complexity of the utterance on the other. As a result, the clarity of a given utterance depends almost exclusively on the intention of the speaker; she must in some way remain cognizant of the above-mentioned threshold and therefore deploy the force of her utterance in a way that avoids being too diffuse or unmanageably polyvalent. This is not to claim, however, that the clarity of a given utterance is reducible to some Aristotelian mean; rather the clarity of an utterance depends on how well it reflects the earnestness or sincerity of the speaker. This notion of the speaker's earnestness is deduced from the circumstances surrounding the utterance, as well as the utterance's delivery, e.g., the enveloping context, the speaker's particular emphases, diction and enunciation, etc. The addressee thereby "triangulates" the speaker's specific intention through interpreting the above-mentioned features of the utterance. In short, it is absolutely essential to Austin's project that the speaker mean what she says.
It appears then that Austin's fundamental supposition is tautological: the addressee deduces/approximates the speaker's degree of sincerity through the amount of sincerity the speaker conveys in her utterance, which in turn reflects ipso facto the speaker's sincerity (as a subjective condition). In short, the speaker is found to be in earnest because she is in earnest. Only an utterance of the utmost sincerity-what Austin terms an "explicit performative"-carries with it the closest thing to a guarantee in terms of a clear and accurate construal. This further implies that clarity of utterance is ultimately an ethical consideration, rather than a linguistic or grammatical one, because the speaker's responsibility to her addressee obliges her to be earnest and therefore quite literal in her expression (see Habermas on this point). Unless of course the context in which the utterance is made is one in which it is assumed, either through mutual agreement or convention, that explicit or pure performatives are not necessarily expected nor pertinent, e.g., a comical monologue, a play, etc.
Thus, while Austin's argument in How to Do Things with Words is elegantly schematic, it nevertheless implies a somewhat simplistically idealized and unitary notion of the speaker's subjectivity. In other words, Austin's claims cannot adequately accommodate instances of insincerity that, while perhaps unanticipated, are not exactly inappropriate-such as ironical observations on an immediate situation-because such self-abrogation of the speaker's sincerity renders the utterance "infelicitous" almost to the point of being diabolically caustic with regard to the addressee's apprehension.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Brisk tour through Speech Act Theory
Comment: At many points, J.L. Austin's How to do Things with Words reads more like a linguistic textbook than a philosophy text. Whether you count this as a benifit or a distraction will depend on your disposition (it certainly beats reading Kant), but whatever your views on the subject, the work is a useful introduction to Speech Act Theory. How to do Things with Words examines a part of language that philosophy has traditionaly ignored, what he dubs the performative utterance. There are certain instances in language where to say something is do perform the very act you say, promising being the perinial example. If I say, under ordinary circumstances, "I promise to do x" then I have promised to do x. Using this seemingly magical fact as his starting point, Austin goes reach profound conclusions about the nature of language and philosophy. Though the tasks Austin sets out to accomplish are largely left uncompleted (he himself admits this) the book will give you the grounding you need to pursue other works in the field, such as those of Searle or Grice. Happy reading!
 |
Title: Speech Acts by P.G. Searle, John R. Searle ISBN: 052109626X Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 01 January, 1969 List Price(USD): $28.00 |
 |
Title: Limited Inc. by Jacques Derrida ISBN: 0810107880 Publisher: Northwestern University Press Pub. Date: 01 November, 1988 List Price(USD): $19.00 |
 |
Title: Gender Trouble (Tenth Anniversary Edition) by Judith Butler ISBN: 0415924995 Publisher: Routledge Pub. Date: September, 1999 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
 |
Title: Philosophical Papers (Oxford Paperbacks) by J.L. Austin ISBN: 019283021X Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 January, 1980 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
 |
Title: Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts by John R. Searle ISBN: 0521313937 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 01 November, 1985 List Price(USD): $33.00 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
