How to Do Things with Words

Twelve lectures Austin gave as the William James Lectures at Harvard in 1955, published after his death from his notes, edited by J. O. Urmson. Austin begins by challenging the assumption that the job of a sentence is to state facts truly or falsely. Some utterances, which he calls performatives, do something rather than describe it: saying 'I do' in a wedding, naming a ship, making a bet or a promise. These are not true or false but happy or unhappy, and Austin catalogues the ways they can fail, from misfires, where the act is not achieved, to abuses such as insincere promises. As the lectures go on, he finds that the line between performatives and statements breaks down. He replaces it with a general theory of speech acts, distinguishing the locutionary act of saying something meaningful, the illocutionary act performed in saying it, such as warning or ordering, and the perlocutionary act of producing effects, such as persuading. The last lecture sorts illocutionary forces into five families.

It founded speech act theory, which is still used in linguistics, law and social philosophy, and it reads as an informal, often funny series of talks.