Episode 186: J.L. Austin on Doing Things with Words (Part Two)

From The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey

Continuing on How to Do Things with Words (lectures from 1955), covering lectures 5-9.

Austin tries and fails to come up with a way to grammatically distinguish performatives from other utterances, and so turns to his more complicated system of aspects of a single act: locutionary, illocutionary, perlocutionary. In doing so, he perlocutionarily blows our minds.

Listen to part one first, or get the ad-free Citizen Edition. Please support PEL!

End song: "The Promise" by When In Rome; hear singer Clive Farrington on Nakedly Examined Music #40.