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

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.