Positivism during this period was virtually unopposed on any intellectually organized scale.” Logical positivism was an approach to language that sought to determine whether or not utterances were meaningful or meaningless. Writing in the early 1990s, Stanley Cavell recalls the pervasiveness of logical positivism in Anglo-American philosophy departments of the 1940s and 50s, calling it “a hegemonic presence more total than that of any one of today’s politically or intellectually advanced positions. Philosophers should pay attention to the total speech act. It has dimensions of meaning, force, fairness, exactness that differ according to situation. Finally, Austin urges us to consider that language cannot be evaluated merely on a true/false scale. This division soon collapses on itself, too.

He recasts his scheme such that it includes what we say, what we mean to say, and what effect our saying has on listeners. But then he spends several chapters showing how this division fails because there is no guaranteed vocabulary or grammar that will let us know for certain when we are stating, describing, reporting, etc. This half-obvious, half-banal idea is at the core of How to Do Things with Words indeed, by the second lecture Austin establishes that our utterances can be divided into those that can be judged true/false statement and those that can be judged as successful/unsuccessful acts. When we say something, we do not merely describe or report a state of affairs-we also do something.

Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (1955)

Jl austin how to do things with words