Mark Rowe on J.L.Austin
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This is Philosophy Bites with me, David Edmonds. And me, Nigel Warburton. If you enjoy Philosophy Bites, please support us. We're unfunded and all donations will be gratefully received. For more details, go to www.philosophybites.com. J.L. Austin exercised a huge influence over Oxford philosophy in the post-war period. He was a leading exponent of what's usually known as ordinary language philosophy, an approach to the subject that begins from examining in detail the particular ways in which we speak.

His importance, however, was not just as a philosopher. His biographer, Mark Rowe, has shown that Austin played a pivotal role in the Second World War as a brilliant intelligence officer. David Edmonds discusses Austin with Mark Rowe in this episode of the biographical strand of Philosophy Bites, Biobites. Mark Rowe, welcome to Philosophy Bites. Thank you very much for inviting me.

We're talking today about J.L. Austin, a 20th century British philosopher. Just give me a thumbnail sketch of his life. So Austin was born in Lancaster in 1911 into a family of architects. The family suffered quite badly in the First World War. Both his mother's siblings were killed and his father lost all his friends. And when the father came back from the war, there was very little architectural work. The firm had basically survived by building churches.

and people didn't want to build churches anymore. So he had to find a job, and he eventually found a job as bursar to his mother's old school, St Leonard's in St Andrews, so that's where the family moved. Austin went to the local prep school. He was clearly brilliant at classics and languages, and he won an open scholarship to Shrewsbury.

where he went in 1924, did fantastically well at Shrewsbury and got an open scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford in 1929, where again his academic progress was spectacular. He got a first in mods after the first five terms and then in greats after the next seven terms.

He then took the All Souls exam, became an All Souls fellow, and then two years later took a job as a tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford, because that was a permanent appointment rather than the All Souls one, which was just for seven years. And it's there he begins to find his feet philosophically. He held a class with Isaiah Berlin on pragmatism.

He then had set up a discussion group with Ea, Berlin and other leading philosophers and was just beginning to sort of establish a reputation for himself when the war started. So in 1940 he's called up and he joins British intelligence and he joins an outfit called MI14 which was basically looking at what the Germans were doing in North Africa. Did very brilliantly there. Then moved to a small unit which had been set up to look at the coast to establish intelligence prior to D-Day.

After D-Day, he transfers to Eisenhower and becomes his order of battle chief and ends the war in Germany, basically interrogating German prisoners and doing various administrative duties. Comes back in 1946, takes up his Oxford tutoring job. He sets up a Saturday morning group, which became quite famous for young tutors.

And then in 1955, he's invited to Harvard, where he gave a very successful series of lectures on how to do things with words. He goes back to California in 1958, goes off on a tour of Scandinavia in 1959, and when he comes back, he realises he's quite ill. The children see how exhausted he is. And within about three or four months of falling ill, he dies of lung cancer, aged 48, at the very beginning of 1960.

So he dies as a young man. You touched briefly upon his war experience, but until you delved into Austin, nobody really knew quite how pivotal a role he'd played in the war.

Well, the fact and the significance were known, but there's only five paragraphs written about it in Geoffrey Warnock's memorial lecture. What I tried to do was put some detail on this and turn five paragraphs into 12 chapters and show exactly what he did and why he got a reputation as a brilliant intelligence officer and what role he played in D-Day and why it was so important.

So he goes on to play an important role in D-Day, but it all begins with him starting out as an intelligence officer. Yes, it does. He joins this group called MI-14, and basically he was working on North Africa. And what had happened in North Africa, at the end of 1940, the Italians had been extremely badly defeated.

And Austin suddenly realised that the Germans were going to send troops to reinforce their defeated allies. He was the first one to see that the Germans were transferring the Africa Corps and General Rommel into North Africa, which was obviously the beginning of a two or three year very hard fought campaign.

He had only been working in intelligence for about five or six weeks. He was a part-time trainee. He was helping people out with sort of, you know, humdrum routine tasks. And suddenly he saw something that everybody else had missed, a major strategic turn in German policy.

And people were pretty impressed by this, I think. So when they then wanted someone to lead a new unit to look at the coast of France prior to an Allied landing, which they knew must take place at some point.

he was placed in charge of it. It was called the Advanced Intelligence Section. When he took it over, there were only four or five people employed there. So his job was to analyse where the British and American troops should land effectively? Yes. He was in charge of intelligence from the north of Holland, the Den Helder, right down to the Spanish frontier, looking at all possible places where the landing would take place and looking at intelligence for about 30 miles inland.

So they wanted to know things about, for example, the composition of the beaches. Would it support armoured vehicles, for example? Where are the minefields? Where are the rivers? Where are the tank traps? Where are the ditches? Where are the gun positions? Austin's unit was in charge of basically all man-made defences, but he also had a role. He had to coordinate all the other intelligence, so things like...

the physical geography of beaches, which was actually done by another unit, putting together everything the Allies might need for successful landing. And how do we judge his success? It was extraordinarily successful. I mean, one thing to look at is the Dieppe raid in August 1942, which was a complete disaster.

One of the reasons why it was a complete disaster and why something like 6,000 troops were taken prisoner and 1,000 were killed is that nobody had looked hard enough at the composition of the beaches. They tried to land 50 tanks on the beaches and discovered that the tanks couldn't move because the beaches were made of large, hard pebbles. So when a tank tried to climb up the beach, all it did was dig a hole for itself in the beach and gradually sink and then had to be abandoned.

And they realised this was a disaster. If we're going to do this properly, we're going to have to know absolutely everything about the composition of beaches. For example, just before Bdide, there was a worry that a scientist before the war had gone for a swim off Arromanches where they were thinking about landing. And he said, the sea was turbid with what I think was peat. And they suddenly realised if there's mud or peat just under the surface of the beach, then we could have the same problem as at Dieppe. So they did an immense amount of work on things like aerial photographs,

They looked at historical accounts going back to the time of William the Conqueror to find out the composition of his beaches. They realised, for example, that the Romans had actually mined peat on these beaches.

And eventually they sent swimmers across with sort of augers to press into the sand to see how far under the beach you had to press before you found mud. Then they came back to England and reported that actually there's about 18 inches of cover and that should be enough to support armoured vehicles. And as a result of his efforts, many fewer troops died than were expected. That's certainly true. The British and Americans were expecting up to 30% casualties. That's killed women.

wounded, taken prisoner, missing. Possibly 30,000 or 40,000 troops could be casualties at the end of the first day. They thought it might be as bad as the first day at the Somme, for example.

In actual fact, the casualties overall turned out to be about something like 3% or so, very much less. And they actually had an investigation. And the official report said, well, one of the main reasons why this landing went so well was because the intelligence was so good. And they picked out two units. One is a group called ISTD, which is in charge of the physical geography. And the other one was Austin's group called Theatre Intelligence Section, which is in charge of man-made defences. And they said it was so good because we knew where every machine gun was, every anti-tank ditch,

every kind of defence, we knew what the German troops were, we knew how experienced they were and we could take countermeasures. So he actually received official praise for being one of the people who had made D-Day such a success.

That's his war effort. Let's get back to the philosophy. He's known as the father of ordinary language philosophy. What is ordinary language philosophy and how did Austen get interested in it? Ordinary language philosophy is the idea that philosophical problems arise because philosophers subtly misuse ordinary expressions.

and if you show them that they are misusing ordinary expressions, then they'll no longer want to ask those questions. It became fashionable to say that philosophical problems aren't solved, they're dissolved. They would be shown to be pseudo-questions, so it's like, what time is it on the sun? Which you initially think is a rather hard question, how long do we have to answer that? And then he writes, it's actually an unintelligible question. So how did he get interested in it? Well, I think there are two reasons. First of all, his whole training had been in languages.

So he was a brilliant classicist. He spoke fluent French and excellent German, had a working knowledge of Spanish and Russian and so forth, so he was immediately attracted by that. I also think that he was quite influenced by Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein had returned to Cambridge in 1929. Ostin began to find his philosophical feet with a discussion group they set up at All Souls in 1937.

By which time Wittgenstein's views were fairly familiar. The manuscripts or the typescripts of the Blue Book and the Brown Book were circulating. Austen didn't go off to war until the middle of 1940, so I assume sometime in those four years he read the Blue Book and the Brown Book. I think it's basically, he was interested by sort of linguistic questions anyway, and the influence of Wittgenstein suddenly came together just before the war.

And then there's a kind of five year pause while he thought about these things before he went back to professional philosophy. Also to say that as a classicist, he was very interested in Aristotle and Plato. And clearly, if you look at the early Socratic dialogues, Socrates is asking questions like, you know, what is piety? What is courage and so forth?

and there are good grounds for those in that those are actually linguistic questions. What do we mean by piety? What do we mean by courage? And Austen actually says sometime after the war, the method was actually discovered by Socrates. Wittgenstein, of course, also talks about problems dissolving in the analysis of language. So how does Austen's ordinary language philosophy differ from a Wittgensteinian approach? There are a number of differences. I suppose the most obvious one is that Wittgenstein tends to talk about

large-scale problems, rather general words, and his problems survive in translation. So he's interested in knowledge, he's interested in mind, he's interested in emotion and those kind of things, and clearly you can ask those questions in German or French or whatever. Whereas Austin tends to be interested in almost near synonyms in English and distinguish between them. For example, doing something deliberately, doing something intentionally, or doing something on purpose, or between the difference between a tool

tool and a utensil or an instrument for example and he would spend some of his Saturday morning sessions discriminating between these things or what's the difference between driving with care and driving with attention. Now Wittgenstein never goes in for that kind of very minute distinctions which basically you only find in English and there are all sorts of other differences. Wittgenstein for example is very interested in error.

He sympathises with people who make errors. He thinks that language itself leads you astray. He's interested in how you got into this muddle in the first place and he thinks you have to understand how you got into it to get out of it. He's almost like a sort of psychoanalyst trying to look at how these problems arise and how they get out of them. Austin is not really interested in why you made a mistake. He's just interested in that you have made this mistake and now how are we going to get out of it. Austin is much more, a bit more of a schoolmasterly figure. He thinks you got into a muddle and you need to sort it out.

And what is the ultimate objective? Is the point to just achieve linguistic clarity, conceptual clarity, is that the end in itself? I think initially it was, between about 1945 and 55, I think that was Austin's view, that basically if you got complete linguistic clarity, then these so-called philosophical questions would ultimately dissolve and basically philosophy could be wound up and would be at an end.

But his views after that change. I think he thought that after 10 years of effort, it didn't look like any philosophical problems had been particularly cleared up, and people began to ask rather sceptical questions about what exactly has been the result of all these seminars and investigations he's conducted. Also, Austin had begun to work on something called speech acts, and I'll just very briefly describe what speech acts are.

It's basically what you do in using language, in using sentences. When people start grammar at school, you're told there are four kinds of sentences. Questions, exclamations, descriptions and commands. And usually that passes within the first 30 seconds of the lesson and nobody takes any notice of it again.

But Austin did look at these and began to ask questions about, well, where does promising fit into those four kinds of sentences? For example, is it a command? Is it a question? Is it a description? No, not at all. What about congratulating? How does that fit in? Again, that doesn't quite fit. So he said, we really need to rethink this whole business about kinds of sentences or what we do with sentences. And he came up with the theory of speech acts.

Basically, he divided the Speech Act into three parts. The first part is the locution, which is what's actually said of the sentence. There's then the illocutionary act, which is what you do when using the sentence. For example, promising, excommunicating, marrying, naming, whatever. Then there's the perlocutionary act, which is the effect of what you say, which is basically boring, surprising, astonishing, depressing, and so forth. With this threefold classification of language, he does a much better job

of giving an overview of what we do with language, which is the foundation of a new academic subject, which is now studied in philosophy and in linguistics. So this sounds like he's doing philosophy in a very different way from his early years when he's just focusing on how ordinary language is actually used.

And that's completely true. I think there was a real sea change. For example, speech acts is a theory. And Austin, in the early days of the war, was not keen on theories. Secondly, he comes up with a whole new vocabulary, a whole new jargon of illogutionary acts, perlocutionary acts and so forth. Whereas before, he'd rather disapproved of jargon and been suspicious of it.

Thirdly, he clearly thought that philosophy should be done as a kind of team effort. And there's no sign that Austin actually worked out his theory of speech acts with a team. It's something he came up with by himself. And actually, he's no longer doing linguistic philosophy, which is a method applicable to all areas of philosophy. He's now concentrating on a new topic called the philosophy of language, which is only beginning to come into existence largely through Austin's own work.

which is a sub-discipline of philosophy, it's a whole new area. And at the beginning of 1956, he's published a paper called Ifs and Cans, at the end of which he outlines a three-stage model of philosophical inquiry. The first stage is where you kind of survey the entire area and do what he calls linguistic phonology. You look in tremendous detail at how we actually use words.

The second stage is more theoretical when philosophers and scientists and other researchers begin to collaborate on putting forward models and theories and then testing them.

The third stage is when that subject really gets going, breaks away from philosophy and acquires a new name, as do the practitioners. And Austin would give examples like, for example, psychology in the 19th century was not a part of philosophy, whereas now it's not. Simply mathematical logic started off with philosophers, but now is a subject here in its own right. And in our own time, we might think about something like artificial intelligence.

which was initially largely of interest to philosophers and now the whole departments of artificial intelligence where the subject is carried on. And clearly his own theory of speech acts is a good example of the second stage because philosophers and linguists are actually concentrating on giving a more precise theory of speech acts and it's quite possible that speech acts would eventually break away and become a whole new area of linguistics and there are very good signs that that is actually happening. We've talked about...

Austen's war work, we've talked about his philosophy. On the face of it they sound like two entirely different domains. What, if anything, is the connection between them?

There's an interesting letter which Austin writes to his wife at the beginning of 1941 where he says, I'm slightly dazzled because I'm used to working on imponderables where nobody really knows how to solve them and nobody's actually that interested in the answers. Whereas suddenly I'm being asked very specific questions like how many tanks are there in a particular storage site? And it's absolutely vital I get the questions right and men's lives depend on it.

And when he's writing these letters, you can actually see him thinking, why don't we do philosophy like that? And the way they worked out answers to intelligence questions was a general question would come in. It was then broken down into smaller questions and given out to specialists. The specialists would then research it. They would all then get together in a kind of seminar. They would report their findings. And then Austin would write a general report about the intelligence findings. And then this would be passed on to the relevant authorities.

And he clearly thought, why don't we do philosophy like that? Why does it have to be so individualistic? Why is it a matter of individual geniuses, you know, having insights in garrets? Surely it should be conducted by committees of intelligent people with assigned roles. And when he started to set up this group in Oxford, actually initially in 1947, his Saturday morning group, he insisted that, you know, they had a table, they sat round it, somebody took minutes to

Research projects were assigned, for example, HLA Hart, the lawyer had to go off and research baseball, the rules of baseball for a year. They were then feed back. And I think Austin did sort of actually try writing some sort of general summaries and reports on what they discovered. So it had actually an immediate effect on how he conducted philosophy. I mean, clearly he looks at the positivists thinking, you know, they were serious, sober men and certainly they did quite a lot of collaboration. But he was thinking of a much deeper notion of collaboration and research.

I think he thought for a number of years, although philosophical results were not quickly forthcoming, he thought eventually they would. Now, by 1955, I think that he'd begun to lose faith in that idea. And basically, after 1955, we see Austen change from an Oxford linguistic philosopher to an international philosopher of language.

because his work in speech acts was taken up most seriously in the States. And Austin thought that his future as a philosopher lay there. And he also thought that his influence in Oxford was basically coming to an end. He thought he'd reached the summit, the apogée of everything he might achieve in Oxford. And he was beginning to look beyond Oxford. So you see this change from an Oxford-ordinary language philosopher to an international philosopher of language basically focused on America and on Scandinavia.

And as an Oxford ordinary language philosopher, before this transition, with his Saturday group and so on, were there aspects of his personality which were conducive to this kind of business committee meeting approach to resolving philosophical problems?

Yes, I mean, Austin was a fairly austere, remote individual to people who weren't intimate friends and members of his family. People describe him as rather headmasterly. You know, you had to be on your best behaviour and you wanted to impress him. I think something else that's worth bearing in mind is that many dons in Oxford had served in intelligence and knew about the glamour of Austin's military career. And to them, he was a very successful, formidable, much decorated senior officer.

And I think some of that authority still carries on into post-war Oxford. So, yes, he was very good at running committees. I mean, he was extremely funny. You know, he made you laugh while apparently disapproving.

And it was said that when Austin died and Grice took over the same seminar, I mean, Grice is an absolutely excellent philosopher. He's a first-rate philosopher of language. But it said that the seminars never went quite so well. He just wasn't quite so good at sort of bringing out the best in people. And after 70 years, the group eventually dissipated. So, yes, Austin's analytic remoteness and also his authority were excellent for conducting these kind of sessions. And finally, now that you have...

a deep insight into his life and personality. Has that given you also a more profound appreciation of his philosophy?

I think his later judgment turns out to be right. I mean, I think his attempt to conduct philosophical inquiry like intelligence officers conducting inquiries into military intelligence is very important in the history of philosophy. You know, it was worth trying once. Similar, his very minute investigations of the nuances of English were worth trying once. But

But nobody does philosophy in that way anymore. It's history. It's now in the past. Whereas his work on speech acts is still very much alive. And as I said before, the theoretical stuff is largely constructed in linguistics. And it's become a kind of semi-science and academic subject in exactly the way he predicted. So I think speech acts is his major contribution to posterity. And it ought to be said that

It's very unusual for a philosopher to come up with a theory about an area of intellectual life that's never been mapped before. And everybody takes this up and thinks, this is pretty much right. Yeah, I mean, there's been obviously lots of tinkering with illocutionary acts and what are perlocutionary effects and so forth. But basically, people have seen, yeah, this is right. Let's take this over and let's develop this. That's very, very unusual in the history of philosophy. Even with Wittgenstein, you can't say, well, he was certainly right about that and everybody now agrees with it.

So that's really a rather unique contribution by Austin to come up with this theory about this utterly neglected area of grammar and come up with something so illuminating. So that's a very important contribution. Mark Woe, thank you very much indeed. Thank you very much. I've enjoyed it very much. For more Philosophy Bites, go to www.philosophybites.com. You can also find details there of Philosophy Bites books and how to support us.