Constructed posthumously from his lecture notes, John Langhsaw Austin’s How to Do Things with Words has had a major impact on linguistics in the field of pragmatics and is the most cited work of post-1945 British philosophy. However, Austin himself noted that the lectures had boring and repetitious passages (Rowe, 2023). It seems likely that had he had time to convert the lectures into a published book, he would have made careful revisions and edits. The aim of my paper is to consider how the core ideas in How to Do Things with Words can be presented in a straightforward and accessible way to university students. There are three main parts to the paper. In the first, the core ideas of the book are summarised. In the second part, problems with the text are examined. I consider whether terms are divorced from their common usage, an example being written utterances. I examine some of the gaps, particularly in his labelling of misfires and abuses, and also in integrating misunderstandings into Austin’s initial infelicities for performatives as well as ambiguities and redundancies in some of the key terms. In the third part, I sketch an outline of the way Austin’s process of thought and key ideas can be illustrated as part of a course through a set of tasks for students to create interaction and discussion in a way that is closer to a seminar than a lecture course.
Walter DAVIES (Sun,) studied this question.