John Langshaw Austin: fuerzas ilocucionarias y poderes mágicos

Abstract

In talking about speech acts what Austin was doing or should have been doing was trying to articulate a theory of speech act 

efficacy: how is it that, for instance, when I say to someone in socially appropriate circumstances ‘I appoint you … ‘ the person referred to gets appointed? This is pure magic. My words work like a spell. They constitute a spell. My words are what they are because of the social effect they produce. Officiating as a magician in his own philosophical tribe, he is unable to break free from the spell he himself is under. His speech act theory is conditioned by social forces of which he is unaware. As a result his speech acts on speech acts misfire. This paper is an attempt to articulate a perspective from which the social situation in which Austin finds himself and the way it impinges upon the production of his theory can be appraised.