History of The Term
In his 1955 William James lecture series, which were later published under the title How to Do Things with Words, Austin argued against a positivist philosophical claim that the utterances always "describe" or "constate" something and are thus always true or false. After mentioning several examples of sentences which are not so used, and not truth-evaluable (among them non-sensical sentences, interrogatives, directives and "ethical" propositions), he introduces "performative" sentences as another instance.
Read more about this topic: Performative Utterance
Famous quotes containing the words history of, history and/or term:
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
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—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
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—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)