John Langshaw Austin

usually J. L. Austin (British philosopher, 1911–1960). Austin is best known as an influential linguistic philosopher whose work of the 1950s paved the way for speech act theory. He is the author of How to Do Things With Words and the posthumously published Sense and Sensibilia, a volume compiled from lecture notes that represents a pointed attack on sense-data theories of perception; in particular, A. J. Ayer comes under heavy fire for his failure to consider how such words as "know", "exist" and "real" are employed in daily life.