ABSTRACT
My title is of course a twist on the one J.L. Austin gave to the series of twelve William James lectures he delivered at Harvard fifty years ago. And since my understanding of what is going on in Austin’s lectures both deeply informs what I am doing in this paper and at the same time is pointedly at odds with the standard way of taking them, I think it best for me to start with some general remarks about how I read How to Do Things With Words.1
