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J.L.AUSTIN The Arguments of the Philosophers EDITOR: TED HONDERICH The purpose of this series is to provide a contemporary assessment and history of the entire course of philosophical thought. Each book constitutes a detailed, critical introduction to the work of a philosopher of major influence and significance. Plato J.C.B.Gosling Augustine Christopher Kirwan The Presocratic Philosophers Jonathan Barnes Plotinus Lloyd P.Gerson The Sceptics R.J.Hankinson Socrates Gerasimos Xenophon Santas Berkeley George Pitcher Descartes Margarer Dauler Wilson Hobbes Tom Sorell Locke Michael Ayers Spinoza R.J.Delahunty Bentham Ross Harrison Hume Barry Stroud Butler Terence Penelhum John Stuart Mill John Skorupski Thomas Reid Keith Lehrer Kant Ralph C.S.Walker Hegel M.J.Inwood Schopenhauer D.W.Hamlyn Kierkegaard Alastair Hannay Nietzsche Richard Schacht Karl Marx Allen W.Wood Gottlob Frege Hans D.Sluga Meinong Reinhardt Grossmann Husserl David Bell G.E.Moore Thomas Baldwin Wittgenstein Robert J.Fogelin Russell Mark Sainsbury William James Graham Bird Peirce Christopher Hookway Santayana Timothy L.S.Sprigge Dewey J.E.Tiles Bergson A.R.Lacey J.L.Austin G.J.Warnock Karl Popper Anthony O’Hear Ayer John Foster Sartre Peter Caws J.L.AUSTIN The Arguments of the Philosophers G.J.Warnock LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 1989 by Routledge First published in paperback 1991 Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk. Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 1989, 1991 G.J.Warnock All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-84968-X Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-415-20387-2 (Print Edition) ISBN 0-415-20392-9 (set) Publisher’s note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original book may be apparent. Contents Preface vi Preface to the paperback edition vii I INTRODUCTION 1 II PERCEPTION AND OTHER MATTERS 8 III KNOWLEDGE AND OTHER MINDS 24 IV TRUTH 34 V EXCUSES AND ACCUSATIONS 49 VI IFS AND CANS 61 VII SOME OTHER PAPERS 75 VIII WORDS AND DEEDS 80 Postscript 116 Bibliographical Note 118 Notes 119 Index 129 Preface I have conceived what follows as a book about Austin, rather than about Austin and his critics and commentators. I have accordingly aimed at plain exposition and discussion of his texts, rather than at much examination of the controversial literature to which some of them have given rise. I hope that those many people who have written about Austin will not assume, if their contributions are unmentioned here, that I have not read or do not esteem them—though the opposite assumption, I fear, may also not always be quite safe. G.J.Warnock, Hertford College, Oxford April 1988 Preface to the paperback edition In preparing for the issue of this book in paperback form, I have taken the opportunity of making two additions to the text. I have added some paragraphs at the end in which I try to explain—or at least to sketch the beginnings of an explanation—why it was that Austin succeeded, as he always did, in engaging so notably the interest of his contemporaries— where the feeling, if you like, of hope and of excitement came from. It would really take a different sort of book to do this properly, but I have tried at least to hint at what the points to be considered would be. Secondly, I have added a note about ‘the true/false fetish’ (pp. 140–5) which appears on page 163. I had said in the book that I was far from sure what Austin had in mind in using this cryptic expression. I now think I understand him a little better. G.J.Warnock November 1990 I Introduction Austin died in February 1960, at the age of 48. He would have been 49 on 26 March of that year. Though comparatively young, he held at that time, and in fact had held for a good many years, a leading position among philosophers not only in Oxford—where he lived and taught—but in Britain, and to some extent In the English-speaking world as a whole. He had been elected in 1952 to one of Oxford’s only three (at that time) professorships of philosophy—a noteworthy election, in that the chair in question, that of the White’s Profes- sor of Moral Philosophy, was ‘officially’ in a field in which he was only pretty marginally interested and had published nothing; it must have been felt that it would nevertheless have looked obviously wrong to elect anybody else, and fortunately the University had long countenanced considerable latitude in such matters. In 1955 he delivered, but by 1960 was still revising for possible publication, the William James lectures at Harvard. His immensely high standing among philosophers was certainly not attributable, at any time, to sheer quantity of publication. At the date of his election as White’s Profes- sor he had edited H.W.B.Joseph’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Leibniz,1 had translated Frege’s Grund-lagen der Arithmetik,2 and had published only three papers of his own; and of the thirteen articles now included in his Philosophical Papers (1961; 3rd edition 1979) only seven were actually published in his own lifetime. His two books—Sense and Sen- sibilia and How to Do Things with Words (the latter being the text of his William James lectures)—both appeared after his death. That his reputation owed much to his certainly formidable personality is probably, though usually said by would-be detractors, not entirely untrue; he was a natural leader, and could scarcely have been inconspicuous in any com- pany. But of course it rested, and rests, essentially upon the quality of his writings—above all, I think, upon a quality of originality, of ‘newness’, that he brought to any topic—and upon the vitality of his performance, not so much in lecturing (which he did not greatly enjoy) as in teaching and discussion, in every degree of formality and informality. But it is probably inevitable that in a case such as his—in which formal writing for publication played so comparatively small a part—the impression that he made as a philosopher upon those who knew him may be difficult fully to appreciate for those not included in that now diminishing number. He had been primarily a classical scholar as a schoolboy at Shrewsbury, and in his early undergraduate years at Balliol had again achieved distinction in classical scholarship. But it was as a philosopher that he was elected to a Fellowship at All Souls in 1933, and he began regularly to teach philosophy in 1935, when he became a Fellow and tutor at Magdalen. His career, like many another, was interrupted by the war, in which he served for six years in the Intelligence Corps, eventually with the rank of lieutenant-colonel (and receiving French and American, as well as British, decorations for his notable services). After the war his principal service to his University, apart of course from his teaching and lecturing, 2 J.L.Austin: The Arguments of the Philosophers was to the Oxford University Press. He became a ‘Delegate’ in 1952, and from 1957 was Chairman of its Finance Committee—the most important, and certainly by far the most responsible and laborious, non-professional office in that very large publishing business. He was by no means a reclusive, unworldly, unpractical academic. He would have made, for instance, a first-rate Cabinet Secretary—unless perhaps Ministers would have found him too formidable for their comfort, as some of his academic colleagues certainly did from time to time.3 Was Austin a linguistic philosopher? At one time many people would have thought this a reasonably answerable question, and many would have said without hesitation that the answer was ‘Yes’—perhaps, even, that he was the linguistic philosopher. (I was interested to see that, as recently as 1987, Austin was described by Sir Alfred Ayer, in dialogue with Bryan Magee, as ‘a linguistic philosopher in the narrowest possible sense’.) I think it may be worth considering—I hope without undue raking-over of archaic embers—first what that (actually) rather obscure question might mean, and also why the label ‘linguistic phi- losophy’ now seems to me, as applied to Austin’s work, more liable to be obfuscatory than helpful. One thing that a linguistic philosopher, usefully so called, might be would be one who held a particular view of the relation between philosophy and language—such as that the typical problems and perplexities of philosophy are in some way latent in, or generated by, or spring out of, language itself, and are therefore to be solved, or in one way or another dealt with, by the scrutiny of language. Such a view has of course been held. Gilbert Ryle, at least for a time, though he would not have liked the label ‘linguistic philosopher’, was inclined to the idea that philosophical troubles typically arise because in some cases cur- rent forms of expression in natural languages are, as he put it, ‘systematically misleading’; linguistic-surface congruities and superficial linguistic similarities overlay and may blind us to deep conceptual differences, so that we seek, uncomfortably and sometimes even nonsensically, to represent and to discuss one ‘kind of thing’ as if it were some radically different ‘kind of thing’, just because we seem to speak of both in much the same way.4 If so, then the goal of philosophy would be resistance to being thus misled: to unmask mis- leading forms of expression as misleading, to avoid the snares of false analogy and misas- similation which language lays under our feet, and so to do away with the discomfort and puzzlement of trying to squeeze our thought into forms that will not fit. Wittgenstein, too, more famously, often spoke in very much the same vein: We have to resist ‘the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language’, supersti- tions ‘produced by grammatical illusions’, ‘through a misinterpretation of our forms of language’; therefore, we must look ‘into the workings of our language, and that in such a way as to make us recognize those workings: in despite of an urge to misunderstand them’. We must make it our aim to ‘command a clear view’, in spite of the fact that ‘our forms of expression prevent us in all sorts of ways’ from seeing clearly what lies before us.5 This would be linguistic philosophy in at least one comparatively good and clear sense; the thesis is that philosophical problems arise because of (certain features of) our language, and that it is therefore our language itself to which we must attend—resisting ‘bewitch- ment’—if those problems are to be solved, or dissipated, or done away with. I suppose that, in a different, cruder, and more dogmatic way, Logical Positivism too could be intelligibly
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