Comment

J. L. Austin: Comment W. V. Quine The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 62, No. 19, American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Sixty-Second Annual Meeting. (Oct. 7, 1965), pp. 509-510. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-362X%2819651007%2962%3A19%3C509%3AJLAC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-L The Journal of Philosophy is currently published by Journal of Philosophy, Inc..

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BYMPOSIUM: T H E PHILOSOPHY OF AUSTIN

509

Apparently Austin's most developed thinking was on performative utterances, especially "the doctrine of Infelicities." Some readers find those classifications and distinctions exciting; others are bored. My question would be, had Austin left the main line of business and gone into something subsidiary? Certainly those distinctions are related to some philosophical problems. Also, shoes are related to feet. B u t what if a chiropodist began to devote most of his unusual ingenuity and energy to his shoe factory rather than to feet? NORMAN MALCOLM CORNELLUNIVEBSITY

J. L. AUSTIN, COMMENT "

T

HE therapeutic positivists were once few, the metaphysicians many. Now, with the numbers reversed and the epidemic stemmed, what work remains for the veteran therapists? They can turn to treating philosophical perplexity in the unprofessional mind; thus Ryle, Dilemmas. Also they can continue, as pure research, the language study that once went into the therapy; thus Austin. Urmson depicts this research as introspective semantics, done by natives in groups to offset the subjectivity of introspection. There is little evident concern over whether we call i t philosophy. Austin viewed philosophy, Urmson says, merely as a heterogeneous set of inquiries which for want of standard methods have not hived off under a special name. I applaud this scorn of rubrics. If a scholar is concerned with some problem that librarians class as philosophical, i t is no reason for him to be concerned with other problems that they class as philosophical rather than mathematical or linguistic. Rubrics foster deep misconceptions, too-e.g., that mathematics differs in kind from theoretical physics. But for all my distrust of rubrics I must say with regard to Austin's work that the disavowals are getting out of hand. His work is tied to philosophy in a more substantial sense than just what hasn't hived off. Austin was philosophical in choosing what idioms to analyze. No Baconian inductivist he, simply stockpiling random samples of the world or of the dictionary and scanning them for unforeseen uniformities. He had philosophical

'Abstract of a paper to be presented in an APA symposium, commenting on J. 0.Urmson, "J. L. Austin," this JOURNAL,62, 19 (Oet. 7, 1965): 499508.

510

T H E JOURNAL O F PHILOSOPHY

arridres pense'es. The arridre pense'e of How to Do Things with W o r d s was "an inclination to play Old Harry with . . . (1) the true/false fetish, ( 2 ) the value/fact fetish" (p. 150). Ironically, I think i t was overattention to rubrics that deprived Austin of Tarski's insights regarding truth and falsity. It was excessive concern with the limits of language study. What counts as true for Tarski is language, granted; but we get the value of Tarski's theory only if, a t the second level, talking o f truth, we look beyond languaqe to logic. Only in that perspective do we see Tarski's truth concept as an inevitable scientific concept, one that would have had to be invented if the word 'true' had not been there. Austin erred, I say, in limiting his philosophy to language study. The tendency to do so is due partly to the fact that language criticism has been the method of therapeutic positivism and partly, I think, to something I call "semantic ascent." This is a technique for the control of question-begging in arguments over fundamental issues. B y talking about fundamental sentences of two conflicting theories, instead of just pitting those sentences themselves against each other, we talk in terms that the theories share despite their disparate foundations. The effectiveness of such ascent promotes the illusion that philosophical truth is truth about language, when really it is continuous rather with scientific truth generally about the world. Tarski's truth paradigm-to get back to that-is immune to Austin's strictures and distinctions. I t fits evaluations and performatives, after all, along with statements of fact. Developments prompted by Austin's animus against "the true/false fetish" do make sense, however, as explorations of the gulf between sentence and statement. His work on this will doubtless be continued by others. As for "the value/fact fetish," Austin's work seems rather to depict the intertwining of value and fact than to discredit the distinction-though someone may discredit it. Austin's animus against those two fetishes has issued in perceptive work that is relevant to several fields, particularly the philosophy of law. Historians of science tell us that science advances not by deadpan Baconian induction but by pursuing preconceptions, even mistaken ones. I see in Austin's work a case of this.

W. V. QUINE HARVARD UN~SITY

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J. L. Austin J. O. Urmson The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 62, No. 19, American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Sixty-Second Annual Meeting. (Oct. 7, 1965), pp. 499-508. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-362X%2819651007%2962%3A19%3C499%3AJLA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-L

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