J. L. Austin on Language

Philosophers in Depth Series Editor: Constantine Sandis Philosophers in Depth is a series of themed edited collections focusing on particular aspects of the thought of major figures from the history of philosophy. The volumes showcase a combination of newly commissioned and previously published work with the aim of deepening our understanding of the topics covered. Each book stands alone, but taken together the series will amount to a vast collection of critical essays covering the history of philosophy, exploring issues that are central to the ideas of individual philosophers. This project was launched with the financial support of the Institute for Historical and Cultural Research at Oxford Brookes University, for which we are very grateful. Titles include: Alison Denham (editor) PLATO ON ART AND BEAUTY Edward Feser (editor) ARISTOTLE ON METHOD AND METAPHYSICS Brian Garvey (editor) J.L. AUSTIN ON LANGUAGE Philip Goff (editor) SPINOZA ON MONISM Leonard Kahn (editor) MILL ON JUSTICE Arto Laitinen and Constantine Sandis (editors) HEGEL ON ACTION Katherine Morris (editor) SARTRE ON THE BODY Charles R. Pigden (editor) HUME ON MOTIVATION AND VIRTUE Sabine Roeser (editor) REID ON ETHICS Henrik Rydenfelt and Sami Pihlström (editors) WILLIAM JAMES ON RELIGION Daniel Whiting (editor) THE LATER WITTGENSTEIN ON LANGUAGE Forthcoming titles: Alix Cohen (editor) KANT ON EMOTION AND VALUE Pierre Destree (editor) ARISTOTLE ON AESTHETICS

David Dolby (editor) RYLE ON MIND AND LANGUAGE Christopher Pulman (editor) HART ON RESPONSIBILITY Bernhard Weiss (editor) DUMMETT ON ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY

Also by Brian Garvey PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGY

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J.L. Austin on Language Edited by

Brian Garvey Lancaster University, UK

Selection, introduction and editorial matter © Brian Garvey 2014 Chapters © Individual authors 2014 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–1–137–32998–1 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Contents Acknowledgements

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List of Contributors

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Introduction Brian Garvey

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Remembering J.L. Austin Ann Lendrum

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1 Recollections of J.L. Austin John R. Searle

Part I

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Speech-Act Theory

2 Austin on Language and Action Marina Sbisà

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3 When Words Do Things: Perlocutions and Social Affordances Charles Lassiter

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4 Etiolations Joe Friggieri

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5 How to Do Things without Words Tom Grimwood and Paul K. Miller

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Part II Ordinary Language and Philosophical Method 6 Austin’s Method Hanno Birken-Bertsch

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7 Getting the Philosopher Out of the Armchair: J.L. Austin’s Response to Logical Positivism in Comparison to That of Arne Naess Siobhan Chapman 8 Verbal Fallacies and Philosophical Intuitions: The Continuing Relevance of Ordinary Language Analysis Eugen Fischer v

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124

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9 Sense and Sensibilia and the Significance of Linguistic Phenomenology Roberta Locatelli

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Part III Language, Perception and Mind 10 Austin on the Philosophy of Perception Paul F. Snowdon 11 Austin on Conceptual Polarity and Sensation Deception Metaphors Dale Jacquette

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12 The Importance of Intentions in Introspection Kevin Reuter

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13 Ordinary Language and the Nature of Emotions and Motives Harry Lesser

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References

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Index

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Acknowledgements This book grew out of the J.L. Austin Centenary Conference that was held at Lancaster University in April 2011. That conference would not have been possible without the generous support of the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster, and without the help of John O’Neill and Sarah Hitchen. Sarah also transcribed the talk by John R. Searle to make the chapter in the present volume and helped me with the Austin quotations in the Introduction. I thank Constantine Sandis for help and advice in preparing the initial book proposal for submission to Palgrave Macmillan, and Brendan George for helping to see the manuscript through to final submission. Austin’s sister Ann Lendrum and his daughters Fanny Mitchell and Lucy Nusseibeh have been supportive of the project from the beginning. I also thank Mark Rowe and Tim Austin for carefully fact-checking the biographical details in Ann Lendrum’s contribution.

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List of Contributors Hanno Birken-Bertsch is an independent scholar, previously at the Universities of Jena and Magdeburg. Siobhan Chapman is Professor of English at the University of Liverpool. Eugen Fischer is a senior lecturer in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. Joe Friggieri is Professor of Philosophy and Pro-Rector at the University of Malta. Brian Garvey is a lecturer in Philosophy at Lancaster University. Tom Grimwood is a senior lecturer in the faculty of Health and Science at the University of Cumbria. Dale Jacquette is Senior Professorial Chair in Logic and Theoretical Philosophy at Universität Bern, Switzerland. Charles Lassiter is a visiting lecturer at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington, USA. Harry Lesser is an honorary research fellow and former Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Manchester. Roberta Locatelli is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Warwick and the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne (joint supervision). Paul Miller is a senior lecturer in Social Psychology, and executive consultant for the Health and Social Care Evaluation Unit, within the faculty of Health and Science at the University of Cumbria. Kevin Reuter is a postdoctoral fellow in the Philosophy Department of the Ruhr University in Bochum. Marina Sbisà is Professor of Philosophy of Language at the Department of Humanities of the University of Trieste. John R. Searle is the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Paul F. Snowdon is Grote Professor of Mind and Logic at University College London. viii

Introduction Brian Garvey

Language is at the heart of all of J.L. Austin’s philosophical work, being both a subject of inquiry for him, and a methodological tool of central importance. He was one of the leading figures of the Oxford school of philosophers of the mid-twentieth century, who put the investigation of language in all its various uses at the centre of their philosophical inquiries. Like his contemporary Wittgenstein at Cambridge, Austin challenged the widespread assumption that asserting propositions was the core function of language, and investigated in depth the many other things that people are doing when they use words. In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein argued that superficial similarities in the form of sentences make philosophers blind to the variety of different things that sentences are used to do: It is like looking into the cabin of a locomotive. We see handles all looking more or less alike. (Naturally, since they are all supposed to be handled.) But one is the handle of a crank which can be moved continuously (it regulates the opening of a valve); another is the handle of a switch, which has only two effective positions, it is either off or on; a third is the handle of a brake-lever, the harder one pulls on it, the harder it brakes; a fourth, the handle of a pump: it has an effect only so long as it is moved to and fro. (Wittgenstein 1953: §12) Austin, though wary of Wittgenstein – as John R. Searle tells us in his contribution to the present volume – had a similar insight, which he developed in How to Do Things with Words and elsewhere. What they both emphasized was the sheer variety of ways that words are used and how that boded ill for any prospect of a unitary account of those properties of sentences, ‘truth’, ‘meaning’, and so forth. For both, it makes no sense to ask what – for example – ‘meanings’ are in general. Wittgenstein’s lever-metaphor makes clear his aversion to this kind of quest for general accounts, and Austin expresses a similar aversion in his paper ‘The Meaning of a Word’: Suppose that I ask: ‘What is the point of doing so-and-so?’ For example, I ask Old Father William ‘What is the point of standing on ix

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one’s head?’ He replies in the way we know. Then I follow this up with ‘What is the point of balancing an eel on the end of one’s nose?’ And he explains. Now suppose I ask as my third question ‘What is the point of doing anything – not anything in particular, but just anything?’ Old Father William would no doubt kick me downstairs without the option. But lesser men, raising this same question, would very likely commit suicide or join the Church. (Luckily, in the case of ‘What is the meaning of a word?’ the effects are less serious, amounting only to the writing of books.) (Austin 1979: 59) I do not intend to offer a point-by-point comparison of Wittgenstein and Austin here, but one of the ways in which they differ is that, whereas Wittgenstein is inclined to simply emphasize how varied the uses of sentences are, Austin goes some way towards creating a systematic taxonomy of types of speech-acts. That is not to say that he would have positively endorsed Searle’s view that there is a finite and fixed number of types, still less that he would have endorsed the particular taxonomy that Searle proposed (Searle 1969). He certainly thought that the variety of different types of speech-act was very great. In ‘How to Talk: Some Simple Ways’, he says: Names for speech-acts are more numerous, more specialized, more ambiguous and more significant than is ordinarily allowed for ... Here of course we have been concerned with only a few speech-acts of a single family, but naturally there are whole other families besides. (Austin 1979: 150) But Austin did give us new technical terms for types of speech-acts, and at least the beginnings of accounts of how it is that sentences have the powers that they have.1 As well as his philosophical work on language, Austin also had a meta-philosophical commitment to the importance of paying close attention to language in doing philosophy about any subject. The meta-philosophical outlook that can be broadly said to characterize the work of Wittgenstein, Ryle, Austin, and others has come to be labelled ‘ordinary language philosophy’. In some ways this is an unsatisfactory term, but as with many other unsatisfactory terms we are probably stuck with it. Some highly prominent philosophers at the time took a very dim view of the whole approach, and their grounds for taking that dim view are, I think, instructive about misunderstandings that are easy to make about what the methodological commitments of Austin et al. are.

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Bertrand Russell attacked what he described as ‘the most influential school of philosophy in Britain at the present day [i.e 1953]’, and he clearly had Austin, among others, in mind when he said: The doctrine, as I understand it, consists in maintaining that the language of daily life, with words used in their ordinary meanings, suffices for philosophy, which has no need of technical terms or of changes in the signification of common terms. (Russell 1953: 303) One misunderstanding that appears to be embodied in this is that ‘ordinary language’ means the language of ‘the man on the street’, as opposed to the technical, specialist language that many disciplines have. However, Ryle, in a paper called ‘Ordinary Language’, made it clear that the ‘ordinary’ use of a linguistic expression may well be a highly specialized use in some highly specialized field. In this respect, words can be like pieces of equipment: We can contrast the stock or standard use of a fish-knife or sphygmomanometer with some non-regulation use of it. The stock use of a fish-knife is to cut up fish with; but it might be used for cutting up seed-potatoes or as a heliograph. A sphygmomanometer might, for all I know, be used for checking tyre-pressures; but this is not its standard use. Whether an implement or instrument is a common or specialist one, there remains the distinction between its stock use and non-stock uses of it. If a term is a highly technical term, most people will not know its stock use or, a fortiori, any non-stock uses of it either. (Ryle 1953: 168) Moreover, Austin himself invented new technical terms for use in philosophy (as for that matter did Wittgenstein and Ryle), which seems incompatible with believing that philosophy has no need for them. Russell seems to have seriously misunderstood their stance. A second easy misunderstanding to make – also evident in the above quotation from Russell – is that ‘ordinary language philosophers’ method consists of treating ‘ordinary language’ as somehow infallible or unimpeachable, at least for philosophical purposes. There are, true enough, some things that Austin says that make it sound as though he ascribes some kind of unimpeachable authority to ‘ordinary language’ Philosophers often seem to think that they can just ‘assign’ any meaning whatever to any word; and so, no doubt, in an absolutely

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trivial sense, they can (like Humpty-Dumpty) ... [B]ut most words are in fact used in a particular way already, and this fact can’t be just disregarded. (For example, some meanings that have been assigned to ‘know’ and ‘certain’ have made it seem outrageous that we should use these terms as we actually do; but what this shows is that the meanings assigned by some philosophers are wrong.) (Austin 1962: 62–63) But at other points he makes clear that he does not take ordinary language to be an unimpeachable authority. He offers arguments for the philosophical usefulness of paying close attention to ordinary language, and those arguments clearly imply that such close attention is potentially very useful, rather than that ordinary language is unimpeachable Certainly, when we have discovered how a word is in fact used, that may not be the end of the matter; there is certainly no reason why, in general, things should be left exactly as we find them; we may wish to tidy the situation up a bit, revise the map here and there, draw the boundaries and distinctions rather differently. But still, it is advisable always to bear in mind (a) that the distinctions embodied in our vast and, for the most part, relatively ancient stock of ordinary words are neither few nor always very obvious, and almost never just arbitrary; (b) that in any case, before indulging in any tampering on our own account, we need to find out what it is that we have to deal with; and (c) that tampering with words in what we take to be one little corner of the field is always liable to have unforeseen repercussions in the adjoining territory. (Austin 1962: 63) One of the arguments in the foregoing is that ordinary language makes distinctions that philosophers have a habit of ignoring. Austin is far from being the first philosopher to point out that philosophical perplexities can often be resolved by making distinctions. It was an important tool in Aristotle’s toolbox, for example. But drawing attention to the usefulness of the already-existing resource of ordinary language in making distinctions may be one of the most distinctive contributions that Austin made to philosophical methodology. In sum, Austin thought that we should at least begin our philosophical inquiries into any subject with a careful survey of the ordinary linguistic usages around that subject. But, as he put it in ‘A Plea for Excuses’:

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Certainly, then, ordinary language is not the last word: in principle it can everywhere be supplemented and improved upon and superseded. Only remember, it is the first word. (Austin 1979: 185) As Searle points out in the present volume, in addition to his technical contributions, one of Austin’s most important contributions to philosophy was a call to his colleagues to slow down, and in particular to take the time to be careful with one’s language: ‘words are our tools, and, as a minimum we should use clean tools’ (Austin 1979: 181).

Overview of this book The chapters are preceded by the text of a short speech by J.L. Austin’s sister, Ann Lendrum, which affectionately remembers Austin and provides some interesting biographical insight. John R. Searle’s chapter deals with his recollections of Austin from his own time as a student at Oxford. He worked with Austin closely, and his own work on speech-acts (1969) arises out of the work that Austin began. The stories that Searle provides in this chapter give us a sense of what Austin was like and of the impression he made on those who met him. There is more than just biographical interest to this because Austin’s influence as a philosopher was in many ways disseminated through people’s personal encounters with him – for example, through the discussion groups with which he was involved at Oxford. In addition, Searle tells us why he thinks Austin remains important today, despite the relative neglect which ‘ordinary language philosophy’ currently suffers. Any reader who is not convinced that Austin’s work is still of relevance today would do well to read Searle’s chapter. After Searle’s contribution, the remaining chapters in the present volume fall into three sections. The first section consists of papers dealing with Austin’s speech-act theory. In her contribution, Marina Sbisà aims to elucidate Austin’s crucially important categories of locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts by locating them in relation to an overall theory of actions which can be found in How to Do Things with Words as well as in a number of his papers. For Sbisà, many criticisms of Austin’s distinctions among speech-acts arise because the critics, perhaps tacitly, hold different theories of actions in general. Next, Charles Lassiter deals with a problem that arises in connection with Austin’s account of perlocutionary acts: the perlocutionary force of such acts appears to be defined by Austin in terms of the effect it has on

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someone – the perlocutionary force of asking someone to pass the salt is that they pass the salt. The problem with this is that, prima facie, it is not clear whether Austin understands this force as constituted by the actual effect a speech-act has or by its intended effect. Austin does not want to include every effect an action has – such as, trivially, moving the molecules of air immediately in front of one’s mouth, or less trivially, upsetting someone unintentionally, or starting a fight, etc. – as part of its perlocutionary force. And conversely, something may count as part of the perlocutionary force of a speech-act even if it fails to occur: the perlocutionary force of ‘pass the salt’ remains the same even if the other person ignores you. One might conclude from this that one is supposed to count all and only intended effects, whether they actually occur or not. However, Austin explicitly blocks this, saying that unintended effects can count. Consequently, there appears to be no characteristic that makes something part of the perlocutionary force: it can include unintended effects that happen as well as intended effects that do not. Lassiter proposes a solution using J.J. Gibson’s concept of social affordances. Because of the social relations and conventions that we live and breathe in, there are responses to speech-acts that sociolinguistically competent agents can be assumed to normally have. Consequently, the perlocutionary force of a speech-act can be understood not in terms of either the intentions of the speaker or the actual effects the act has, but it terms of the effects it is likely to have, given the affordances that are in place because of these social conditions. Lassiter, further, uses this idea to elucidate some other aspects of speech-act theory. Joe Friggieri addresses different ways in which a speech-act can be said to be ‘etiolated’ – that is, because of certain distinctive (but perfectly familiar) circumstances, it doesn’t have the force it normally would. Examples of such etiolating circumstances include telling a joke or acting in a play. A group of actors could go through all the motions of making a bet, or getting married, but because they are in a play they would not then be bound to honour the bet, or married. Friggieri points out that Austin only touched on these types of cases in passing. He argues that in these passing remarks Austin hinted at a more comprehensive account of the many uses of language that he did not develop. This more comprehensive account could include uses of language in jokes, plays, fiction and so forth, and could be of relevance to problems such as the paradox of fiction (why are we affected emotionally by stories about people who do not exist?) and the ontological status of persons and events in fiction. Friggieri’s is one of a number of chapters in the present volume that demonstrate the potential fruitfulness of Austin’s ideas by

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showing how they can be developed and applied to questions that he didn’t himself address or only remarked on in passing. Tom Grimwood and Paul Miller discuss the influence of Austin’s speech-act theory in the social sciences, focussing in particular on the approach to the study of ordinary conversations developed by Harvey Sacks (‘Conversation Analysis’). They argue that the influence has been largely one-way, with philosophers, even those few who are directly influenced by Austin, paying very little attention to these social science developments. As Siobhan Chapman also argues in a later chapter, one might expect Austin and those of a similar philosophical bent to be willing to do more hands-on empirical work into how ordinary people from all walks of life actually speak. But instead, Austin and other ‘ordinary language’ philosophers drew their linguistic data from their own linguistic intuitions in imaginary scenarios, often highly unrealistic ones – from ‘what one would say if’ rather than ‘what people actually say when’. This, they believe, has impoverished philosophers’ views on the variety of speech-acts there are. As a case-study to illustrate this impoverishment, they discuss the role of silence in conversations. On many occasions, not speaking can actively contribute to a conversation. Such occasions have been actively studied by conversation analysts but largely neglected by philosophers. The papers in the second part of this volume all aim to clarify Austin’s contribution to philosophical methodology. Hanno Birken-Bertsch’s contribution provides a considered account of what that Austin’s conception of philosophical method was. He quotes the widely known account of Austin’s method given by J.O. Urmson (1967a), which he does not dispute as such, but argues is importantly incomplete. Urmson’s account describes how the linguistic data that are needed for philosophical inquiry are procured but, according to Birken-Bertsch, fail to describe what is supposed to be done with that data and thus fails to describe the actual philosophical part of an inquiry. In order to understand this, he argues, it helps to understand Austin’s work against the background of a prominent feature of earlier twentieth century philosophers’ work, for example that of Husserl, Russell, and Ayer: the claim that philosophy should be scientific. Austin wanted philosophy to be scientific too, but his conception of science was in important ways different from, at any rate, those of Russell and Ayer. In brief, Russell and Ayer were willing to use as their linguistic data highly idealized exemplars of the uses of words and sentences, whereas Austin thought that the data should encompass the whole variety of their uses. When we see the linguistic work as providing the data for philosophy, rather

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than as itself constituting philosophy, some of the best-known accusations against ‘ordinary language philosophy’, such as Ernest Gellner’s (1959) that it is purely destructive and that it is only about words, lose much of their force. A challenge to Austin’s methodological stance comes from his contemporary Arne Naess, as recounted here in the chapter by Siobhan Chapman. In many ways, Austin and Naess had similar or at least parallel philosophical developments. Both were for a while impressed by logical positivism’s apparent quest for clarity, and both subsequently turned away from it and in particular from its project to create an ideal language. For both, philosophical inquiry into – for example – truth must not be divorced from how the word ‘truth’ is ordinarily used. An inquiry that starts by trying to purge the word of its everyday connotations will be simply beside the point. Both, also, go to great lengths to draw our attention to the sheer variety of different ways that words such as ‘true’ or ‘real’ are used. But, as Chapman shows, from there on they diverge widely on questions of methodology. For Austin, determining what the ordinary uses of a word are cannot be a matter of, as Stanley Cavell once put it, ‘counting noses’ (Cavell 1958: 175). For Austin, there is a strong element of introspection in the process of discovering the normal uses of words,2 a process he called ‘linguistic phenomenology’ (see Locatelli, this volume), although he does also endorse the use of sources such as the Oxford English Dictionary. However, for Naess, determining the normal use of words is essentially a sociological matter: extensive empirical research has to be carried out on the ways that people – the widest possible variety of people – actually use words. Moreover, such research should as far as possible be non-judgemental: no way that people actually use words can be called ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’. For Austin, by contrast, there are correct and incorrect uses, and there are (at least it is implied) people who are more qualified than others to know what the correct ones are – the committee of the Oxford English Dictionary, for example. Both Austin and Naess have often been cited as inspirational figures behind the school known as corpus linguistics because of their rejection of idealized views of language and their willingness to enter into the complexities of actual usage. However, on Chapman’s account, Naess appears much closer to the spirit of that movement than Austin. Moreover, Naess, with his non-judgemental stance towards different kinds of speakers, can be thought to have distanced himself more decisively from the logical positivists and their ‘ideal language’. More positive evaluations of Austin’s method come from Eugen Fischer and Roberta Locatelli. Fischer responds to the often-made criticism that

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the current rules of ordinary language do not determine the bounds of sense. He argues that the method of ‘ordinary language’ analysis remains philosophically valuable, especially in light of the currently growing movement of ‘experimental philosophy’. Experimental philosophers aim to discover the intuitions that people who are not professional philosophers have regarding philosophically significant concepts, such as knowledge or free will. In some ways this is similar to Austin’s project of asking how words are used in non-philosophical contexts. However, experimental philosophy differs from Austin’s project, among other ways, in that the former uses the methods of empirical social science. In that respect experimental philosophy is more akin to Arne Naess’ approach. However, neither Austin nor experimental philosophers treat the results of such findings as authoritative or final on what it is acceptable to say on a topic. Rather, both take such data as a startingpoint – but a necessary one – for philosophical discussion. The ensuing philosophical discussion may end up in a rejection of ordinary nonphilosophical speech. Fischer argues that Austin provided methodological tools that could be of great use to experimental philosophers, for example, by identifying common fallacies. Roberta Locatelli provides an in-depth reading of Austin’s linguistic phenomenology. She argues that it is more than a polemical or therapeutic tool, but a way of drawing attention to features of perception and fine-tuning our understanding of perception. For example, Austin’s discussion in Sense and Sensibilia of the differences between illusion, delusion and hallucination are not just either lexicographical explorations, or censures of what philosophers have said about those things, or even both. Locatelli argues that they give access to a sort of non-introspective intersubjective phenomenology, which may be the foundation of sensible philosophical interrogations and a genuine progress in knowledge. On this basis, she argues, we can follow Austin and use the ways we talk about experience to enhance our understanding of experience itself. In this respect, Austin’s project in Sense and Sensibilia can be understood as a contribution to phenomenology in the sense of the twentieth-school of European philosophy, even if neither he nor the phenomenologists would have seen it that way. Locatelli argues, in addition, that the positive insights into experience that emerge from Austin’s linguistic phenomenology suggest an original way of conceiving what ‘naive realism’ is, and of defending it against scepticism. The third section of the present volume is entitled ‘Language, Perception and Mind’. Two out of the four papers in this section take a critical look at Austin’s most extended application of his methodological

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principles – the attack on sense-datum theory that comprises Sense and Sensibilia (Austin 1962). The other two, by Kevin Reuter and Harry Lesser, apply some of Austin’s ideas to other issues about mind – introspection and emotion respectively. In the first chapter in this section, Paul F. Snowdon takes us through the text of Sense and Sensibilia and is highly critical of its arguments. He wonders why Austin has chosen A.J. Ayer’s Foundations of Empirical Knowledge (1940) as the principal focus of his attack on sense-datum theory. Austin says that he has done so because Ayer’s arguments – together with those of H.H. Price (1932) and Geoffrey Warnock (1953) – are the ‘best available expositions of the approved reasons for holding theories that are at least as old as Heraclitus’ (Austin 1962: 1). Snowdon wonders whether this remark is ‘a joke’, and finds it hard to believe that anyone would think that Ayer et al.’s presentations of the argument from illusion were better than, for example Berkeley’s. Hence, he argues, even if Austin’s attack on Ayer was successful, that would in no way show that the theory of sense-data was problematic – only that some philosophers have given poor arguments for it. Moreover, Snowdon thinks that Austin’s arguments against Ayer are a mixed bag: in some instances Ayer deserves the criticisms that Austin levels against him, but in others not. Moreover still, Snowdon thinks that some of the general claims that Austin makes in the course of his arguments are extremely inadequately defended – for example, Austin’s claim that philosophers’ habitual uses of the word ‘real’ are problematic. By contrast with Snowdon’s start-to-finish walk through Sense and Sensibilia, Dale Jacquette, in the next chapter, focuses his attention on one section of one chapter (II.5). That section is a very important one in Austin’s book as a whole, however, and Jacquette’s attention to it is every bit as critical as Snowdon’s is to the book as a whole. In the section that Jacquette considers, Austin takes issue with the idea that the senses can be said to ‘deceive’ us, which is often a central part of the articulation of the argument from illusion and of sensedatum theory. The senses, Austin holds, cannot be said to deceive us, because they are ‘dumb’ – they say nothing. Jacquette argues that Austin, perhaps ironically given his views on language, is here failing to appreciate the variety of perfectly ordinary and acceptable ways in which the word ‘deceive’ is used. There is nothing unusual or untoward in saying that my eyes sometimes deceive me, or for that matter in saying that they tell me things. Such uses of ‘deceive’ (and ‘tell’) do not require intentional deception (or intentional telling) at all. Moreover, the fact that such uses of deceive do not imply intention

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does not in any way reduce their capacity to play the role in the argument from illusion that the claim ‘my senses sometimes deceive me’ is often required to play. Kevin Reuter’s paper takes some ideas raised by Austin in Sense and Sensibilia and develops them with a view to improving our understanding of introspection. As Reuter points out, recent discussions of introspection of sensory states tend to account for it either in terms of introspective attention or in terms of attending to the appearance of something rather than how it really is. Reuter argues that, either way, we need to distinguish between descriptions of appearance that are introspective and ones that are not, and he believes that some of Austin’s remarks in Sense and Sensibilia give a useful clue as to how to do this. Austin argues that, in at least a great many cases, appearances are perfectly publicly accessible things: that is, when we say that something appears so-and-so, we are not describing inaccessible inner events but are describing things that other people can see too – and our descriptions are thus in principle publicly challengeable. For example, if I say that a certain sponge looks like a rock, I am describing its appearance as opposed to what it really is, but I expect other people to be able to see that it looks like a rock, and I could in principle be overruled if other people are able to point out ways in which it doesn’t. Reuter argues then that some, but only some, descriptions of how things appear are in principle open to public challenge in this way. For example, a mirage of an oasis can be understood as being caused by distortion of light-rays or by the disordered senses of someone dying of thirst. In both cases, the appearance is different from the reality, but in the first case that appearance is publicly accessible, and a report that it is a case of that kind is publicly challengeable. In the second case, the appearance is not publicly accessible and a report in those terms is not publicly challengeable. Hence, for Reuter, intentions matter in determining whether something counts as introspection: if I report how something appears to me in a way that I intend to be publicly challengeable, then I am not describing an introspected experience; but if I do not, I am. Finally, Harry Lesser applies Austin’s methodological principles to understanding the nature of emotions. Austin argued that if a philosophical issue is in an area where there already exists a rich pre-philosophical vocabulary, we should begin by understanding this vocabulary, what it puts together and what it separates, and in general what, according to ordinary discourse, it is true to say under what circumstances. Applying this principle to the emotions, where there certainly does exist such a rich pre-philosophical vocabulary, Lesser argues that we should think of

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ascriptions of emotion as interpretations of actions rather than as descriptions of feelings. Thus, ordinary language does not support either feeling theories of emotions or behaviourist theories. Even if we are swayed by Snowdon’s negative assessment of Sense and Sensibilia as a whole, both Reuter’s and Lesser’s papers demonstrate the continued applicability of many of Austin’s ideas, methodological and otherwise, in new fields. A number of other contributors to this book – for example Friggieri and Fischer – have shown how ideas that Austin threw out, sometimes only in brief asides, can be developed and yield useful insights for recent philosophical concerns. Jacquette (this volume) remarks: Almost every passage chosen for discussion from Austin’s lectures is comparably insightful with respect to understanding his unique, signature, virtually inimitable method of critically considering samplings and idealizations of colloquial language to determine the scope and limits of their permissible philosophical applications. Even if we do not think that ordinary language delimits the scope of permissible philosophical applications, and even if we accept, with Birken-Bertsch, that the study of ordinary language was only intended by Austin as a starting point, we can still find insights, suggestions of theories and of critiques of theories, on virtually every page. There is no doubt that the history of philosophy is a worthwhile field of study, and that Austin himself was a fascinating figure in that history. But it is also worth being reminded that, just as Searle says in his chapter, Austin remains worthy of study as a source of philosophical insight and not only for historical reasons.

Notes 1. I am compelled to say ‘the beginnings of’, because, apart from the – fairly small number of – papers he published in his lifetime, the body of writings left to us by Austin is provisional and incomplete, and would almost certainly not have been published in the form in which they now exist had he lived longer. 2. Cavell says: ‘in general, to tell what is and isn’t English, and to tell whether what is said is properly used, the native speaker can rely on his own nose.’ (ibid.).

Remembering J.L. Austin Ann Lendrum

This is the text of a speech given by J.L. Austin’s sister, Ann Lendrum, at the conference dinner of the J.L. Austin Centenary Conference at Lancaster University on 5 April 2011. First I would like to thank you for inviting me to speak on this very special occasion of the centenary of my brother’s birth in 1911. He still lives so vividly in my memory that it is hard to believe that his death was over 50 years ago. I should like to thank the University and Brian Garvey in particular for so opportunely arranging this occasion. My brother was the second son of G.L. Austin, who was an architect in his father’s firm of Austin and Paley – a prestigious firm responsible for most of the churches and civic buildings in Lancaster. The Austins were a family of five: three boys and two girls. Three of the oldest, including my brother, were born at 4 Hillside, Lancaster – the house which on Thursday is to have a centenary plaque unveiled. By 1920 the family had moved to ‘Fairlight’ on the desirable Haverbreaks estate in Lancaster. Later this house was bought by the University of Lancaster and renamed ‘Emmanuel House’. It was used for visiting professors and the like. I was the only one of the family born there, in 1920. My brother and the three older siblings initially shared a governess in Lancaster with the Helme family who lived just across the road from us. She was called Elsie Shaw. My brother never forgot her excellent introduction to ‘learning’ and unfailingly gave her credit for many years afterwards for the soundness of his educational grounding. In 1921 the whole family moved to St Andrews in Scotland where our father had been appointed as secretary to the council of the famous girls’ Public School of St Leonards. From 1921 onwards for 50 years ‘Kilrule’ in St Andrews was the family home. It was a large four-storied Victorian house right on the seafront and only a stone’s throw from the famous Royal and Ancient Golf Club. My brother, now 10, continued his education at a small private boys’ prep school just along the road, appropriately run by Mr Lemaitre.

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From there he won a scholarship to Shrewsbury School where his elder brother was already a pupil. He was soon to join his two-year older brother’s class, which could have caused problems – but if it did I never heard about them! I was nine years younger than my brother and he had an enormous influence on my life, devoting a large amount of time to his young sister. He was always a kind and gentle mentor and a wonderfully amusing companion. There was inevitably lots of teasing, but it was never cruel, and his razor sharp wit was quite without malice. He was undoubtedly a ‘polymath’, but I prefer to use the simpler term ‘all rounder’. Polymath conjures a vision of pomp and bombast which could not have been less like my brother. In addition to Greek and Latin, he spoke fluent French and German, and had a good working knowledge of Russian, Spanish and Italian. He was a superb draughtsman and could draw anything you wanted – but particularly figures. He played first violin in a small local musical group. He was a good average sportsman, excelling at ‘Fives’ for which he got a Half-Blue at Oxford. I personally benefited from some intensive cricket coaching! From Shrewsbury he won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, and thereafter was elected a Fellow of All Souls College. It was there he developed a firm friendship with Isaiah Berlin. The latter kept a large cardboard cut-out of an Austin car on his mantelpiece with an inscription below: ‘Watch out or Austin will overtake ya.’ They both thoroughly enjoyed the philosophical debates which took place on Saturday mornings at All Souls during term time. The outbreak of World War II in 1939 found him as a don at Magdalen College, but in July 1940 he was called up, and in November 1940 drafted into the Intelligence Corps. Obviously nobody had the least idea what his job entailed because, of course, the Official Secrets Act was in force. However, a few years ago my nephew arranged for us to visit one of the ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service) who had worked closely with him for much of the war. She described how she had been one of a team of five in the Combined Intelligence section. This team, consisting of my brother as leader, plus two fellow officers and two ATS typists, were forever changing their office for security reasons – each new location more cramped than the one before. Added to that, the office was thick with smoke as all of them except my brother were chain smokers. She was lyrical in her praise of my brother and let slip that the rest of them would have done absolutely anything for him. The little team had two basic tasks: to produce weekly intelligence digests, called

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‘Martian Reports’, outlining German troop dispositions and defences; and to produce a handy but detailed guidebook outlining the human and physical geography of the invasion area. My brother called the latter ‘Invade Mecum’, which was a clever double take of a booklet given to all new boys at Shrewsbury School – ‘Vade Mecum’ – which they had to carry with them on all occasions. ‘Invade Mecum’, which was distributed to platoon commanders and above, ensured that the invading troops had a very accurate guide to local administrative structures and terrain while the intelligence contained in the ‘Martian Reports’ ensured that the location of every German regiment, battery, gun range, etc., was known to the invaders. Between them, the two documents probably saved many thousands of Allied lives. In the crucial work up to D-Day, my brother’s team – now hugely expanded in numbers – worked closely with Eisenhower’s staff at SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force). A month or so before D-Day, the team was split in two: my brother remained in charge, but his section concentrated on the disposition of enemy troops, while the other, under his deputy Major Beattie, dealt with the disposition of beach obstacles. Until the last moments before the invasion, they were still processing incoming intelligence, and it was a thoroughly nervewracking time for the whole team. By the end of the war, my brother had been promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and was present when the German Deputy Commander-in-Chief, Colonel General Jodl, surrendered unconditionally at Reims in May 1945. The Americans awarded my brother the Legion of Merit (given only for exceptionally meritorious conduct), the French the Croix de Geurre, and the British the OBE (Military). After the war he returned to Magdalen and in 1952 was appointed White’s Professor of Philosophy at Corpus Christi at the young age of 41. In the 50s he travelled twice to the States, firstly to Harvard and later to Berkeley. He enjoyed these visits so much that he was sorely tempted to move permanently to America, but the complications of moving abroad when his four children were still being educated over here proved too much of an obstacle. He was very relaxed in America and was, I think, glad to escape for a bit from the internecine academic strife which prevailed at that time in Britain. This, I know, he found very upsetting – it was so against his own nature, which was unassuming, friendly and non-aggressive. He returned from America in early 1959 and by early December was diagnosed with lung cancer. By February 1960, just a few weeks short of

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his 49th birthday, he was dead – a legend in his own time and a much loved brother and father. Sadly, one of the last things he said to me before he died was: ‘You know Ann, I think I should have devoted such talents as I have to something more practical than philosophy.’ I am no philosopher, but I really do believe that my brother was one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century. This conference in honour of the centenary of his birth in Lancaster surely reflects the ongoing legacy of his contribution to the development of thought – even 50 years after his death. Long may he be remembered.

1 Recollections of J.L. Austin John R. Searle

It is a great honour for me to be invited to talk at a 100th anniversary commemoration of the birth of J.L. Austin. Austin made an enormous difference to me, he made an enormous difference to Oxford, and truth to tell he made an enormous difference to philosophy. So it is an honour to speak here, and though I did not fully appreciate it at the time, it was an honour to have been taught by Austin and to have had so many conversations with him. I am going to talk in a way that is not really a matter of conventional scholarship because I think this is really another kind of occasion. Much of what I have to say about Austin will be personal reminiscences. I will talk about Austin’s contribution to philosophy, but this is not intended as a scholarly examination of his life and work. I think there have been such things and there will no doubt be more, but that is not why I am here. I want to begin by saying what a tremendous difference Austin made to me personally. There is a certain irony in this, because when I went to Oxford I had never heard of Austin. I have read accounts saying I went there especially to study with him, which is entirely false. I got a scholarship when I was 19 years old and I showed up in Oxford to matriculate after my 20th birthday, and I had never heard of him. But I heard of him in Oxford, people talked about him, so I went to his lectures in my second year. This is another irony: I went to his lectures on something he called ‘Speech Acts,’ and I thought they were so boring I quit going! And when I go back and find my notes (I saved all my lecture notes) I know that I did not continue. Later on I found his lectures on this topic rather interesting! And indeed, that was Austin’s first enormous influence on me; he inspired my own work on the philosophy of language. My work on speech acts is an attempt to carry on what Austin had begun.

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Austin died, tragically, before he was even 50 years old. He had an enormous amount of creative potential still inside him, and I was not attempting to complete the work that he had begun, no doubt he is the only person who could have done; rather, I was trying to carry on a line of investigation that he had begun. And so my first, initial, debt to Austin was that he inspired my early work in philosophy, and he continues to be a source of inspiration to me. A second effect that Austin had on me, and I did not know this until thirty years after the event is that, as far as I know, he is responsible for my holding my position in Berkeley. I found out (and this again was long after the event) that when they offered a job to Austin himself he turned them down, but told my colleagues, ‘If you cannot hire me, hire Searle.’ Well, that is a distinct come down, but in any case that is what they did, and here I am as a result. A third influence of Austin, and certainly not one to be discounted, is that I met my wife Dagmar in Austin’s office. Austin introduced me to Dagmar. Personally, professionally, and intellectually I have enormous debts to Austin. Austin incidentally was very anxious to get me out of Oxford. He kept saying, ‘You have learned all that we are going to teach you’ and he very much wanted me to go to the United States. Austin, as you know, was immensely cautious. Even in the most casual conversation, Austin did not tolerate anything that was loose or not thought out. But the one subject on which, it seems to me, he permitted himself exuberance was the United States, and I remember him saying to me: ‘The future lies with America!’ And on another occasion – this is so untypical of Austin, you have to have known him to realize how untypical this was – when he said, ‘There are unploughed fields in that country!’ He had a kind of (I think it not unfair to say) Imperialist vision of America, and he thought there were enormous possibilities there. And indeed when I left for Berkeley, I got a hand written note from Austin (the last communication I ever received from him) in which he gave me advice on how I was to conduct myself in these parts of the world. (I had, by the way, been in Oxford for seven years. I went there when I was 19, left when I was 26. I essentially grew up there, so America was, in a sense, a foreign country to me.) Austin, in this advice, said, ‘Here is some advice I am sure you will not need ... ’ Watch out when Austin says something like that, because he knows you need it, ‘ ... when in Berkeley, I should not speak too highly of Oxford philosophy if I were you. Better not mention it by name at all! Be diplomatic!’ Now, as always, I wish I had followed his advice. I did not. But I think the diction there is typical of

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Austin. Even personal notes from Austin had a kind of careful expression that was not common. He happened to be in the United States when I married Dagmar Carboch, and I sent him the wedding announcement, and he wrote back a letter. He did not say anything as flat-footed as ‘Congratulations,’ he said, ‘I think the affair very well-conceived.’ And I thought that was, again, rather typical of Austin. With that personal preface, let me say a little bit about why we are here. What was Austin’s importance? To do that I need to set the stage a little bit. I need to tell you a bit about Oxford in the 1950s. Quite by coincidence, my first stay in Oxford from 1952 to 1959 more or less coincided with Austin’s ascendency, the period when he was the dominating philosopher in Oxford. Now, Oxford at the time had a very large number of professional philosophers on the ground, about 60 by my count, and a very large number of other people came in from different countries. It was a Mecca for foreign visitors in philosophy. Oxford (and here I speak of it collectively) was convinced that it was the best university in the world (modesty has never been a trait of the two oldest universities in Britain). Oxonians typically thought ‘this is the best university and the best subject in it is philosophy,’ and certainly philosophy had a kind of status and prestige which is unlike any other university I have ever known. The feeling in Oxford was, if you were good enough to do philosophy, you did philosophy. There might be some people who had a special gift for Greek History or Quantum Mechanics, but the most brilliant and intelligent people in Oxford at the time did philosophy. And Austin was the dominant figure. There was no question about it, Austin was the single most influential figure, in the most influential subject, in what at the time we thought was the most influential university. He had this enormous personal influence and enormous stature. Now, why? Well, there again there is another irony in that the stuff Austin actually published in his lifetime (he only published seven articles in his life) I think is not representative of his most important work. His most important work was published posthumously: his book, How to Do Things with Words, and another important book called Sense and Sensibilia. But the irony is that the greatest work he was doing was not known, even at the time when he was famous and influential. I think that a great deal of Austin’s influence had not only to do with his sheer intelligence and the intellectual content of what he had to convey, but it had to do with a certain force of character. You simply did not relax intellectually in Austin’s presence. Even in the most casual conversation. Once we were talking about long playing needles (none of you are old enough to remember this, but we had these ‘records,’

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and that was how we got our music) and I said to him, ‘If you get a diamond-tipped needle it will last for years.’ Austin cross-questioned me: ‘For years?’ Well, I had to admit, for many months, maybe even for longer than a year. In conversation, Austin wanted to know the details and wanted to be precise about English usage, so he would say to me things like, ‘Why did you use the subjunctive?’ And on another occasion he said to me, ‘Now you said “suppose”. What does the “sup” mean in “suppose”?’ So this kind of attention to detail was typical of Austin, and it was one of the reasons why he was so influential in Oxford. He did not fit the mould of a typical great figure in philosophy: he was not conveying deep truths in an oracular style. On the contrary, he was paying attention to meticulous questions of detail. And the other dons in Oxford stood in a kind of awe of Austin; even quite famous philosophers were in awe of Austin. I remember there was a seminar that went on for some terms given by Geoffrey Warnock and Paul Grice, both famous philosophers in their own right, and Austin adopted a practice of coming to these seminars and making contributions that were often decisive. Once I was sitting next to Grice and Warnock, the seminar had not yet begun and Austin had not shown up, and I remember Grice turned to Warnock and said, ‘Austin is not here yet, do you suppose it is all right if we start?’ Now that is a stunning thing to say. Austin had no official role in this seminar at all; he was just someone who happened to be there. There was no obligation for them to wait for him, or even for him to come. But it is a mark of his influence that his presence in the room made an enormous difference. It was a matter of everyone waiting to see what Austin had to say. Another misconception of Austin was that he was essentially a terrifying figure. I do not want simply to deny that, because he was indeed terrifying if you were important or pretentious, but to ordinary undergraduates like me he was immensely kind. There was nothing threatening in Austin; he was only threatening to people who were pompous. Once Karl Popper came and gave an extremely pretentious talk, and Austin, in his careful questioning style, just deflated him. He kept asking, ‘Why did you say ... ,’ and then he quoted some passage. Another famous big shot was Gabriel Marcel who came and gave a lecture more in the French style, and again Austin’s effect in the conversation was deflationary. Austin had a peculiar relation to the rest of the subject and to the history of the subject. In general, he did not think that for the kind of work he was interested in doing the history of philosophy was of very great importance. ‘All that old stuff!’ he would call it. But at the same

Recollections of J.L. Austin 5

time, he thought that if we were going to talk about the history of philosophy, we had to be immensely careful. We had to be very precise and get the scholarship exactly right if we were going to talk about it, and when he did lecture on Aristotle, the scholarly precision was remarkable. And indeed he is famous for having said about a passage in Aristotle, ‘It is just not Greek, it is not good Greek.’ Few of us would have the temerity to pose ourselves as authorities over Aristotle on the question of what was, or was not, Greek. His influence, I think, in Oxford, had a great deal to do with not just the content of what he had to say, which was very important, but with a personal style of carefulness. Once Austin and I were having a conversation, ‘There is a lot of loose thinking in this town.’ And we sat together and shook our heads as we thought of loose thinking way out the Banbury road and the Woodstock road, maybe even out as far as Iffley and Cowley and no doubt down St Aldate’s past old Folly Bridge: everywhere in Oxford, loose thinking. And Austin was very eager to combat loose thinking. However, he was also eager to have an influence, to make disciples and to make converts to his way of doing things. And sometimes he exasperated me. In 1958, there was a big conference held at Royaumont Abbey in Paris, and we all went off to it. There were a lot of people from Oxford. I was a nobody then; I was just a young don. I had what other colleges would call a ‘Prize Fellowship,’ but Christ Church called it a ‘Research Lecturership.’ Austin was there along with a big contingent from Oxford, and several Americans were present, including Quine. Austin saw me in a conversation with a distinguished elderly French philosopher, Jean Wahl, and he came up to me and said, ‘Do not waste your time on the aged. Talk to the young!’ This annoyed me at the time because I did not think I was there to make converts, to have an impact on people, but Austin thought we would be wasting our time to go to France if we did not convert people to our way of thinking, if we did not, somehow or other, spread the truth. I talked to various Frenchmen at this conference and by, and large they were very dismissive of the Anglophones, but there were two that stood out: they thought that Austin was terrific, and they admired Bernard Williams. Austin gave a talk called, ‘Performatif-Constatif,’ which he read in French, and Bernard gave a talk called ‘La Certitude du Cogito.’ And there was a comical moment when the simultaneous translator did not know how to put a passage in English and he interrupted to ask Austin, ‘What did you say when you wrote this in English in the original text?’ Austin looked at him evenly and said, ‘I wrote it in French.’ The idea

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that Austin would translate from English was just out of the question as far as he was concerned. You will sometimes read accounts saying that Austin was influenced by Wittgenstein or that he was part of the Ordinary Language Movement that came from Cambridge. Austin was not in the least influenced by Wittgenstein, and he had very little respect and admiration for Wittgenstein. He was congenitally unsympathetic to the type of oracular, vague talk that one found in Wittgenstein, and I discovered this even as an undergraduate. Wittgenstein’s book, the Philosophical Investigations, had just recently come out when Austin taught his ‘Informal Instruction.’ I requested that we discuss the Philosophical Investigations in Austin’s undergraduate class: I wanted to talk about the Private Language argument, and if you are familiar with this text you will remember the famous passage about the beetle in the box, where Wittgenstein tries to attack the view that talking about your sensations is like talking about a private object. Wittgenstein says, ‘Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a “beetle”’ (P.I. #293). Now that was ironic of course, but it was typical of Austin to deal with Wittgenstein by simply taking everything that he said literally. Then Austin went on with the text, and a few sentences later Wittgenstein says, that ‘the box might even be empty’ and Austin pointed out a plain contradiction: ‘Wittgenstein says first everyone has a beetle and then he says maybe there is nothing in the box, an obvious inconsistency.’ Austin’s method was to take everything literally: if the philosopher said this, then we are going to take him literally at his word. I think Austin was unintelligent where Wittgenstein was concerned, indeed the only unintelligent thing I ever heard Austin say in philosophy was what he said about Wittgenstein, ‘It’s all in Moore!’ Well, it is not all in Moore. Moore was a very good philosopher, but Wittgenstein was a philosopher of a different calibre. So I think there were limitations to Austin’s method and certainly to his treatment of other philosophers and other historical figures. Nonetheless, it seems to me, he has had an enormous influence on my life and an often unacknowledged influence in philosophy generally. One way to bring this discussion to a close would be to summarize some of his most important impacts. I think his greatest contribution was a certain vision that he had of language. I think this vision is right, and I think in the long run it will prevail, though right now it is not the dominant vision in professional philosophy. The picture that Austin had of language is that we ought to think of language not as a formal system, or not just as a formal system, it is not like mathematics or mathematical logic, but rather we ought to

Recollections of J.L. Austin 7

think of language as a set of tools that we use for speaking, for performing speech acts (where speaking includes writing as well as what comes out of the mouth). He thought the basic unit of analysis in language is the speech act and that is because our aim is to examine language as a form of human activity. We are interested in examining language as a form of human social activity. And Austin, more than anybody else, inaugurated the study of speech acts, he inaugurated the study of the philosophy of language as an investigation of the use that human beings make of language, and that is a project, as you know, that I have attempted to continue and have attempted to go further with the investigation that Austin began. Again I have to mention that there is a certain irony here because Austin in his lifetime was supposed to be a philosopher totally obsessed with details and uninterested in the larger vision. That, it seems to me, is wrong. He did care about the details (as I have mentioned earlier), but sometimes, and indeed often it seems to me, he got the details wrong. But what is really powerful in Austin is his overall conception of human language and the philosophical importance that attaches to his conception of human language. As I said, I think right now, that is not in the ascendency. Right now as I speak, the dominant conception of language is, again, that we ought to think of it as a formal system: our model ought to be mathematical logic. Austin had great respect for mathematical logic, but he thought that was the wrong way to approach language for philosophical purposes. His second great impact is that he saw how careful analysis would enable us to get a much deeper insight into traditional philosophical issues than we could get from our forebears. His most famous work here is his (again posthumously published) lectures Sense and Sensibilia. By the way, the reference to Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility was typical of Austin, and his titles How to Do Things with Words and Words and Deeds also had this kind of literary panache that he liked. Now, Sense and Sensibilia is important because what he did was take a certain widespread conception, namely that we never really perceive objects and states of affairs in the world but only perceive our own sense data, only perceive in the traditional jargon our ‘impressions, or ideas, or representations,’ that we never perceive material objects. Austin explodes the arguments for that by doing careful analyses of texts. That work is more polemic than anything else that Austin did, and I think that he would not have published it in that polemical form because it is harsh in its criticisms of the people it is criticizing, and Austin, I think, was immensely tactful and ‘diplomatic,’ to use one of his

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words, in that sort of investigation. But he does succeed in refuting the views of the sense datum theorists, particularly Ayer. This is a case where a careful analysis of the argument shows that the arguments to prove that all we ever perceive are sense data are without foundation. They are extremely bad arguments. Now Austin is also careful to avoid the other side, the side that says, ‘Well we really perceive material objects.’ He thought the notion of a material object was as bad as the notion of a sense datum; it was just very much a confused notion. My own view is that he did not go far enough in attacking the sense datum theory. I think that it’s the worst disaster in philosophy over the past four centuries, the idea that all we can ever perceive are our representations, our own experiences, because it makes it impossible to give a solution to the problem of scepticism (how do you get outside the circle of your own experiences? Kant famously says it is impossible: we can never know of things in themselves). It also gives a mistaken conception of the relations of our experiences to the world. So I want to go a step further than Austin did, but I think that it was an important application of his method to see that if you took traditional philosophical arguments, where people are anxious to go fast, anxious to get the Argument from Illusion out, the evil demon or the bent stick, or whatever other favourite examples there were to show that all we can ever perceive are sense data, if you go over it carefully, you will find that it fails, that the argument does not bear scrutiny. Indeed Austin’s most characteristic criticism of me in our conversations, and when I presented him with my work was, ‘You are going much too fast.’ Austin did not think we should go fast. Well, I am, I guess, congenitally in a hurry. But Austin thought, correctly, that often we would do well to slow down. A third area of Austin’s influence was that not only did he have his vision of language and he had his careful, critical, methods in examining other philosophers, but he thought that the investigation of language that he did would open up new areas of investigation. So, the ordinary language philosophy that he practised was not just devoted to attacking traditional issues, but he thought that you could open up a whole lot of new issues. I think his article ‘A Plea for Excuses’ is a canonical statement of his view on this. If you look at how we actually describe human actions, and in particular the adverbs that we use to describe human actions (what is it to do something on purpose, inadvertently, deliberately, by mistake, accidentally ... ), then you can learn a lot about the structure of human action. I think this view is less influential than the other two. Why? Well, it just takes an awful lot of patience. Most philosophers do not have the

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type of patience necessary for this sort of meticulous analysis of words that Austin gave us. But when you see him in action, it is quite impressive. If you think, without reflecting on it, is there any difference between doing something by accident and doing it by mistake? Well, not much. It seems as if it is roughly the same idea. Austin’s careful description of examples reminds us that there are enormous differences between doing something by accident and doing it by mistake. I am sure you remember the example, but I will repeat it: I go into the field to shoot my donkey, but I miss my donkey and hit your donkey. In the first case, I miss my donkey, as what I supposed was my donkey is your donkey. Did I shoot your donkey by accident or by mistake? That is clearly a case where I did it by mistake. I mistook your donkey for my donkey. But the other case, where I went out to shoot my donkey, but the gun goes off and I simply hit your donkey is a case where I shot your donkey by accident, not mistake – not a case of mistaking one donkey for another. Austin has lots of examples like that which show that meticulous analysis will give us insights into areas which go beyond what a lot of traditional philosophers have supposed. A fourth effect of Austin – and this is, I think, the one that has had the least long-term effect – was his enormous carefulness and precision in philosophical analysis and philosophical discussion. As I mentioned earlier, Austin had a way of raising the tone of any discussion. People did not talk loosely or casually in his presence. And that, I think, has faded out. I think those of us who knew him personally, or who admire his writings, do see this. But I think it is very hard for a lot of philosophers to maintain the type of carefulness that Austin gave us, but it was, I think, a model for how philosophy ought to be practised. It is a model of the attempt to get to the truth through careful and cautious analyses. The temptation in philosophy, as you know, is to try to make grandiose claims on the basis of insufficient reflection and insufficient evidence. Now that I have attempted to describe Austin’s influence and his impact on me, I am going to conclude with an interesting question. Why did he arouse so much hostility? Why was there so much hatred of Austin? I am not quite sure. But I know he did arouse enormous hostility not only in the philosophical world at large but even in Oxford where he had so much influence and so many friends. Many of us liked him personally and loved him as a human being, but he did arouse a lot of negative feeling. I think the best comparison is with Socrates. Socrates also had modesty in his claims but aroused (with tragic results) an enormous amount of hostility and hatred in Athens. Socrates and Austin both seemed to attack certain traditional ways of thinking and certain

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pieties. They destroyed the traditional intellectual edifice, but they did not seem to put anything in its place. They did not give us a substitute for the traditional religious pieties that they were attacking. Socrates and Austin also shared the trait that though they did not give us a set of truths to substitute for the edifices they had demolished, they did give us a method or a set of methods. That I think will in the end be Austin’s enduring legacy. He did have a vision of language, but he also had a set of methods for how we might use the study of language to pursue important philosophical issues. And that, I think, will continue, and indeed that does continue even among a lot of people who did not know him and have not read anything by him. Nonetheless, this has become an enduring legacy. It has become a part of the philosophical tradition.

Part I Speech-Act Theory

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2 Austin on Language and Action Marina Sbisà

2.1

Introduction

While Austin’s distinction between the locutionary, the illocutionary and the perlocutionary acts has been cited, used, criticized and adjusted by many, attention has rarely been paid to its relationship with the notion of action. But tacit assumptions about what an action is and whether acts are actions are far from irrelevant to its understanding and interpretation. The main aim of this paper is to explore what notion of action Austin intended to apply to locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts. For this task, we have two main sources at our disposal. One is How to Do Things with Words, to the extent to which we can gather from its pages on the locutionary, the illocutionary and the perlocutionary act how these acts are identified and distinguished from one another, and whether and why they are taken to be actions. The other source is Austin’s papers on the philosophy of action (1956–1958). Austin wrote the first draft of what would later become How to Do Things with Words in 1951–1952 and prepared the notes for the Harvard Lectures, on which the published volume is based, in 1955. His papers in the philosophy of action were written from 1955 onwards, when he stopped working on the draft of How to Do Things with Words. His paper ‘A Plea for Excuses’ (presumably incorporating earlier material discussed in seminars, possibly those he gave with H.L.A. Hart) was presented to the Aristotelian Society in 1956 and his other papers on the philosophy of action, including the posthumously published ‘Three Ways of Spilling Ink’, were composed between 1956 and 1958. The apparent shift in focus from foregrounding speech acts to foregrounding the language of action may indicate Austin’s awareness that speech act theory should be backed 13

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by an appropriate philosophy of action, the access to which, according to his own approach to philosophy, is reflection upon the language we use to talk about action. A reconstruction of Austin’s conception of action in the 1956–1958 papers should therefore be expected to clarify the guesses and suggestions about action offered by How to Do Things with Words. I will examine the contributions made by these two sources to our understanding of Austin’s conception of action. I will then explore some problems in Austin’s speech act theory upon which light may be shed by making reference to his conception of action. Some considerations about the role of language in Austin’s philosophy of action will follow.

2.2

Speech as action in How to Do Things with Words

In How to Do Things with Words, action is hardly ever in focus: Austin very likely has his conception of action in mind, but fails to spell it out. What we find in How to Do Things with Words are only hints that a cooperative reader can elaborate upon. Let us explore some of them. 2.2.1 Acts and actions First of all, let us reflect upon how the terms ‘act’ and ‘action’ are used in the volume. That Austin is going to speak of actions is made clear from the very beginning by his definition of performative utterances as utterances the issuing of which is, or is part of, ‘the doing of an action’ (1975: 5). Shortly afterwards, the reader is reminded that ‘perform’ is ‘the usual verb with the noun “action”’. So, performativity is a matter of ‘action’, not merely of ‘acts’. When it comes to the locutionary, the illocutionary, and the perlocutionary acts, these are introduced and defined as ‘acts’, but it is also said that they ‘are the performing of actions’ or simply ‘are actions’ (1975: 105–106). Nevertheless, in several contexts, Austin shifts from using the word ‘action’ to using ‘act’ as if it had a slightly different shade of meaning, which makes it appropriate to other discourse contexts. So betting is called an ‘action’, but what is performed when uttering ‘I bet’ is called ‘the act of betting’ (1975: 63). Or ‘ending’ (a speech, a case in a law court, a novel ... ) is called an action (‘the action of “ending”’), but is also an ‘act’, albeit one difficult to perform ‘being the cessation of acting’ (1975: 65). Austin never explicitly addresses the question of whether or not all actions are also acts, and vice versa. So while it is easy to conclude that Austin’s conception of action should be applicable to the ‘acts’ he characterizes as locutionary, illocutionary

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or perlocutionary, we can only conjecture about whether all acts, of every kind, are also actions in Austin’s opinion, and whether actions must always be acts. For example, when Austin says that ‘ending’ is a difficult act to perform, because it is the cessation of acting, this might be because what he has in mind is an activity-related view of an ‘act’: the act as a unit to be isolated on the background of an agent’s ‘activity’, or as an element or stretch of ‘active’ behaviour. Indeed, ‘ending’ does not consist of any such thing. If it is taken to be an ‘action’ nevertheless, and in some sense also an ‘act’ (there is a shade of irony in Austin’s words, by which he leaves this open), it might be so in a different sense than that of an element or stretch of active behaviour. There is indeed also an action-related notion of ‘act’, in which ‘act’ and ‘action’ share a core content, the bringing about of a state of affairs, and their difference does not lie in the phenomena referred to, but in the perspective from which these are viewed. One may recall here the notion of aspect in linguistics and the distinction between ‘perfective’ and ‘imperfective’ aspect. ‘Act’ seems to involve the perfective aspect: whatever is meant by this word is considered as a whole, without taking into account its possible internal temporal articulation. ‘Action’ involves the imperfective aspect: if viewed as an action, the bringing about of a state of affairs develops as a process involving phases and tending to a result. Thus the action-related sense of ‘act’ singles out the bringing about of a state of affairs, which can also be viewed as the core phase of a (successful) action. I think it is this action-related sense of ‘act’ that enables Austin to use the word ‘act’ in such phrases as ‘the act of betting’, ‘the act of promising’, and so on, while referring elsewhere to betting or promising as the doing of an ‘action’. It would be consistent with Austin’s use of the words ‘act’ and ‘action’ to admit that not all actions must always be acts (in the activity-related sense of ‘act’: a cessation or omission is not precisely an ‘act’ in this sense), but that any act (in the action-related sense in which the word ‘act’ identifies the bringing about of a state of affairs) might be an action too. Obviously, not every act (in the action-related sense) we may spot here or there must always be taken into consideration qua action: we may save the more complex, imperfective consideration for salient cases.1 Consider a person who is walking. Walking is certainly an activity, a stretch of active behaviour. Each step can be singled out as an act, since it is an element of the activity of walking. Each step, however, also changes the position in space of the person who is walking and thus brings about a state of affairs in which that person is no longer

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located at Pn, but at Pn+1. That is the action-related sense of ‘act’. We do not usually take it into consideration when speaking of a person who is walking because the state of affairs brought about by one single step is usually not remarkably different from the state of affairs that obtained before that step. But suppose that a series of steps were to make the person change her location in a salient way: then her behaviour would be considered to be the action of ‘going to’ or ‘walking to’ a certain place. These considerations do not belong to Austin and cannot be attributed to him in any way. But in their light, his shifts from ‘act’ to ‘action’ and vice versa and his claim that locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts are actions can be understood as indicating that he was using ‘act’ in its action-related sense and, in theorizing about ‘speech acts’, intended to connect language with action, not merely to state that speaking is an activity. The Wittgenstein-inspired perspective viewing language as a ‘rule-governed activity’ is not incompatible with Austin’s claims, but has a subtly different focus, encouraging a consideration of ‘speech acts’ as units of ‘active’ linguistic behaviour. We shall return to this difference below. 2.2.2

The distinction between phatic act and rhetic act

Since the publication of How to Do Things with Words, many authors have noticed that Austin’s distinctions between the various partial acts within the total speech act present unclarities. Of course, one may conclude from this that they are inaccurate. But if one assumes that Austin was careful enough in making those distinctions, one can arrive at his purpose and assumptions from how he made them. My suggestion is that he assumed that the identification of acts, at least insofar as they can also be actions, is description-dependent and that this holds both at the token and the type level, so that the characterization of kinds of act is connected to kinds of description. Let us consider in this light his account of the distinction between the phatic act and the rhetic act. Austin (1975: 95–97) illustrates the notions of phatic act and rhetic act by making reference to the different kinds of speech reports that are pertinent to each: direct speech reports or oratio recta for the phatic act and indirect speech reports or oratio obliqua (introduced by verbs of saying) for the rhetic act. In short, phatic acts are those acts that are reported by direct speech reports, while rhetic acts are reported by indirect ones. So

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(1) Jane said ‘It is raining’. reports a phatic act (i.e. Jane’s act of uttering articulated sounds corresponding to the English grammatical sentence ‘It is raining’, while meaning it to be an English grammatical sentence) and (2) Jane said that it was raining. reports a rhetic act (i.e. Jane’s act of saying that – on the time of utterance and at the salient location – certain weather circumstances hold). It should be noted that these two acts, so specified, are not such that the latter simply builds upon the former. When report (2) is issued, we are not told what Jane’s exact words were. She might have spoken Italian rather than English, for example, and it might still be true that she said it was raining. Moreover, even if she spoke English, she certainly did not use the word ‘was’. So when we are informed about her rhetic act, we are not thereby informed about her phatic act, contrary to what should be expected to happen if the phatic act were included in the rhetic one. If these aspects of Austin’s account are taken seriously, then, his distinction between the phatic and rhetic acts need not be grounded in separable components of the speaker’s active behaviour (possibly adding up to one another to yield the total locutionary act), but cuts across these components, highlighting bundles of aspects of the total speech act to the extent to which these are relevant to the purposes of one or other kind of report. 2.2.3 The accordion effect The pages of How to Do Things with Words in which Austin comes closest to explicitly considering the nature of action are those devoted to the distinction between the illocutionary and perlocutionary acts (1975: 107–115). He struggles with two difficulties here: he wants to show that there are further effects, and acts, beyond illocutionary ones, but also that these are further effects and acts, that is, that the effects constitutive of perlocution can in some way be detached from the chain of effects originating from the speaker’s utterance. It is in connection with perlocution that Austin illustrates for the first time what will later be called the ‘accordion effect’. He writes: That we can import an arbitrarily long stretch of what might also be called the ‘consequences’ of our act into the nomenclature of the act

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itself is, or should be, a fundamental commonplace of the theory of our language about all ‘action’ in general. (1975: 107) Later on, he resumes the discussion of the relationship between an action and its consequences by pointing out that in the case of a ‘nonconventional “physical” action’ (111), it is ‘an intricate matter’ to decide where the action stops and its consequences begin. But in the case of locutionary and illocutionary acts, which are both ‘conventional’ (each in its own way) (116 fn), he claims that we can identify a break between act and consequences, either thanks to lexical resources (such as names for illocutionary acts), or just because, while the consequences of physical actions are usually in their own turn physical states, events or actions, the perlocutionary consequences of saying something do not usually belong to the same class of facts as locution and illocution.2 The relationship between action and consequences was also discussed by Anscombe (1963), in a way somewhat similar to Austin’s. The feature which, in Austin’s opinion (1975: 107, see above), characterizes our language about action was dubbed the ‘accordion effect’ by Joel Feinberg (1964: 146) and was later reinterpreted by Davidson (1980: 57–59). Anscombe and Davidson both assume that the apparent plurality of actions which the ‘accordion effect’ presents us with is no more than a plurality of descriptions, while the agent’s action is one only: Anscombe is inclined to identify it by reference to her conception of the agent’s intention, while Davidson anchors action identity to bodily movements (the ‘minimum physical’ sense of action about which Austin seems sceptical in his 1975: 111).3 Even if what Austin says literally in How to Do Things with Words about action and consequences is not openly incompatible with action monism, many other aspects of his work suggest that he had no wish to feel compelled to split behavioural sequences into non-overlapping ‘acts’ or ‘actions’, which means he would favour action pluralism.

2.3 Themes from Austin’s papers on the philosophy of action (1956–1958) Austin devoted attention to various themes regarding the philosophy of action, including action ascriptions, disclaimers, attributions of intentions and abilities, and free will. Unfortunately, his work in this area remained fragmentary or unfinished. Even his celebrated paper ‘A Plea

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for Excuses’ (1979: 175–204), while containing a great deal of interesting remarks and suggestions, does not offer fully developed arguments for or against theoretical claims about action. However, when carefully examined, his 1956–1958 papers contain a number of emerging, recurrent features which can be taken to characterize his approach to action, which I will now attempt to summarize. 2.3.1 From failures to actions Austin suggests that access to the nature and structure of actions is best gained by focusing upon action failures, as revealed by the language of excuses. An excuse reports or describes a stretch of behaviour seemingly constituting a certain action, as not really a performance of that action (possibly a failure to perform it) and the doing of something else (which may amount to another action). If the excuse is completely successful, the agent may turn out not to have performed the alleged action at all, or even not to have performed any action. The latter is the case when the occurrence of the state of affairs which would constitute the alleged action’s effect or result is explained by a chain of agent-independent causes. Since excuses are not always an all-or-nothing matter, they may single out failures affecting one aspect or another of the performance or attempted performance of an action. Thus, according to Austin, the study of the language of excuses enables us to distinguish the various facets of an action. Moreover, the effects of each kind of failure on the successfulness of the performance and the legitimacy of the corresponding attribution of responsibility help us understand the role of the flawed facet with respect to the whole action, thus shedding light on its internal structure. There is a ‘machinery of action’ (1979: 193–194) that comprises a series of stages such as the intelligence, the appreciation of the situation, the planning, the decision, and the execution (1979: 201). Such machinery works within what we may call a ‘narrative’ dimension, that is, in accordance with certain patterns of sequential development. The fact, often highlighted in Austin’s 1956–1958 papers, that talk of action regularly requires attention to be paid to such a narrative articulation, appears to confirm that ‘action’ is considered by Austin in an imperfective aspectual perspective, but at the same time may be taken to support the suggestion made above that there is a core to an action, which is the effect or result brought about, and that, once considered in the perfective aspectual perspective, it is this core that connects what we mean by ‘action’ to the ‘act’ in the action-related sense.

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Talk of action may also focus upon the distinction between the ‘phases’ of a (complex) action, which may figure as acts, or even actions, themselves (raising part-whole and means-to-end issues), or the relationships among the ‘stretches’ of behaviour that are involved in the performance of the action (Austin 1979: 201). Reporting on each of the stages or phases is not describing the whole action, but an action’s having certain stages or phases contributes to its being that kind of action. It may also contribute to its being an action at all: one may wonder whether something not exhibiting certain stages – for example, not displaying a narrative development of a certain kind – is, or can correctly be called, an action. The consideration of ‘stretches’, by the way, connects to the theme of the ‘accordion effect’. In his paper on excuses, Austin states that different ways of segmenting the agent’s behaviour into stretches correspond to her liability to different kinds of failures, and therefore allow for different kinds of excuses. Commenting on a legal case dating back to 1874, concerning a psychiatric hospital attendant called Finney who scalded a patient to death, he remarks that we should not say that Finney scalded his patient by mistake when what he did by mistake was turning on the hot water tap. So, if it is the case that Finney both turned on the hot water tap (by mistake) and scalded his patient (because of his carelessness), perhaps these two descriptions, albeit depicting partially overlapping ‘stretches’ of Finney’s behaviour and events connected to it, do not attribute one and the same action to Finney, but account for two of his actions, each flawed in a different way and excusable to a differing extent. 2.3.2 The role of responsibility and that of intention In his paper on excuses, Austin observes that responsibility is a central issue with respect to action, at least as central as freedom (1979: 180–181). The remark remains a bit mysterious, as if it were out of context: there is no talk of freedom in the subsequent parts of the paper. In order to get a glimpse of what Austin thought about freedom, we must turn to another of his papers (‘Ifs and Cans’, 1956), which argues against the doctrine, called ‘compatibilism’, according to which Free Will is compatible with Determinism (1979: 205–232). In this paper, he objects to those analyses of ‘can’ and ‘could’ that make the truth of the utterances containing these words (which apparently recognize an agent as free) compatible with the assumption that Determinism holds. According to Austin, ordinary language does not embody Compatibilism: when we say of someone that she ‘can’ or ‘could’ do something, we mean precisely that she is or was able to do it or was in a position to do it, or

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had an opportunity to do it, and was therefore free from some relevant constraints with respect to that action. But does this suggest that when Determinism applies, Free Will does not, and vice versa? Excuses typically invoke causes external to the agent to extenuate or even cancel out her agency. Austin himself identifies ‘the cases in which it will not do to say simply “X did A”’ (1979: 180), namely, those in which we add to the report of the action some extenuating phrase, as cases in which the action ‘is not “free”’. It would seem, then, that what fails to be free (because what happened is amenable to a causal chain of events) is not real, full-fledged action. But there are also cases in which an (alleged) action can be excused by invoking some kind of non-freedom while the agent intuitively remains responsible for something she did (181). Does this open the door to Compatibilism again? Perhaps not, since Compatibilism is a metaphysical claim, while remarks on action, in terms either of freedom or of responsibility, are in Austin’s perspective equally context-bound.4 As to intention, in the posthumous paper ‘Three Ways of Spilling Ink’ (1979: 272–287), Austin offers an image of it which appears to be meant to explain the role of the agent’s intention in acting: a miner’s lamp illuminating only part of the agent’s environment, and a different part of it each time, depending on her position and movements (283–285). Does this image suggest that the agent of an intentional action must know what she is doing? That one cannot perform an action without knowing which one it is? But how can Austin, with his well-known tendency to deal with mental attitudes as implied by actions rather than governing them (1975: 39–41, 48–50), endorse such a cognitively-oriented, intellectualistic conception of intention? When it comes to the ‘bracketing’ role of intention (and intention attribution or self-attribution) (1979: 285), however, it appears that Austin is not holding two incompatible views. The thief may claim he borrowed (versus stole) the money with the intention of replacing it, but the observer may object that the thief should know he was not allowed to take any of that money for any personal reason for any length of time. The intention-based bracketing proposed by the agent does not determine the final verdict as to what action has been performed. Indeed, the person taking the money with the intention of replacing it should not have taken it at all, any neutral party would think. Thus, his proposed bracketing is unconvincing and his action is more of a theft than he would have liked it to be. So, even if Austin takes intention to be a cognitive state of the agent, yielding his or her reading of his or her own action, he still does not count intention as the only means for action identification, and perhaps

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not even as a general dimension of action (see his criticism of the assumption that we act either intentionally or unintentionally, 1979: 189–190). He would not say, for example, that actions are bodily movements caused by cognitive states such as having certain intentions. The intention the agent has in performing the action, coinciding for Austin with her awareness of what she is doing or where she is heading to, is not focused upon as a cause of the action itself: applying the language of causes to actions pertains to excuses rather than to attributions of responsibility. 2.3.3 Ontologies of action Excuses extenuate responsibility for something done to various degrees by re-describing an alleged action as a failed or flawed action, or as a different action, or as no action at all. If such extenuation can ever be effective, though, it is because responsibility is attributed in the first place, and actions are recognized as being performed, by means of descriptions or reports. This shows that the identification of actions is description-dependent and calls into question the ontology of action. Indeed, what kind of an entity is one which depends on a description in order to be identified? Is it an entity at all (a piece of furniture from the actual world)? And just how many entities like this are there: one for each true identifying description? Or is there one ‘real’ action of an agent at a time, which is merely described in diverse ways (or identified under diverse descriptions)? I think that the way in which Austin suggests that the identification of actions is description-dependent fits best with a pluralist ontology of action. In How to Do Things with Words Austin refuses to endorse any ontology of actions that reifies actions, for example, by identifying them with doings (as stretches of active behaviour) and dealing with doings as with (a kind of) ‘things’ or objects (1975: 107). In this frame of mind, he is against identifying actions with bodily movements. He appears to assume, relying upon the way in which we ordinarily speak of actions, that we usually foreground those actions that are salient for us in context and that these are seldom mere bodily movements (1975: 112). Austin does not say that a bodily movement cannot be an action, but does not think we should in general (and thinks we do not ordinarily) reduce all actions to bodily movements. These aspects of his view imply action pluralism: a liberal ontology that allows for the co-presence of a plurality of actions in one and the same stretch of behaviour. It should be noted that Austin favours ontological pluralism in other connections too, for example, as regards the dichotomy opposing sense

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data to material objects in Sense and Sensibilia (1962), or as to the metaphysical question of how many worlds there are in his critical review of Ryle’s The Concept of Mind (1949). His leaning towards ontological pluralism as regards action is further confirmed in the context of his analysis of the ‘non-serious’ practice of pretending, which he sees as involving the performance by the same agent of more than one action simultaneously (1979: 253–271).

2.4

Implications for speech act theory

The conception of action emerging from our investigations so far is a responsibility-based one. What distinguishes actions is not the particular kind of bodily movement they consist of (e.g. movements caused by the agent’s intentions or such as may be described as intentional), but the agent’s being responsible (in a broad sense, not necessarily involving moral responsibility) for the state of the world that is their outcome or result. Action identification (as regards action tokens) can thus start only from the singling out of the state of the world to be counted as outcome or result. Responsibility for that state is traced back to the agent on the basis of the state’s causal connection to the agent’s behaviour in the given environment, provided no special circumstances make the agent not responsible. This way of identifying actions does not assume a oneto-one correspondence between actions and bodily movements. Rather, we are allowed to speak of more than one action when the relevant stretch of behaviour of the agent is one and the same. I would now like to reconsider some of the criticisms levelled at Austin’s analysis of the speech act. To a large extent, they appear to be rooted in views of action squarely opposed to Austin’s, which refuse action pluralism and assume that any alleged action can be traced back to a basic action consisting of bodily movements. 2.4.1 Searle on the locutionary–illocutionary distinction In Searle’s arguments against Austin’s locutionary–illocutionary distinction (1973), as well as in his influential suggestion that illocutionary acts (as illocutionary act tokens) are the same as complete speech acts (since they must comprise an utterance act and the expression of a proposition) (1969: 25, 31), he appears to assume that there is only one thing that is indeed done by the speaker when she utters her words, consisting of a set of bodily movements accompanied by the forming of certain mental attitudes (notably intentions). This complex act can be described from various points of view, some of which abstract from

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some of its aspects, but – it seems – can be grasped completely by its illocutionary report: a literal oratio obliqua report introduced by the illocutionary verb naming the force of the speech act. While Austin, in recognizing that the ‘total speech act’ can be described from various points of view, does not refrain from speaking of the abstracted ‘acts’ as ‘actions’ themselves, Searle presents his own abstracted acts as parts or components of the speech act, that is, as each amounting to a subset of the set of bodily movements and related mental attitudes that constitute the whole speech act. He deems Austin’s abstracted acts to be inadequate because their characterizations do not make them fit to play the role of components of the speech act. But this does not make them unsuitable for Austin’s aims within Austin’s own conceptual framework. In his discussion of the locutionary–illocutionary distinction, Searle contends that it cannot be completely general, in the sense of marking off two mutually exclusive classes of acts, because there are at least some cases (such as explicit performatives) in which the sense and reference of a sentence (connected to the locutionary act) determine the illocutionary force of its utterance (1973: 142–143). Searle’s idea seems to be that locutionary act and illocutionary act are distinct only to the extent to which utterances that have the same sense and the same reference, and therefore perform the same locutionary act (as different tokens of one locutionary type), can have different illocutionary forces, that is, be tokens of different illocutionary types. Conversely, if performing a locutionary act is uttering a sentence with a certain meaning, and performing an illocutionary act is uttering a sentence with a certain force, then the force is part of the meaning ‘there are no two different acts but two different labels for the same act’ (Searle 1973: 143). Searle’s conclusion is reminiscent of Davidson’s way of distinguishing between action and action description: he appears to conceive of an ‘act’ as a bodily movement liable to be described in more than one way, at least one of which is intentional; under all its descriptions, the act remains one and the same action. But, in Austin’s perspective, two actions may remain distinct even if they occur together and are ascribed to the agent on the basis of the very same stretch of behaviour. In such a perspective, the conclusion that the distinction between locutionary act and illocutionary act does not hold in a general way does not follow. Another argument offered by Searle against the locutionary– illocutionary distinction points out that oratio obliqua reports are always introduced by illocutionary verbs, which in turn makes it impossible to distinguish the rhetic act (which belongs to the locutionary level

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of the speech act) and therefore the locutionary act itself from the illocutionary act. His claim is grounded in the assumption that some illocutionary acts are more general and others more specific, and that acts like telling someone to do something or saying to someone that p are illocutionary acts of the most general kind. It is an open question, though, why Austin used ‘say that’ and ‘tell to’ (or even ‘ask whether’) in his examples of rhetic reports (which, in his perspective, single out rhetic acts), and whether he was right or wrong to do so. It might be consistent of him to admit that there is a sense in which ‘say that’, ‘tell to’ and ‘ask whether’ do not assign full-fledged illocutionary force to the speech act in reporting which they are used, but merely account for the use of the declarative, imperative or interrogative sentence type in the sentence uttered. Indeed, here and there in How to Do Things with Words Austin indicates that he is aware that a distinction should be drawn between ‘saying’ in the locutionary sense of the word and ‘saying’ as equivalent to ‘stating’ (which is an illocutionary act). Jennifer Hornsby seems to grasp a not-yet-illocutionary sense of ‘say that’, ‘tell to’ and ‘ask whether’ when she suggests (in her 1988) that assertions, questions and commands are indeed rhetic acts rather than illocutionary acts. If we take rhetic reports to be different from illocutionary reports and take it, with Austin, that actions are singled out by descriptions or reports, Searle’s second objection too fails to be a real threat to the distinction between the rhetic act (or the locutionary act) and the illocutionary act. It should be noted that, in Searle’s speech act theory, the effect or outcome of an act plays no part in fixing the act’s identity. This aspect of Searle’s assumptions suggests he is viewing his acts as ‘gestures’ of the speaker, some physical (bodily movements), some mental (the forming of attitudes), but all contributing to the performance of an activity, rather than action-related (that is, according to the distinctions proposed above, consisting of the bringing about of states of affairs). Thus, once again, in speaking of speech acts, illocutionary acts, and so on, Searle is not referring to the same sort of things or phenomena as Austin was discussing. 2.4.2 Possibilities and limitations of the perlocutionary act Differences in the way ‘acts’ are conceived also underlie the various misunderstandings that have accompanied the notion of the perlocutionary act over the decades. I would like to raise three questions here, and attempt to reply to them within an Austinian framework.

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(1) Is the perlocutionary act an act, or just a re-description of the speech act? (2) Where do perlocutionary effects begin? That is, how can we tell which is the closest effect of a speech act that should be considered perlocutionary? (3) Is the perlocutionary act an act of the speaker? As to (1), I would like to recall what Holdcroft (1978: 20) says: a perlocutionary act is ‘an act that when performed by saying something can be re-described as the performance of an illocutionary act with certain consequences’. The converse also holds: when an illocutionary act has certain consequences, it can be re-described as the performance of a perlocutionary act, namely, the bringing about of a state of affairs which is a consequence of the illocutionary act. Now, which is the performance, and which is the re-description? One may think that perlocution is just a way of re-describing the speech act and some of its consequences and does not involve any act, or action, of a specific kind beyond the locutionary act and the illocutionary act. While it surely must be so for those who stick to a definition of action rooted in bodily movements (since, in order to perform a perlocutionary act, the speaker need not perform any further bodily movement or form any additional mental attitude with respect to those required for the performance of an illocutionary act), the perlocutionary act can well be an act on its own and even an action in the framework of an Austinian, responsibility-based conception of action. Within such a framework, we start by focusing upon a state of affairs in the world which is a consequence of the illocutionary act (or, in other cases, of the locutionary act; or of both) and proceed to attributing responsibility for it to the speaker on the grounds provided by her performance of a certain locutionary or illocutionary act. So the reply to (1), in an Austinian framework, is that the perlocutionary act is an act and even an action, and that it is so precisely because its outcome state can be re-described so as to attribute responsibility for it to the speaker. As to (2), I would like to recall that in speech act theory there is a tendency to view the speech act as an act in the sense of the element of an activity (e.g. a move in the rule-governed activity which the use of language amounts to; see Searle 1969: 16, and 2.2 above), rather than in the action-related sense of the bringing about of a state of affairs. When this tendency is at work, too easily does a certain kind of effect, whose bringing about is central to the illocutionary act in Austin’s original view, fade from sight. I am thinking of the conventional effect that

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the socially accepted procedure including felicity conditions and illocutionary force indicators is designed to bring about (cf. Sbisà 2007). This conventional effect (such as the state of commitment brought about by a promise, the state of obligation brought about by an order, the state of license brought about by a permission, the interactional balance brought about by an act of thanking or apologizing) is sometimes talked about as if it were a mere consequence of the speech act, albeit a conventional one. According to Bach and Harnish’s conception of the illocutionary act, an illocutionary act can actually be performed and still fail to produce it. Thus Bach and Harnish (1979) present the obligation stemming from a promise as after all only a particular kind of perlocutionary effect of the speech act of promising, as if a promise could be actually made without binding the speaker. Also in Geis’s Dynamic Speech Act Theory (1995), commitments and other kinds of obligations are severed from the illocutionary act (whose only effect, along Searlean lines, is taken to be the audience’s understanding) and re-described as ‘interactional effects’ of the speech act. But the fact that speech act theory has developed this way does not show Austin was wrong. It only shows that the notion of an ‘act’, for most speech act theorists, is not associated with the bringing about of an effect, but with the notion of an element of an activity. My answer to question (2), therefore, is that we should distinguish the result or outcome of an action, which by definition must be achieved whenever that action is actually performed (as opposed to being merely attempted), from its further consequences. The conventional effect, for example the assignment of an obligation, the undertaking of a commitment, or the granting of a license, is precisely the state of affairs for which the agent is held responsible when the illocutionary act is ascribed to her, and is therefore the result or outcome of the illocutionary act as an action, not a mere consequence of it.5 Anything else that may follow from that state of affairs is a consequence of the illocutionary act as opposed to its outcome. We pass from the illocutionary act to the perlocutionary when we consider one of those consequences as the outcome of an act of the same agent who has performed the illocutionary act. As to question (3), it should be clear by now both where the problem lies and what the solution is. The problem is the notion of act as a stretch of active behaviour, a movement or gesture that plays a role in an activity of the agent. Indeed, there is no stretch of active behaviour, no movement or gesture on the part of the agent that can be made to correspond precisely and exclusively to her perlocutionary act. To perform perlocution, the agent need not do anything more than what

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was required for the performance of the illocutionary act: to echo Davidson, it is the world that makes the difference. If we stick to the above-mentioned notion of an act, the perlocutionary act cannot be an act of the speaker. Likewise, if we accept a Davidsonian view of action in which the action, however described, must correspond to some bodily movement of the agent, the perlocutionary act cannot be an action of the speaker. The only act, or action, that is actually performed is that with which the receiver responds to the illocutionary act. But this is an act of the receiver. The solution does not lie in working out some complex explanation of cooperative behaviour involving both agent and receiver (e.g. Gu 1993), but in understanding the limits of the notion of an act as a stretch of active behaviour and of the notion of action as a bodily movement (with a mental cause). By turning to a notion of act as the core of an action, and therefore the bringing about of a state of affairs, the problem simply does not arise: there is perlocutionary act as an act of the speaker whenever she can be attributed responsibility for some consequence of her speech act.

2.5

From language to action and back again

There is a hidden symmetry between Austin’s theory of illocutionary acts and his analysis of excuses. My attention was drawn to it by a note in Austin’s manuscript for How to Do Things with Words. It is not a note the author used as a part of the 1955 Harvard set, but was very likely written in 1951 or 1952. The note contains a tentative index of subjects, the first of which reads: I. The General Theory of Performatives, or How to Do Things with Words. while the second reads: II. The General Theory of Intention, Extenuatives. Or How to Get out of Things, How not to have Done Things with Words. I’ll leave aside the implications of connecting a ‘general theory of intention’ with ‘extenuatives’, that is, excuses. How Austin hoped to relate intention to responsibility (and to its extenuation) is an important issue that cannot be discussed further here (but see above, 2.3.2). Instead, I would like to focus attention on what Austin might have meant by opposing the project of a theory of extenuation to that of his theory

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of performatives and illocution (in the same set of notes, the title How to Do Things with Words is also paraphrased as: ‘The General Theory of Performatives and Illocution’). What do these two themes or projects have in common? In the theory of performatives (extended to cover all illocution), what is studied is how it is that, in speaking, we perform actions (and particularly actions of a special, conventional kind). Analyses of the conditions for the successfulness of performatives, of the securing of uptake, of the linguistic forms that embody and indicate illocutionary force and their processing, all contribute to explaining how it is that the act of uttering words becomes an illocutionary act bringing about a state of affairs of a certain kind. But what about the theory of ‘extenuatives’? Austin contrasts ‘to do things with words’ with ‘to get out of things’ or ‘not to have done things with words’. The last phrase is unclear. Is the final ‘with words’ part of the phrase ‘have done things with words’, or does it fall outside of it as well as outside the scope of the negation (as in: ‘How – with words – not to have done things’)? Is the intended subject matter infelicity (that is, how we come not to have done, beyond our intention and efforts, some one of the actions that can be done with words) or is Austin suggesting that with our verbal practices of excuse and extenuation, we can make it so that we have not done something we were credited for or charged with? According to Austin, infelicities affecting the illocutionary act (or at least some of them) can make what we did (or appeared to do) with words not done or not happened, depriving the utterance of the effect that would have made a certain illocutionary act out of it. The appropriateness of extending this principle to other aspects of the speech act, particularly perlocution, which are not subject to conventional rules or conditions in the same way, is highly disputable, and even more so is the attempt to extend it to non-verbal non-conventional actions. What excuse can make your opening the door not done or not happened? Or your crashing your car? The door remains open, the car crashed; what was done can be mended, perhaps, but still remains done. It is not like a void contract that, when its infelicity is revealed, turns out not to have ever been a real contract. But, if the door is open, and you were the last one who touched it when it was closed, so that to all appearances you did open it, you might still have done so under duress or in a state of total and perhaps faultless absent-mindedness, which ‘extenuates’ your agency, sometimes to such an extent that you are demoted from being an agent and having performed the alleged action. If the car is crashed, it remains in that state whatever you say,

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but it might turn out that it was not your fault, for example, that the car crash merely affected you (you were pushed against another car by the car behind yours) and you played no agent role in it. In these cases, the state of the world brought about is still there, but your action is not. So after all, by means of language, quite beyond the scope of conventional action and its infelicities, agency may be withdrawn from people so that what seemed to be an action of a certain person may turn out not to be. Let us now consider that action identification too is, according to Austin, language-dependent (since it depends on descriptions or reports). By indicating a possible symmetry between the two philosophical projects he had in mind in the early 50s, was Austin thereby suggesting that while, if on the one hand language cannot be fully understood without considering the actions it is designed to perform, human action, too, cannot be fully understood without considering the role of language in its identification and attribution, if not in its ontology? Be that as it may, while the symmetry between these two philosophical projects is far from perfect, it is still interesting and intriguing to realize that one and the same view of action underlies both.

Notes 1. According to narrative semiotics (Greimas and Courtés 1979), there are acts that fill in the central slot in an instance of the narrative schema involving manipulation, action, and sanction. These I take to be made salient as actions. 2. Literally, Austin says that they are not themselves sayings. This is quite puzzling and perhaps false. I take it that, taking both locution and illocution to be conventional, he is concerned with the difference between conventional effects and non-conventional consequences, and intends to exclude conventional effects from ever being perlocutionary. 3. Feinberg too appears to assume that acts can be squeezed or stretched out like accordions by the descriptions they receive, without changing their identity conditions. 4. Austin contrasts freedom and responsibility as two independent dimensions of action. The reason might lie in the causal feature of responsibility (the fact that the ascription of an action to an agent implies an assumption, on basically causal grounds, about her involvement in determining the outcome). 5. Strangely enough, Austin does seem to confuse effects, results and consequences sometimes. However, the often-cited passage of How to Do Things with Words – ‘It will be seen that the “consequential effects” here mentioned ... do not include a particular kind of consequential effects, those achieved, e.g. by way of committing the speaker as in promising, which come into the illocutionary act. Perhaps restrictions need making, as there is clearly a difference

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between what we feel to be the real production of real effects and what we regard as mere conventional consequences’ (103) – contains (alas) an editorial mistake. The occurrence of the word ‘consequence’ at the end of the quote is the editorial expansion of a succinct note in which the word ‘consequence’ does not occur. There is no evidence that Austin would ever call the speaker’s obligation to perform a ‘consequence’ of her promise.

3 When Words Do Things: Perlocutions and Social Affordances Charles Lassiter

3.1

Introduction

When my spouse once asked me ‘Where’s the milk?’ I thought that my answer ‘In the refrigerator’ was fine. Turns out, I was less helpful than I thought I was. The intended effect of my utterance turned out to be different from what it actually brought about. This feature of utterances is especially salient in discussions of perlocutionary acts, which are utterances that cause an effect in others (Austin 1975: 101). On the one hand, an utterance is produced by the speaker and so facts about the speaker’s mental life should play an important role in understanding what perlocutions are. On the other, perlocutions are what they are because they bring things about in the world, whether the speaker likes it or not. Gu (1993) argues that this is but one of a handful of serious problems faced by the Received Model (to be discussed in detail below) of Austin’s theory of perlocutions. Consequently, Gu argues that Austin’s theory of perlocutions requires abandonment. I argue in this paper that Austin’s theoretical contributions are sound but require a different interpretation to avoid the problems Gu introduces. The interpretation I argue for – the Social-Ecological Model – endorses Austin’s central claims about perlocutions but avoids the problems entrenched in the Received Model. After a brief review of key features of perlocutionary acts, I introduce two key concepts from ecological psychology for fleshing out the Social-Ecological Model: attunements and affordances (Gibson 1979). In Section 3, I discuss some details of the Social-Ecological Model. In Section 4, I present Gu’s objections to the Received Model and how the Social-Ecological Model handles Gu’s objections. 32

When Words Do Things 33

3.2

Background: perlocutions and ecological psychology

In this section, I’ll introduce the relevant background information about Austin’s theory of perlocutions and Gibson’s ecological psychology for discussing the Social-Ecological Model in Section 3. 3.2.1 Austin’s theory of perlocutions A perlocution is an utterance that produces an effect in the hearer. Austin, in lecture VIII of How to Do Things with Words, writes: Saying something will often, or even normally, produce certain consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audience, or of the speaker, or of other persons: and it may be done with the design, intention, or purpose of producing them. (1975: 101) For example, I can alarm hearers by uttering ‘look out!’ and intimidate hearers by uttering ‘don’t make me call the police on you.’ Naturally, though, not any utterance can produce any effect. I can’t (reasonably) expect to intimidate you by uttering ‘The moon is in waning gibbous’1 nor by uttering ‘You are now intimidated.’ But we discover through interactions with social agents the sorts of utterances that do and don’t intimidate. And in finding out what kinds of utterances do and don’t intimidate (or alarm or whatever) communicative agents discover that perlocutionary utterances can have their effects independently of a speaker’s intentions. Austin provides a taxonomy of perlocutionary acts (see Figure 3.1).2

Perlocutionary act

Intended

Succeed in effecting E

Fail to effect E

Fail in achievement

Figure 3.1

Unintended

Taxonomy of perlocutionary acts

Fail in attempt

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The first division is between intentional and unintentional perlocutionary acts: When an effect E is intended, then the act is intentional; otherwise, it’s unintentional. Under intentional perlocutionary acts, speakers can either succeed or fail to bring E about. But speakers can fail in two ways. First, speakers can intend to bring about E but fail in the achievement to bring about E. A speaker fails in her achievement to bring about E when she does everything right to bring E about but the audience simply was not cooperating at the time. For example, my utterance ‘Shoot him!’ fails to get a hearer to act if the hearer doesn’t hear me properly or fails to understand who I mean by ‘him.’ Second, speakers can intend to bring about E but fail in the attempt to bring about E. A speaker fails in her attempt to bring about E when she fails to do the right sorts of things that are required to bring about E. For example, suppose I intend to frighten you by saying ‘Health care costs in the United States will continue to balloon over the next hundred years.’ My utterance may cause you to be worried, but not frightened. You are frightened by all the usual sorts of things; it’s just that I was wrong in what constitutes the usual sorts of things that frighten. Two other features of perlocutions bear mentioning. First, it is characteristic of perlocutions that their effects can be achieved through non-locutionary means. I can intimidate my hearer by uttering a threat; but I can also intimidate my hearer by waving a large stick or revealing a gun tucked into my belt. Second, perlocutionary acts involve the achievement of either a perlocutionary object or a perlocutionary sequel. Perlocutionary objects are the mental states a speaker hopes to token in the audience in virtue of producing that utterance. Perlocutionary sequels are overt responses performed by the audience in virtue of the speaker’s perlocutionary act.3 On this, Austin writes: Thus the act of warning may achieve its perlocutionary object of alerting and also have the perlocutionary sequel of alarming ... warning may produce the sequel of deterring and saying ‘Don’t’, whose object is to deter, may produce the sequel of altering or even alarming. (1975: 118) But the positing of both perlocutionary objects and sequels suggests what was mentioned above: that the effects of perlocutionary acts are discovered through interaction with agents in our social environment.

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3.2.2 Attunements and affordances: basic tools of ecological psychology Ecological psychology holds that perception, cognition, and action are part of a single trajectory. We do not, according to ecological psychology, collect information about the world, perform internal computations, and perform an action. Rather, perception and action are an engagement of the world by a ‘living observer,’ one who has aims and a world to navigate (Gibson 1979; Turvey et al. 1981). As situated and acting organisms, animals explore their environments to learn what the environment can offer them in terms of acting. And part of exploring an environment is exploiting stable patterns in our perceptual experience of the world in order to act. For example, a biotypical agent, when she walks towards a tree, will experience the tree taking up more room in her visual field, while walking away produces the opposite. Turning her head left causes the tree to shift right in the visual field; turning her head to the right causes the tree to shift left. Just as certain sorts of movements bring about predictable changes in our perceptual field, objects support actions in predictable ways. Chairs are for sitting and occasionally standing on; mugs are for grasping; stairs are for climbing; and so on. Ecological psychologists say that objects in the world afford agents certain actions; agents perceive affordances in acting in the world (Gibson 1979). And affordances are not things that agents work out via an occult process; I do not first receive visual information about a nearby chair and then, through various internal information-processing mechanisms, infer that the chair can be sat upon. Rather, I directly see that the chair affords sitting. The chair shows up for me as something that can be sat upon. Affordances are relational properties holding between an object and an agent: objects afford actions for agents.4 And for an agent to take advantage of those affordances, she must have the proper sensitivities or attunements. When it comes to acting in the physical world, having the right sorts of attunements means having the right sort of body and the right sort of motor programs developed in response to environmental interaction (cf. Gallagher 2005). I don’t perceive a fence as climbable, for example, unless I have the right sort of body and motor capabilities to climb over the fence. Attunements are defined (in part) in terms of affordances; and affordances are defined (in part) in terms of attunements. For an object O to afford an action A, O must afford A to an organism with relevant kinds of attunements. And to say that an organism has the relevant

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kinds of attunements is to say that it is attuned to the actions afforded by some object. The world shows up for relevantly attuned agents in ways that afford action by those agents, and agents are capable of perceiving those affordances because they are attuned in the relevant ways.

3.3

Social-ecological model

In this section, I briefly discuss the Social-Ecological Model of perlocutions. The Social-Ecological Model holds that a speaker S performs a perlocutionary act P when S performs those actions that afford a response by a relevantly attuned hearer H, a response that accords with the kind of response a sociolinguistically competent agent would produce. For example, my uttering ‘look out!’ to you is a perlocutionary act of alarming when I say and do the kinds of things that afford you, as a properly attuned agent, with the kind of response that we would anticipate a sociolinguistically competent agent to perform. More succinctly, my utterance is an act of alarming when I do and say what reasonable people in my speech community would describe as an act of alarming. In the next sections, I discuss the notions of social affordances and attunements as well as providing examples to flesh out the SocialEcological Model. 3.3.1 Social affordances The social world is a relatively stable domain.5 We saw in Section 3.2.2 that objects afford actions and agents directly perceive those affordances. Similarly, socially salient objects afford social responses, and agents directly perceive those affordances for social response. And just as organisms are attuned to affordances in the physical world, organisms are attuned to affordances in the social world, to social affordances.6 Social affordances point to responses available to an agent in a social environment. Ordinary examples abound: a $20 note affords exchanging for goods and services, an outstretched hand affords shaking, a Duchenne smile affords approachability, and a greeting affords similarly greeting the speaker. There are two points to make here about social affordances. The first point is that that they afford responses to the social environment, as opposed to affordances in the physical environment affording actions. The reason for the shift is that we social agents are complex and may not overtly respond to social stimuli: if a speaker says something to hurt my feelings, I may not take that as an opportunity to tell the speaker that

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my feelings are hurt.7 But still I am not senseless or inert in this situation; it’s not as though nothing happens to me. So to capture the idea that social stimuli can affect us but not move us to act, I say that social affordances afford responses rather than actions. The second point is that social affordances show up for us as social.8 The social world is not inferred from the perception of socially-neutered things but is directly perceived by the relevantly attuned agents. For example, when we engage others in conversation, we pick up on and respond to the things that they say and the way they say it – your saying ‘Hello,’ ‘Watch where you’re stepping!’ or ‘Can I buy you a drink?’ is what I perceive and respond to. Obviously in communication, what agents say and how they say it requires the expulsion of air from the lungs that’s shaped by the vocal folds. But these biological details are irrelevant to us most of the time. I’m not interested in how the lungs compress to force air from your mouth; I am interested in your greeting, annoyed mutter, or offer for a drink. So while the uttering of noises may be the product of the movements of vocal organs, the uttering of a word is not the consequence of the uttering of a noise (cf. Austin 1975; Strawson 1985). We do not merely utter noises at one another in our social worlds; we tell jokes, request information, utter commands, give instruction, use pick up lines, demand apologies, greet, tell stories, and so on – acting, gesticulating, and modulating the pitch and volume of our voices all the while. These are the kinds of things that show up in our social worlds, and these are the kinds of things that afford social action. Social affordances, then, identify those features of the social world that offer responses to social agents. They show up for us as constituting the social world. But not just anyone can pick up on any social affordances; agents have to have developed the right sorts of attunements to pick up on the relevant social affordances. It is to attunements to social affordances that we now turn. 3.3.2 Attunements to social affordances Agents’ capacities to pick up on social affordances – our capacity to pick up on social cues for social action – depend on phylogenetic dispositions shaped during ontogeny. We are disposed towards sensitivity to social information,9 and our sensitivities are shaped throughout our lifetime. Ontogenetically, we are inducted into various social practices and learn how to socially interact with others and objects. Ontogenetic development of attunements is directed by members of the developing agent’s

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social community in a process called guided attunement (Heft 2007). For example, when I hand a toy to a baby, I not only draw the baby’s attention to the object; I draw attention to how it is engaged. I shake the rattle, bang the drum, or squeeze the rubber ducky. And it is through guided attunement that children are taught ways of interacting with their environments. Children are, of course, taught ways of communicatively interacting with their environments. For example, when Uncle Joe gives little Suzette a birthday present, Suzette’s parents prompt Suzette to say ‘thank you.’ And if Suzette wants Uncle Joe to pass her the salt during dinner, Suzette is reminded to say ‘please’ when performing her request. These ways of interacting with children in a social environment are a way of guiding them to say the appropriate things at the appropriate times.10 And these are but two small examples of guided attunement in communicative interaction: children are taught through engagement with others in their social environment how to respond to social stimuli. That is to say: children develop attunements to social affordances. And when children have developed the attunements that are accepted by their community, they are sociolinguistically competent members of their communities. Because different sociolinguistic communities adhere to different norms, individuals develop different attunements in virtue of being members of different sociolinguistic communities. I may take myself to be speaking ironically and believe myself to convey that through my tone of voice. You, however, may miss my cues of ironic intent and take me to be speaking sincerely. So I might utter, ‘That was a smart idea,’ anticipating that you will pick up on my ironic tone of voice. If you are not attuned to the cues by which I intend for you to pick up on my sarcastic intent, you may take me to be speaking sincerely. What I take to be clearly rolling my eyes in exasperation, you may take to be an unimportant eye-movements. My hyperbole you read as only slight overstatement. 3.3.3 Examples illustrating the social-ecological model I’ve said in Section 3.3.1 and 3.3.2 that social affordances point to ways in which we can interact with the social environment, and that agents can pick up on social affordances in virtue of having the right sorts of attunements. And recall how the Social-Ecological Model defines perlocutions: a speaker S performs a perlocutionary act P when S performs those actions that afford a response by a relevantly attuned hearer H, a response that accords with the kind of response a sociolinguistically competent agent would produce. We are now in a

When Words Do Things 39

position to see how the Social-Ecological Model describes an instance of warning a hearer. If I am to perform a perlocutionary act of warning, then I do the kinds of things that a sociolinguistically competent agent recognizes as warning people, which means doing the kinds of things relevantly attuned agents pick up on as affording a response of warning: I shout ‘Look out!’ in a loud voice, I wave my arms and hands to get my hearer’s attention, I point to the source of danger. Perhaps no one of these individually might warn my hearer; but, being a sociolinguistically competent agent, I know the kinds of things I need to do and say to bring off the perlocutionary act of warning. These actions together afford my hearer a response of being warned, of doing the sorts of things one does in response to being warned: shouting, gasping, turning, running away. If my hearer doesn’t have the relevant attunements and she fails to pick up on my act of warning, it does not necessarily follow that I have completely failed to perform a perlocutionary act of warning. I performed the sort of act that would warn a properly attuned agent, even if such an agent is not present to me; that is, I have failed in achievement (see Figure 3.1 above). Here are four examples to illustrate the Social-Ecological Model, some of which point to interesting extensions of the theory of perlocutions and future research to be done with the Social-Ecological Model. 3.3.3.1

Getting to obey

Ahmed and Ben, competent members of the same sociolinguistic community, are making dinner. Ahmed utters to Ben, ‘Mince two cloves of garlic,’ and Ben subsequently finds two cloves of garlic and minces them. Ahmed got Ben to mince two cloves of garlic by means of the utterance ‘Mince two cloves of garlic.’ On the Social-Ecological Model, Ben picked up on those social actions afforded him by Ahmed’s utterance in virtue of being properly attuned as a competent member of the sociolinguistic community. Another way of putting the matter is to say that Ben picked up on the right sort of move to make in the ongoing social interaction. 3.3.3.2

Frightening

Catherine and Donald have been married for seven years. After a nasty row, Catherine says to Donald, ‘I’m leaving you.’ Donald is frightened as a result of Catherine’s utterance. Catherine’s utterance afforded Donald the response of being frightened, and Donald picked up on that social affordance.

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This case is similar to the previous one of getting to obey insofar as a speaker’s utterance has an effect on the hearer. But we also see how it is interestingly different: Catherine’s utterance had the effect of frightening Donald. But, following what I mentioned above in Section 3.3.1, some responses to perlocutions don’t involve overt actions, and Donald’s being frightened is just such a case. This points to a relevant difference between cases like that of Catherine and Donald (being frightened) and Ahmed and Ben (getting to obey). Some perlocutionary acts invite a response that the responding agent elects to perform – just as Ben elects to mince the garlic. Other perlocutionary acts invite a response that agents typically do not elect to perform, like becoming frightened, feeling elated, or shouting when startled. This suggests another dimension along which to taxonomize perlocutionary acts – see Figure 3.2. The new dimension falls under the branch for an intended, successful perlocution. When the intended act succeeds in producing some effect, the response by the hearer is either elected or unelected. 3.3.3.3

Unintentional perlocutionary acts

Eleanore and Francois are talking about a recent party they attended. Eleanore says, ‘That party was an unmitigated bore.’ Francois is subsequently amused, but Eleanore never intended for her utterance to be taken as amusing.

Perlocutionary act

Intended

Succeed in effecting E

Unelected response Figure 3.2

Unintended

Fail to effect E

Elected response

Fail in achievement

Revised Taxonomy of perlocutionary acts

Fail in attempt

When Words Do Things 41

Unintentional perlocutionary acts highlight the commonplace that our utterances can bring about effects independently of our intentions: Though Eleanore didn’t intend for her utterance to amuse Francois, it amused him nonetheless. But rather than think about this as something out of the ordinary, the Social-Ecological Model regards such cases as uncovering something new and interesting about the sociolinguistic communities of which we are a part. We discover the effects our utterances have on the social world. Even though Eleanore didn’t foresee that her utterance would amuse Francois, she has now discovered that it does. Just as we often discover new uses for old items, Eleanore has discovered a new use for this old utterance. In discovering a new use for an old utterance – that is, in discovering an unexpected affordance manifested by an agent’s utterance – there is no ontological difference between intentional and unintentional perlocutionary utterances. It’s not as though one has something that the other lacks:11 both are utterances manifesting social affordances. The difference between intentional and unintentional perlocutionary acts is epistemic, in knowing how the hearer will respond to the utterance. What makes intentional and unintentional perlocutions different is what the speaker knows about how her audience will react. Unintentional perlocutionary acts do not fail to be speech acts because they fail to have some appropriate intention (cf. Sbisà 2002: 422). The focus is not on the intentions of individuals but rather on the ‘total speech act situation’ (Austin 1975: 148): affordances situated in the environment and picked up by appropriately attuned social agents. And if the total speech act situation is one in which the hearer picks up on affordances to which the speaker is not attuned, then it only means that the speaker wasn’t aware of some way to which her hearer would respond. Unintentional perlocutionary utterances on the Social-Ecological Model are like unforeseen moral consequences of our actions: a doctor may end up harming someone in her attempt to help. The wrong description says that the doctor helped or hurt simpliciter; for the doctor anticipated that her action would help, but it instead ended up killing the patient. The right description says that the doctor tried to help, but ended up hurting, the patient; the doctor neither helped nor harmed simpliciter but only helped or harmed in a qualified way. The same can be said for unintentional perlocutionary utterances: I anticipated that my utterance ‘the moon is in waning gibbous’ would get my hearer to believe that the moon is in waning gibbous; however, I neither got her to believe nor alarmed her simpliciter.

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3.3.3.4

Self-directed perlocutionary acts

The Social-Ecological Model claims that utterances afford social responses to the properly attuned agents. Anecdotal evidence suggests that we can affect our own behaviour through self-directed utterances: sometimes we get ourselves excited by talking about some upcoming event; we calm ourselves down through talking out a solution to a stressful problem; we sometimes convince ourselves in our attempts to convince others. Research in psychology supports the intuitions underlying the anecdotal evidence. For example, Behrend, Rosengren, and Perlmutter (1989) suggest that children’s private speech is self-regulatory, that children talk to themselves to aid in the completion of a difficult puzzle. Self-directed utterances have the effect of helping the child to complete the puzzle. Another example of self-directed perlocutionary acts, found in the implicit social cognition literature, is an implementation intention. An implementation intention is used to help an agent follow through on her plans to achieve some goal in critical situations. They have the structure ‘Whenever situation x arises, I will initiate the goal-directed response y!’ (Gollwitzer 1999; Gawronski and Payne 2010). For example, if I have as a goal eating more healthily, simply saying to myself ‘I want to eat better’ is not helpful in those critical times when I am most tempted. What does help is saying to myself ‘Whenever I see cake, I will eat fruit instead!’ Utterances specifying concrete actions can help change my behaviour under certain circumstances – that is, implementation intentions are self-directed perlocutionary acts. The Social-Ecological Model of perlocutions has a ready account of selfdirected perlocutionary acts. We are attuned to the social affordances of our own utterances: we can pick up on appropriate responses from the utterances we produce. We can do this knowingly when (for example) we tell ourselves that we’re going to hit a home run before going up to bat. And we can do this unknowingly when we recite the instructions of a recipe to help add the right ingredients in the right order. We can – with still-to-be-discovered limitations – affect our attitudes and behaviours by our own utterances.

3.4

The received model

I’ve spent the past two sections of this paper unpacking my favoured account: the Social-Ecological Model of perlocutions. But one common way of unpacking the concept of perlocutions is by appeal to the effect

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of the utterance. On this account, what makes my utterance of ‘Look out!’ an act of alarming my hearer is that it does, in fact, alarm my hearer. Gu (1993) analyzes this account of perlocutionary acts – what he calls the Received Model – in detail. He writes (1993: 406) that a speaker is attributed with the performance of a perlocutionary act when: 1. S says something to H; 2. H is affected in a certain way; and 3. that H is affected in a certain way is treated as a consequential effect of S’s saying something.12 Claim (2) entails two theses: the Multiplicity Thesis and the Infinity Thesis (1993: 407). The Multiplicity Thesis holds that some speech act may produce multiple effects. The Infinity Thesis holds that the possible consequences emerging from any speech act are nearly limitless; there are no clear limits on what can be intended or achieved by some speech act. Claim (3) entails the Causation Thesis: the speaker’s saying something causes the hearer to be affected in some way. The Intention Irrelevance Thesis holds that attributions of perlocutionary acts to speakers are independent of the speaker’s intentions. This follows from the point previously made that perlocutionary acts can be brought off independently of the speaker’s intentions. Gu claims that the Received Model is the conjunction of (1) Multiplicity, (2) Infinity, (3) Causation, and (4) Intention Irrelevance. And, as Gu argues, the Received Model is riddled with problems, the two most serious being with the Causation Thesis and the conjunction of Multiplicity, Infinity, and Intention Irrelevance. These problems are so serious, Gu contends, that they merit jettisoning the Received Model, and hence most of Austin’s theory of perlocutions. I argue that Gu hastily infers that the Received Model follows from the conjunction of (1)–(4) and that he prematurely jettisons Austin’s account of perlocutions. The Social-Ecological Model, by contrast with the Received Model, endorses each of (1)–(4), but under interpretations different from those of Gu, thereby avoiding the problems Gu identifies.13 3.4.1 Problems for the received model The first of Gu’s arguments against the Received Model focuses on Causation. He argues that the relation between utterance U and perlocutionary effect E is misleadingly described as ‘causal.’ After considering

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a variety of interpretations for the claim ‘x causes y,’ Gu argues that under no condition do we find that U is a necessary or sufficient condition for E. But the Causation Thesis entails that U is the cause for E. Consequently, the Causation Thesis is wrong and merits rejection. The second of Gu’s arguments against the Received Model is the conjunction of Multiplicity, Intention Irrelevance, and Infinity, which generates the Effect = Act Fallacy. The thrust of the Effect = Act Fallacy is that speakers end up being unjustly saddled with bizarre perlocutionary acts. Suppose I intend to warn someone by saying ‘The boss is coming to see you.’ Instead of alerting the person, my utterance causes the person to take a swig of bourbon. The Infinity Thesis holds that a perlocutionary utterance could have any number of consequences, including causing an agent to swig bourbon. The Multiplicity Thesis holds that an utterance can cause more than one effect, so my utterance can have the effect of alarming and causing the hearer to swig bourbon. And the Intention Irrelevance Thesis holds that my intentions are irrelevant in considering what kind of perlocutionary act I perform. Putting all three together, we find that my utterance ‘the boss is coming to see you’ was a perlocutionary act of getting my associate to take a swig of bourbon. Intuitively, though, this seems wrong. When I utter ‘the boss is coming to see you,’ my act is not one of getting my hearer to swig bourbon – I am informing and alerting, not getting my hearer to drink. If I wanted to do that, I might utter ‘drink this now!’ Surely my speech act isn’t defined entirely by consequences outside my control. And surely my intentions play some role (even if not a controlling one) in what kinds of perlocutionary acts I perform. But since the Received Model leads us down the garden path to such absurdities, Gu argues, it merits rejection. 3.4.2 Intention irrelevance and the social-ecological model The Received Model holds that intentions are irrelevant. Agents can perform a perlocutionary act independently of whether they intended to perform that act, as indicated by the taxonomy in Figure 3.1: unintended perlocutions are still perlocutions. On the Social-Ecological Model, intentions are not irrelevant to the identity of a perlocutionary act. Suppose I said to my associate not ‘the boss is coming to see you’ but rather ‘the moon is in waning gibbous tonight.’ Suppose further that my associate is caught off-guard by the arrival of the boss and subsequently scolded for goofing off during company time. My associate consequently reprimands me for not saying something. I might protest, saying ‘But I told you “the moon is in waning gibbous tonight”! Why didn’t you look busy for the boss?’ Surely this

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kind of a response is absurd. My associate might likely stare at me with a puzzled sort of a look, and rightly so. In our sociolinguistic community, one cannot, all other things being equal, warn someone with an utterance of ‘the moon is waning gibbous.’ I can’t say just anything and expect my hearer to be alarmed. But what then does the Social-Ecological Model say about the seeming irrelevance of intentions to perlocutionary utterances? Recall that on the Social-Ecological Model, the difference between intended and unintended effects is epistemic, not ontological. Insofar as I intend to bring about certain effects by means of my perlocutionary act, I have to grasp how a sociolinguistically competent agent would respond to my act. Even if some effects are unexpected, it doesn’t follow that my intention is irrelevant; it only follows that there was some effect that I didn’t predict would come about. It’s worth noting that the foregoing discussion fits with Austin’s analysis of intentions in ‘Three Ways of Spilling Ink.’ He describes intentions as like a miner’s headlamp: to say of an agent that her action is intentional is to say that she had a sense of what would come about as a result of her action. But just as the miner’s headlamp only illuminates an area in front of the miner and not the whole of the cave, intentionascriptions throw light on what the agent immediately foresaw but not on everything that could come about as a result of the agent’s utterance: ‘Whatever I am doing is being done and to be done amidst a background of circumstances ... This is what necessitates care, to ward off impingements, upsets, accidents. Furthermore, the doing of it will involve incidentally all kinds of minutiae’ (1979: 284–285). An agent performs a speech act intentionally with limited knowledge of what will come about as a result of her action. Inability to foresee some consequence does not entail ascription of responsibility for that consequence. 3.4.3 Causation and the social-ecological model Perlocutionary acts produce effects in the hearer; Catherine’s uttering ‘I’m leaving you’ causes Donald to feel frightened. Gu implicitly assumes that the only notion of cause that is relevant is that of efficient cause: some perlocutionary utterance causes a perlocutionary sequel just as a bat striking a baseball causes the ball to fly. But, contrary to Gu’s assumption about the relevant notion of cause,14 we are interested in how Catherine’s utterance is a reason for Donald to respond with feelings of fright. Consequently, we might do well to explore other varieties of cause to explain Donald’s response to Catherine’s utterance.15 The Social-Ecological Model claims that a better

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model for understanding how an utterance causes a response in a hearer is that of final causation: the speaker produces some utterance in order to bring something about.16 Part of picking up on social affordances is making the right sort of response in the social context; pick up of social affordances is action-oriented. And we produce social affordances with the expectation that they will be picked up in a specific way by our audience. So our perlocutions are performed on the understanding that they will bring about desired ends. The hearer recognizes my aim in performing the perlocution when she picks up on the affordances manifested in that perlocutionary act. For to perceive the affordances is to produce the relevant sort of response in virtue of being rightly attuned. The Social-Ecological Model modifies the Causation Thesis so that the notion of cause at work is final cause and not efficient cause. And final causes need not have the kind of strict regularity expected with efficient causes. Consequently, it is not misleading to say that a perlocutionary utterance causes a response, provided that one is talking about final cause. 3.4.4 Infinity and the social-ecological model Ready-to-hand examples – like my bourbon-swilling co-worker in the above example – suggest that nearly any kind of response can be given to any kind of perlocutionary utterance. But in the majority of our everyday, humdrum social interactions, we are fairly good at predicting the effects of our utterance. As mentioned previously, I can’t reasonably expect you to be frightened by my utterance ‘the moon is waning gibbous tonight.’ If you were frightened, then that would be an exceptional case. The Social-Ecological Model holds that a wide array of responses is available to perlocutionary utterances, but that some are more typical than others. Uttering ‘the moon is in waning gibbous’ may cause alarm, but that’s not the typical response. So the Social-Ecological Model recognizes that there is a large multitude of effects emerging from a perlocutionary utterance; but it also recognizes that some consequences are more typical than others. Not all perlocutionary sequels are on a par, and our theory of perlocutions need not treat them as such. Consequently, the Social-Ecological Model holds that the Infinity Thesis needs to be amended to read: a perlocutionary act has a finite set of typical responses, but under this set can expand limitlessly with highly specific contextual conditions.

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3.4.5 Social affordance theory of perlocutions vs. the received model In modifying three of the four theoretical commitments Gu identifies in Austin’s theory, we see that the Social-Ecological Model thereby avoids the pitfalls of the Received Model. This suggests that the theory of perlocutions given in How to Do Things with Words is basically right; all that’s missing is a proper account of the underlying mechanisms by which perlocutions are brought off. And that proper account is offered by the Social-Ecological Model: a speaker S performs a perlocutionary act P when S performs those actions that afford a response by a relevantly attuned hearer H that is in accordance with the kind of response a sociolinguistically competent agent would reasonably produce. This model provides a way to interpret Austin’s theory to avoid Gu’s worries. Though lacking space to explore the matter here, another issue is whether the Social-Ecological Model reasonably approximates what Austin had in mind, what Austin really meant. Relatedly, Sbisà’s (2002, 2007) reading of Austin fits well with the Social-Ecological Model. Sbisà emphasizes that Austin’s speech act theory is, in fact, a theory about speech acts – that speaking is a variety of action and an account of it ought to be suitably grounded in the day-to-day interactions of situated social agents. The Social-Ecological Model likewise emphasizes that utterances are a variety of situated social action and ought to be understood along the same lines as other situated social actions.

3.5

Conclusions

I have offered in this paper a novel account of Austin’s theory of perlocutions. Perlocutionary acts manifest social affordances for response that are picked up by properly attuned social agents. This account avoids problems with the Received Model while pointing towards novel areas for research (e.g self-directed perlocutions) within speech act theory. There are at least two open questions to be addressed. First, it seems as though illocutions might count as perlocutions in the social affordance framework: illocutions like ‘I christen this ship the Mr. Stalin’ might then count as perlocutions since it manifests a social affordance to which hearers are likely attuned. Second, a full explication of the social affordance framework ought to also address how it is that hearers pick up on some affordances rather than others: the same utterance might amuse or offend, but what marks the difference in why hearers respond one way or another?

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These questions do not cripple the theory but only point towards more work to be done. The Social-Ecological Model has a great deal of explanatory power and avoids many of the liabilities connected with the Received Model. Independently of what Austin intended in his work, the Social-Ecological Model offers a framework that might well bear much fruit.17

Notes 1. However, we can imagine cases where I mention that the moon is in waning gibbous and this reminds you of a threat you received previously; consequently, you are in fact intimidated as a result of my utterance. I address this point more fully below. 2. Austin 1975: 106. 3. Austin, as I will discuss below, might be read to endorse a dispositional account of mental states, so it might be that perlocutionary objects specify the disposition activated in an agent in virtue of the speaker’s perlocutionary act. 4. Ecological psychologists and ecologically-minded philosophers diverge on the exact nature of affordances, cf. Chemero (2009); Turvey et al. (1981); Greeno (1994); Stoffregen (2003); Jones (2003). 5. Cf. Noë (2009); Clark (1996); Ryle (1949). 6. ‘Social affordances’ is, in some ways, an unfaithful use of the term ‘affordance.’ However, its use is gaining traction in the ecological community (cf. Heft 2001, 2007; McArthur and Baron 1983; Costall 1995; Good 2007). I will use “social affordance” to highlight the continuity between my social-ecological model and the ecological psychology enterprise, even though the connections between social and physical affordances are still hazy. 7. A related problem discussed in the literature is why agents take advantage of some affordances for action and not others, see Gibson (1979). 8. Cf. Heft (2007) 9. For a sampling of the vast literature on infant studies of social cognition, see: Tomasello and Carpenter (2007); Tomasello (1999, 2008); Tomasello, Carpenter, and Liszkowski (2007); Seemann (2012); and Trevarthen (1979). 10. Of course, not all language learning is of this explicit sort. Children frequently pick up on social and linguistic norms without being explicitly taught (Aitchison 2008). 11. Ryle (1949) makes a similar distinction regarding intentional and unintentional behaviours. 12. Compare with Levinson (1983: 237–238). 13. Though lacking space to address the issue here, I think the Social-Ecological Model fits well with Sbisà’s (2002, 2007) interpretation of Austin. 14. Gu (1993: 413) distinguishes between physical and verbal-influential causes. But his analysis of verbal-influential causation suggests that the causal relations are largely the same. He writes that the Received Model is ‘incapable of explaining cases where U is not followed by R. That is, it cannot explain why U fails to cause R’ (420). The need to explain failures of strict regularities is

When Words Do Things 49 expected in, say, chemistry: why did material M combust under these conditions but not those? However, it’s not clear that that is the only notion of cause at work in, say, sociolinguistics or linguistic anthropology. 15. On a related point, Grice (1989: 221) writes, ‘for x to have meaningNN, the intended effect must be something which in some sense is within the control of the audience, or that in some sense of “reason” the recognition of the intention behind x is for the audience a reason and not merely a cause.’ 16. See Juarrero 1999; Scheman 2000; Jaworski 2011; Legrenzi and Umiltà 2011, for relevant discussions about distinctions among causes. 17. Thanks to the participants of the J.L. Austin Centenary Conference for helpful feedback on this paper, especially Marina Sbisà and Gordon Bearne. Thanks to Brian Garvey for help in clarifying several passages and to Jada Strabbing for discussion of related issues.

4 Etiolations Joe Friggieri

In ‘Performative Utterances’, at the end of his discussion of different kinds of ‘unhappiness’ or ‘infelicity’, Austin mentions utterances issued in the course of acting in a play or making a joke or writing a poem, ‘in which case, of course,’ he says, the utterance ‘would not be seriously meant and we shall not be able to say that we seriously performed the act concerned’ (1979: 241). In How to Do Things with Words (1975) Austin makes the same point by distinguishing between what he calls the ‘normal’ or ‘serious’ uses of a sentence and its ‘etiolated’ or ‘parasitical’ uses. A performative utterance will, for example, be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy ... Language in such circumstances is in special ways – intelligibly – used not seriously, but in ways parasitic upon its normal use – ways which fall under the doctrine of the etiolations of language. (1975: 22) In ‘Performative Utterances’ Austin observes that ‘considerations of this kind apply to any utterance at all, not merely to performatives’ (1979: 241). And it is for this reason that both in the BBC talk and in the Harvard lectures, Austin decides to set such examples on one side and concentrate on ordinary or ‘normal’ contexts. ‘All this,’ he says, ‘we are excluding from consideration. Our performative utterances, felicitous or not, are to be understood as issued in ordinary circumstances’ (Austin 1975: 22), adding that such examples ‘might be brought into a more general account’ of the uses of language. In an aside, in the course of discussing what he calls ‘some of the more awe-inspiring performatives’, such as ‘I promise to’ Austin remarks: 50

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Surely the words must be spoken ‘seriously’ and so as to be taken ‘seriously’? This is, though vague, true enough in general – it is an important commonplace in discussing the purport of any utterance whatsoever. I must not be joking, for example, nor writing a poem. (1975: 9) The fact that Austin puts ‘seriously’ in scare quotes, and warns against the vagueness of the idea, indicates that proper analysis is necessary. Closer examination of this area should reveal important differences between the various kinds of ‘intelligible, non-standard’ utterances which Austin lumps together. To start with we must distinguish, as Austin himself does, these ‘etiolated’, non-standard uses of language not only from its normal or ‘serious’ uses, but also from the other kinds of ‘unhappiness’ or ‘infelicity’ he mentions. By tracing the history of the concept of ‘infelicity’ in its various guises, we would then be able to give a better account of the ‘peculiarity’ of the utterances that Austin ‘excludes from consideration’.

4.1 In some sense, saying anything is always doing something. This is what I do: I say something. Before adverting to this fact, however, Austin first noted that there are certain features that characterize performative utterances as a special class. One such feature, highlighted by Austin, is that, in virtue of the non-linguistic conventions with which such utterances are circumscribed, to issue them happily counts as doing this or that. The emphasis is on the need for the existence and observance of ‘an accepted conventional procedure’. There is absolutely no requirement that the utterance used as part of the procedure should be of a certain linguistic or logical form; only that the words used by the participants, where the procedure stipulates that certain words are to be used, should be those laid down by the procedure – words with the same or nearly the same sense will not do – and that the words be uttered by the right persons at the right time. Austin mentions the kind of occasion he has in mind in which performative utterances as originally defined by him would be employed – ‘marrying, betting, bequeathing, christening, or what not’ (1975: 14). In these situations, he says, ‘besides the uttering of the words of the so-called performative, a good many other things have as a general rule to be right and to go right if we are to be said to have happily brought off our action’ (ibid.). Austin’s aim in introducing his ‘Doctrine

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of Infelicities’ in the first place was precisely to show what kind of transgression of what sort of extra-linguistic convention would be involved in cases where the intended doing did not happily ‘come off’. If an unauthorized person (‘some low type’, as Austin calls him (1979: 239)) breaks a bottle of champagne against the stern, kicks away the chocks, and shouts out ‘I name this ship the Generalissimo Stalin’, his act is null and void; he does not, in fact, succeed in naming the ship. The act misfires in virtue of a convention that stipulates that only duly authorized, properly appointed persons can name ships. When the saint pours water over the penguin’s head, saying ‘I baptize you’, he does not in fact christen the penguin – animals are not the lawful recipients of baptism. And in many western countries one cannot marry again while one is still married, nor can a man divorce his wife by telling her ‘I divorce you’, as one can in other parts of the world, subject to some conventions, for example the presence of witnesses. In all these situations there are laws, practices, customs, which rule out certain outcomes and render certain actions impossible. In Section 4.V Austin introduces the notion of the explicit performative to refer to cases of saying something in which words make explicit in a particular way what one is doing. (‘I promise to come’; ‘I order you to stop laughing’). This notion is different from that of performative utterances as originally defined; there are no extra-linguistic conventions at play in the happy issuing of an explicit performative, and no breaches of such conventions involved in their flouting either. The infelicities that beset warnings, promises, suggestions and bits of advice are of a different kind from those affecting performative utterances as originally defined. At one point Austin points out the difference: If I say ‘I congratulate you’ when I’m not pleased or when I don’t believe that the credit was yours, then there is insincerity. Likewise if I say I promise to do something, without having the least intention of doing it or without believing it feasible. In these cases there is something wrong certainly, but it is not like a misfire. We should not say that I didn’t in fact promise, but rather that I did promise but promised insincerely; I did congratulate you but the congratulations were hollow. (1979: 239. See also Austin 1975: 16) As further examples of ‘unhappiness’ Austin lists misunderstanding and acting under duress. But he hastens to add that ‘although that would certainly be an unhappiness of a kind ... it is a quite different kind of thing from what we have been talking about’ (Austin 1979: 240), that

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is infelicity in connection with archetypal performatives, which renders the action ‘null and void’. In ‘Performative Utterances’ he writes: If I say I promise to do something without having the least intention of doing it, or without believing it feasible ... We should not say that I didn’t in fact promise, but rather that I did promise but promised insincerely. (Austin 1979: 239) And he makes the same observation in How to Do Things with Words, where he calls promising insincerely ‘an abuse of the procedure’ rather than a misfire (Austin 1975: 16). Even in his later work, however, Austin still felt that ‘the way we should classify infelicities in different cases will be perhaps rather a difficult matter and may even in the last resort be a bit arbitrary’ (Austin 1979: 240).1 In ‘Other Minds’ Austin had expressed the same hesitation: he did ‘order’ me to do it, but, having no authority over me, he couldn’t ‘order’ me; he did warn me a bull was going to charge, but it wasn’t, or anyway I knew much more about it than he did, so in a way he couldn’t warn me, didn’t warn me. (1979: 102) In How to Do Things wth Words Austin says that it doesn’t really matter, theoretically or practically, which view we take in such cases.2 Still it would seem that in what Austin calls the ‘ritual’ cases (baptisms, bets, games, etc.), whenever a rule is transgressed we have less difficulty classifying ‘what went wrong’ than in the case of orders, warnings, suggestions, etc. Evidently the saint did not christen the penguin when he poured water over its head saying ‘I baptize you’; obviously I do not name the ship unless I get myself properly appointed for the job.3 But in the warning case, the fact that the speaker was mistaken about the content of the warning (the bull wasn’t going to charge) should not lead us to say that he did not warn, or that he only attempted to warn. We should not in this case say the warning was void – i.e that he did not warn but only went through a form of warning – nor that it was insincere: we should feel much more inclined to say that the warning was false or (better) mistaken, as with a statement. (Austin 1975: 55) One can see why Austin found it rather difficult to say what kind of ‘unhappiness’ or ‘infelicity’ was involved in the case where an order

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was given by somebody who lacked the authority to give it. In such cases we feel inclined to say either ‘Who do you think you are to give me orders?’ in which case we seem to accept that an order was indeed given, but refuse to obey it; or ‘That wasn’t really an order, anyway’, in which case we are not even prepared to accept that the utterance constituted, or amounted to, an order in the circumstances. In cases such as this the distinction between linguistic and non-linguistic conventions can still be invoked. The type of reaction we demonstrate on such occasions would depend on which set of conventions we are prepared to lay greater emphasis on. On the one hand, we want to say that it is only in virtue of the meaning of the words that ‘I order you to shut the door’ constitutes an order. On the other we feel that the speaker should stand in some kind of relation to the other party (the listener), viz., a position of authority. This tension between linguistic and non-linguistic conventions accounts for our hesitation in describing the infelicity. It is only directly imperatival speech-acts (like orders and commands) which seem to have this peculiar feature. Most other cases – asking, advising, warning, suggesting, promising, etc. – do not require any special relationship between the parties. Only the kind of relationship that constitutes a genuine linguistic situation – the normal relationship between speaker and hearer – is required in most cases.

4.2 The theory of speech-acts introduces a new vocabulary to deal with infelicities. From the basic thought that sometimes, in virtue of certain conventional procedures, to say something is to do something, Austin moves to the different idea that to say something is, not sometimes, but absolutely always to do something. Observing that whenever one says anything there are always many things that one therein does, Austin embarks on a programme which he describes, at the beginning of Section 4.VIII, as taking us ‘further back for a while to fundamentals – to consider from the ground up how many senses there are in which to say something is to do something’ (1975: 94) And there may be infringements or contraventions at every level. If I say ‘Look out!’ and you do not hear or understand the words, or if I wave or shout but you do not see me waving or hear me shouting, I cannot be said to have warned but only to have tried to warn and not succeeded. Austin makes this clear when he says that for an illocutionary act to be successful it must secure uptake: ‘I cannot be said to have warned an audience unless it hears

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what I say and takes what I say in a certain sense’ (1975: 116). But if I say ‘The bull is about to charge’ with the force of a warning (i.e intending to warn you) and securing uptake (i.e you understand the words of my utterance and you understand it as a warning), but you know more than I do about the case, or do not heed my warning, then my action is successful as an illocution but not as a perlocution. Like any other kind of utterance, a warning can also fail at the locutionary level, for example if I fail to refer, or to use expressions in the correct sense. Obviously in the definition of the phatic act two things were lumped together: vocabulary and grammar. So we have not assigned a name to the person who utters, for example ‘cat thoroughly the if’ or ‘the slithy toves did gyre’. (Austin 1975: 96) Austin’s point is that the first utterance is grammatically incorrect, the second lexically deviant. Clearly these are cases of total phatic misfire. ‘Slithy’, ‘toves’, and ‘gyre’ are not part of the vocabulary of English, while the string of words ‘cat thoroughly the if’ does not form a grammatical sequence. Austin says: ‘The pheme is a unit of language: its typical fault is to be nonsense – meaningless. But the rheme is a unit of speech; its typical fault is to be vague or void or obscure, etc.’ (1975: 98). If somebody says ‘the slithy toves did gyre’ or ‘cat thoroughly the if’, he fails to perform a phatic act, he produces nonsense, mumbo-jumbo. But if a speaker says ‘John’s children are all bald’ when John has no children, then he fails to perform a rhetic act. His utterance, though not meaningless, is void (See Austin 1975: 51). And if when I criticize somebody for behaving badly, he replies ‘The higher you get the fewer’ (Austin 1975: 97), then again he has not performed a rhetic act, though he has performed a phatic act. His utterance, though not meaningless, is vague or obscure. The first example is an example of rhetic failure at the level of reference, the second of rhetic failure at the level of sense. And both are to be distinguished from ‘meaninglessness’ in the sense of nonsense, mumbo-jumbo, etc.4 L.W. Forguson explains: If the speaker performs a phatic act, but something goes wrong at the level of sense and reference, such that it is impossible to determine what the intended sense and/or reference of his utterance is, then he has not performed a rhetic act, or at least we (his audience) are at a loss to determine what rhetic act he has performed. (1973: 166)

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The ‘Doctrine of Infelicities’ should also help us clarify the distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary acts which Austin found hard to make.5 In Section 4.VIII Austin introduces the notion of the perlocutionary act in this way: ‘Saying something will often, or even normally, produce certain consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audience’ (1975: 101). In lecture IX, however, Austin points out that ‘the illocutionary act, as distinct from the perlocutionary, is (also) connected with the production of effects in certain senses’ (1975: 116). So, if both illocutionary and perlocutionary acts are ‘bound up’ with effects on the listener, in order to bring out the difference between them one must distinguish between the different kinds of effect which are ‘bound up’ with each.6 One way of bringing out the distinction is by focussing on the various types of infelicities accompanying illocutions and perlocutions, the various kinds of mismatch between the intentions of the speaker and the effects of his action. Warning, as already shown, can be used to illustrate these distinctions. But it is easy to find other examples. You may try to convince me that a painting is a forgery by saying ‘look at the brush work’. If I fail to see what you are getting at, your action misfires at the illocutionary level; but if I get the point and still am not convinced, your utterance misfires as a perlocution. In all these cases the speech action is described with reference to its effects on the listener. But whereas for an action to count as an illocution it is enough that the listener understand the speaker’s intention, for it to count as a perlocution the listener’s attitudes, beliefs – what, for want of a better expression, we may call roughly his ‘mental state’ – must be affected in some way. (This does not mean that the listener should engage in any action on his part.) We can then look at utterances on three levels, the locutionary, the illocutionary and the perlocutionary; and each level is accompanied by its own brand of infelicity or flaw: locutionary failure (syntactic and semantic failure), illocutionary failure (failure to secure uptake), and perlocutionary failure (failure to secure compliance). Armed with these distinctions, we are now in a better position to define the kind of infelicity that is involved in Austin’s etiolations. Clearly, to start with, there are no special extra-linguistic conventions that need to be in place and whose function needs to be respected in order for jokes, ironic comments, soliloquies, poems or stage utterances to ‘come off’ in the desired way. Such uses of language do not suffer from the kind of insincerity exemplified by the case where I say ‘I congratulate you’ when

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I’m not pleased or when I say I promise to do something without having the least intention of doing it. They are not examples of misnaming or misreferring, whether aberrational or idiosyncratic, described in How to Talk as ‘two very primitive ways in which I may on any occasion go wrong in my utterance’, or of any other instance mentioned in the same paper where my performances are faultily executed. They do not result from any misunderstanding; nor are they issued under duress or the sign of any kind of non-responsibility. They are, Austin tells us, ‘in a peculiar way hollow or void’, and therefore ‘quite different’ from the other kinds of unhappiness or infelicity he mentions.

4.3 What then, we may ask, does the peculiarity of etiolated utterances consist of? Clearly it does not concern the meaning of words. Words and sentences do not change their meaning simply by reason of their being used in a play, poem or joke. Donald Davidson elaborates in this way: ‘Most of the words in a literary work have an ordinary extension in the world. Predicates, adjectives, verbs, common nouns, and adverbs do not lose their normal ties to real objects and events when they are employed in fiction: they could suffer this loss only if their meanings changed, and if their meanings changed we wouldn’t understand them’ (Davidson 2005: 178).7 We do not need a special dictionary or grammar book in order to understand an etiolated use of language (Gale 1971: 337). Austin clearly sees this point. ‘Language in such circumstances’, he says, though used ‘non-seriously’, is still used ‘intelligibly’ (Austin 1975: 22). The difference in question is, therefore, not a difference in meaning but a difference in use. An actor and actress who go through the marriage ceremony in a play or film, saying the words of the marriage formula, do not, in so doing, get married. The same consideration applies to the utterance in a play of explicit performatives and other locutions which, outside the theatre, do not form part of a ritualistic or ceremonial convention. When, in Much Ado About Nothing, the actress playing Beatrice tells the actor playing Benedick ‘Kill Claudio!’ she does not seriously issue an order. All kinds of utterance, indicative as much as imperatival or interrogative, when uttered by an actor on a stage, suffer from this ‘lack of seriousness’. They lack the illocutionary force one usually associates with such utterances. ‘There are many utterances of indicative sentences that are not assertions, for example, indicative sentences uttered in play, pretence, joke and fiction’ (Davidson 1984a: 110).

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If actors and actresses do not command, question or assert by their use of imperatival, interrogative and declarative sentences, they cannot be charged with having asserted something false, having issued an unwise command, and so on, for they only pretend to assert and command these things (Gale 1971). ‘In lying one must make an assertion so as to represent oneself as believing what one does not; in acting assertion is excluded’ (Davidson 1984b: 259). It is worth noting at this point that when Austin speaks of stage utterances as etiolations, it is actors he refers to, not characters. For even if we agree, as I think we should, that it is right to prevent actors, playwrights and story-tellers from making assertions, since they do not commit themselves to the truth of their utterances, we might still want to raise the same question with regard to the characters in a novel or play. For doesn’t Mr Pickwick assert and deny? Doesn’t Lady Macbeth tempt and encourage? Doesn’t Lear warn and threaten and issue orders? Doesn’t Iago suggest and insinuate? The problem here seems to be this: if Pickwick and Iago are not real people, how can they do any of these things? Indeed, how can we refer to them at all? Gareth Evans, for one, thinks we don’t. For him an utterance of ‘Hamlet caused the death of Ophelia’ is not in fact an assertion about anything, but an instance of make-believe, in which the speaker pretends to be referring, by using empty names as if they were the names of actual things (Evans 1982: Ch. 3). Searle takes more or less the same line,8 while David Lewis suggests that rather than take our descriptions of fictional characters at face value, we should regard them as occurring within the scope of an implicit intensional operator (‘It is true in fiction that’) which turns an otherwise false or truth-value-less proposition into a true one. ‘Thus if I say that Holmes liked to show off, you will take it that I have asserted an abbreviated version of the sentence “In the Sherlock Holmes stories, Holmes liked to show off”’ (Lewis 1983: 263). In botany and biology, the word ‘etiolation’ refers to the anomalous growth of a plant because of lack of light. In the etiolated kind of situation mentioned by Austin, the missing element is not at the level of meaning but at the level of force. The suspension of illocutionary force in stage utterances, coupled with the actors’ pretence that they do have that force, together with the audience’s attitude or predisposition (its willingness to play along with the pretence), combine to give rise to the game of pretending which is necessary for the success of the play. Everyone in the theatre seems to be engaged in the same kind of game. As Borges puts it, ‘The actor on a stage plays at being another person in front of a gathering of people who play at taking him for that

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other person’ (Borges 1962: 248, quoted in Walton 1978). For a play to succeed, both utterer and audience must understand that there is some sort of non-deceptive pretence, or make-believe, going on.

4.4 What is true of the utterances of actors on the stage is also true of sentences used by playwrights and story-tellers in constructing their fictions. If we describe as ‘standard’ utterances those in which the conditions governing illocutionary acts are in force, we can say that those in which they are waived are ‘non-standard’. Pericles, in the funeral oration he delivered to honour those Athenians who had been killed in the first year of the Peloponnesian War, stated that no one of real ability would be excluded from the democratic process. Shakespeare, on the other hand, does not state that ‘present fears are less than horrible imaginings’: he creates a character, Macbeth, who states it, even though Shakespeare may believe that what Macbeth states in the play is actually true. ‘Serious’ and ‘non-serious’ utterances differ in the function they are used to perform. If in ordinary discourse a senior lawyer tells his junior partner that ‘we must not make a scarecrow of the law’, then, if all goes well, in using those words he would be performing an illocutionary act (of stating, admonishing, entreating, warning, or whatever). Shakespeare would then exploit the conventions of the theatre to create a fictive context in which the actor using those words (in Measure for Measure as it turns out) could non-deceptively pretend to perform that illocutionary act and represent the character as actually using those words with that illocutionary force. This explains why Austin thinks of the etiolated uses of language as parasitic upon its normal uses. In order to pretend that you are making an assertion, there must be assertions. If one can use language ironically, that’s only because a non-ironic use already exists. Christopher New puts it succinctly this way: ‘If there are metaphors, there must be literal utterances, just as, if there are parasites there must be hosts. In order to have the one you must already have the other’ (New 1999: 17).9 In general, then, and contra Derrida,10 an etiolated use of a sentence is possible only because it depends in some way on its non-etiolated use. There are, of course, some characters in plays by Shakespeare and many others who are endowed with genuine, proper names, such as Julius Caesar. In such cases, it is possible to compare the content of the play with the parallel accounts in the history books. How does a play based on a historical character (e.g Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons)

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differ from one in which the characters and events are purely fictional? Clearly, in at least one important respect we must note a similarity, for what was said about the actor’s actions and speech actions with regard to fictional characters still holds in the case of actors portraying historical characters. For no matter how close the situation on the stage or in a film is made to resemble the real life of its subject, the play is still only a representation, a re-enactment. Actor Ben Kingsley representing the historical Gandhi, Meryl Streep playing Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, and Daniel Day-Lewis in the Lincoln ‘biopic’ are, in this respect, in exactly the same kind of situation as Laurence Olivier playing the completely fictional Hamlet. We may, however, in the case of a film or play based on the life of a historical figure, ask such questions as: How closely does the actor resemble the real character? How faithfully does the film portray him or her? How historically accurate is it? And we can answer these questions by comparing the contents of the representation to the historical evidence available. In the case of historical or biographical films and plays, then, we can raise questions which we cannot raise in the case of purely fictional works. However, as far as the question regarding the nature of the actor’s speech actions is concerned, the theory which governs the latter (fictional drama) applies equally well to the former. An innocent duplicity similar to the kind actors engage in is required on the part of the audience, who respond in some ways to what happens on the stage as one would to real events but not in others. The actor’s pretence, coupled with the audience’s willingness to play along with that pretence, produces in the audience the perlocutionary effects of fear, compassion, anger, etc. In the example given by H.O. Mounce, ‘when Othello kills Desdemona one is disturbed. This shows one is treating the play as if it were real. But one does not send for a policeman. This shows one is not taking it for real’ (1980: 185).11 By not calling the police I show that I know that the play is a pretence. By being genuinely shocked and disturbed I show that I pretend it isn’t. If I called the police, this would show that I was not watching and listening in a way appropriate to fiction. This perlocutionary sequel would simply be uncalled for. However, some of the other perlocutionary effects (fear, compassion, pity, laughter, sorrow) not only are compatible with watching and listening fictionally, they constitute an essential part of the game of pretending which is necessary for the success of the play.12 Actors do not – cannot – merely pretend to do all of the things the characters are supposed to be doing. This is because there are certain things with regard to which it is not clear what one must do in order

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to pretend to do them. Austin gives two examples: pretending to hole a putt and pretending to sit in a chair. an impasse can arise over pretending to do something, say, hole a putt, in circumstances, say in the presence of a surrounding crowd, where there seems nothing one can do at all like holing the putt which will not result in the putt’s being actually holed. It is easy to pretend to be sitting on a certain chair when it is half concealed behind a desk, less easy if it is in full view. (Austin 1979: 258–259) One may, perhaps, pretend to knock at the gate in Macbeth by banging with a heavy hammer on a piece of wood (because the knocking takes place off-stage). And one can certainly pretend to drink wine by drinking coloured water. But actors do not normally pretend to shout, scream, sit, shake hands, walk, and so on. Given a realistic setting, they simply do.13 Another thing actors do not pretend to do is speak. At the locutionary level the actors do the same thing (i.e say the same words) as the characters they represent. They must do things of a locutionary kind for their action to count as one of pretending to do other things of an illocutionary or perlocutionary kind.14 It is in the gap between the locution and the illocution that the etiolation occurs.

4.5 Throughout his work Austin is constantly comparing speech actions with other kinds of action that do not involve speech – what he often refers to as ‘physical’ actions, and we can profitably consider some of the remarks made by Austin in his paper ‘Pretending’ in order to bring out the similarities and differences between the etiolated uses of language on the one hand and the pretence involved in non-speech actions on the other. For unless he does certain things, an actor cannot represent (or pretend to be) Hamlet. If he is going to pretend to kill Polonius he must, for example, use some kind of (imitation) weapon, lunge at the arras, cover his hands with red paint, and so on. On the other hand he mustn’t go too far. If he stabs and mortally wounds the actor hiding behind the arras, he has overstepped the limits.15 Similarly, with regard to speech actions, an actor cannot pretend to do something of an illocutionary kind unless he does something of a locutionary kind. On the other hand, he cannot get so involved in the action that he really starts to hate the actress he’s playing against when he uses words like ‘I hate you’. This would be overstepping the limits between

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pretence and reality, and it is not something we normally associate with acting, or with words uttered on the stage, which would stop having the etiolated character that is a mark of that kind of performance and assume the character of a full-blown speech action. In her paper ‘Pretending’ Elizabeth Anscombe gives two examples, one even more startling than the other, that would seem to illustrate the point Austin was making. In the first case an actor, who has to act the angry man in a play, says ‘When I act it, I really am angry’, and he backs this up by saying that he feels angry, and he means the angry words in which he recalls and threatens evils (Anscombe 1981: 90). ‘Not much pretence about that, is there?’ one can hear Austin complain, using the very same words he says he would use if someone who was ordered ‘on a festive occasion’ to pretend to be a hyena went down on all fours and bit his calf, ‘taking a fair-sized piece right out of it’ (Austin 1979: 256). Anscombe’s second case is equally bizarre. It’s about an actor playing Gloucester in King Lear who says ‘It’s a most extraordinary thing, when they tear out my eyes, I feel an agonizing pain as if it were really so, I almost think I shall have to give up the part’ (Anscombe 1981). The etiolated or parasitic setting disappears, the fun is gone, and the pretence which is one of the essential ingredients that marks the play off from ‘serious’ or ‘normal’ contexts goes with it.

4.6 Although there are ways in which a play and a novel may be profitably compared, in other ways they present interesting contrasts. Considerations of this kind will, once again, show that there are important distinctions to be made in the class of what Austin calls the ‘parasitic’ or ‘etiolated’ uses of speech. On the stage there are actors who move about, make gestures and speak, pretending to be the characters they portray, in a way that resembles people’s ordinary behaviour in some ways, but is significantly different from it in others. In narrative, on the other hand, all actions and gestures are rendered in words; direct speech is either quoted or rendered indirect. In drama the action is ‘shown’, the author seeming to disappear; in a novel the presentation is mediated by the narrator, who ‘interferes’ in a number of ways, describing the setting, identifying the character, summarizing event-sequences, reporting on the characters’ states of mind, interpreting and commenting on the story as it unfolds. As Roger Fowler observes, ‘no narrative can be merely “shown”, presented straight and “dramatically” without authorial intervention and commentary: there is always a “teller” in the “tale”’ (Fowler

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1977: 78).16 Even if a novel (e.g by Henry Green) is written entirely in dialogue, even when the narrator is ‘resolutely silent, non-committal, unobtrusive and unintrusive’ (as in a Hemingway story), ‘he provides a viewing position’ (Fowler 1977: 74), a perspective or ‘point of view’.17 In composing the story the author chooses from a number of storytelling devices or modes of discourse. The most important distinction here is that between first-person and third-person narrative. In both cases, pretence plays a crucial role. Several theorists have made this point. Searle, for example, maintains that telling a story is not an illocutionary act on a par with asserting, requesting, etc. (Searle 1979, loc. cit.). Rather the story-teller is pretending to perform various speechacts, especially asserting. Once again, this pretence does not imply intending to deceive. Discussing a passage from Iris Murdoch’s The Red and the Green, Searle writes: ‘She [i.e the novelist] is pretending, one could say, to make an assertion, or acting as if she were making an assertion, or imitating the making of an assertion’ (ibid.: 65). In a third-person narrative ‘the author pretends to perform illocutionary acts’ (ibid.: 68), whereas in first-person narratives the author ‘pretends to be someone else, making assertions’ (ibid.: 69).18 An essentially similar view is expressed by David Lewis: Storytelling is pretence. The storyteller purports to be telling the truth about matters whereof he has knowledge. He purports to be talking about characters who are known to him, and whom he refers to, typically, by means of their ordinary proper names. But if his story is fiction, he is not really doing these things. Usually his pretence has not the slightest tendency to deceive anyone, nor has he the slightest intent to deceive. Nevertheless he plays a false part, goes through a form of telling known fact when he is not doing so. (Lewis 1983: 266)19

4.7 There are good reasons to believe that Searle’s and Lewis’s views on authorial pretence can be applied to poetry, even in cases where we are tempted to read or listen to the poem as a piece of autobiography. Authorial pretence is obvious in a great deal of narrative poetry, where the author employs a poetic speaker or ‘persona’ to tell the tale and comment about it. Byron’s Childe Harold and Coleridge’s Tale of the Ancient Mariner are good examples. But even where the ‘persona’ device is not explicitly made use of, it is in most cases appropriate and natural

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to assume that the poet only pretends to make assertions. ‘To assume otherwise is to leave the poet open to the socially unpleasant and aesthetically irrelevant charge of lying’ (Kamber 1977: 338–339). Rather than run that risk, we assume that the specific pragmatic rules to which assertions have to conform are absent from poetic contexts.20 Monroe Beardsley argues that most literary works lack a ‘pragmatic context’ and therefore discourage us from saddling the author with the commitments which accompany assertion. If you write a ‘Happy Birthday’ poem and hand it to someone on his birthday, or send it under your own name, you are giving the message a pragmatic context. If you write a love poem and publish it as a poem, you are not giving the message a pragmatic context, it is from nobody to nobody, it is not addressed to, but rather overheard by, the reader; and though you are the writer, you are not the speaker.21 And Jonathan Culler discusses various conventions by which the empirical, individual speaker is displaced, shifted into a different and impersonal mode, conventions that enable us to construct a fictive persona or poetic narrator. Even in poems which are ostensibly presented as personal statements made on particular occasions, the conventions of reading enable us to avoid considering that framework as a purely biographical matter and to construct a referential context in accordance with demands of coherence that the rest of the poem makes. (Culler 1975: 167) Wittgenstein put it even more succinctly as follows: Do not forget that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information. (Wittgenstein 1967: 28) The only example Austin gives of an etiolated use of language comes from poetry, precisely from one of John Donne’s songs in his Songs and Sonnets. ‘If the poet says “Go and catch a falling star” or whatever it may be,’ Austin tells us, ‘he doesn’t seriously issue an order’ (‘Performative Utterances’ in Austin 1979: 241). The reason why the utterance doesn’t come off as an order is not because it is impossible for anyone to carry out the astronomical feat of catching a flying comet before it disintegrates. Nor is it a question of metaphor or the employment of other

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figurative devices. There are many figurative uses of language outside poetic contexts that are not intended to be taken literally – as when someone tells us to get lost, or to go and tell it to the marines, or to pull the other one. For Austin it is simply the fact that the utterance is made in a poetic context that makes it ‘peculiar’ or ‘non-standard’ – a view endorsed by a whole range of literary critics who consider poetry as something ‘removed from an ordinary circuit of communication’ (Culler 1975: 166).22 Obviously there is a sense of ‘seriously’ in which one cannot seriously believe that one can talk to nightingales, skylarks, autumn or the West wind.23 So, taking seriously Austin’s claim about the ‘non-seriousness’ of poetry should allow us to focus on the rhetorical devices that characterize poetic discourse and set it apart from ordinary speech situations. It would lead us to look at a literary work not as a ‘living’ dialogue or monologue, but as ‘a piece of language which has been detached from any specific “living” relationship and thus subject to the “reinscriptions” and reinterpretations of many different readings’ (Eagleton 1996: 104). The specific mode of the poem’s production, the conventions of reading and the organization or structure of the text are such that when we read ‘Go and catch a falling star’ we do not rush out to catch one; that we do not bother to find out what the weather was like when Wordsworth described it as ‘a beauteous evening, calm and free’. And although the question of the real identity of Shakespeare’s ‘Dark Lady’ may create considerable frisson among scholars, an appropriate poetic attitude towards the sonnets would take us beyond consideration of the poet’s life at the actual moment of their production.

4.8 Austin was therefore right in thinking of the uses of language in poetry, plays, jokes, soliloquies, etc., as in some way special – even though he did not himself discuss such uses. Later philosophers and literary critics would do much to work out the details of what Austin calls ‘the doctrine of the etiolations of language’. By way of concluding I would like to go back to the beginning of Austin’s ‘Performative Utterances’ where he mentions two kinds of approach to the philosophy of language which, in his own words, ‘did a great deal of good’ by bringing about what nobody would deny was ‘a great revolution in philosophy and, many would say, the most salutary in its history’ (Austin 1979: 234–235). The first was the ‘verification

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movement’, which brought it about that ‘a great many things which probably are nonsense were found to be such’, even though ‘it is not the case that all kinds of nonsense have been adequately clarified yet’, and that ‘perhaps some things have been dismissed as nonsense which really are not.’ Still, he says, the ‘verification movement’ was, in its way, excellent. The second movement he refers to is the ‘different uses of language’ movement, ‘when people began to ask whether some of those things which, treated as statements, were in danger of being dismissed as nonsense did after all really set out to be statements at all’. ‘Mightn’t they perhaps’, Austin asks, ‘be intended not to report facts but to influence people in this way or that, or to let off steam in this way or that?’ Mightn’t we, it might now occur to us to ask, think of what Austin calls the ‘etiolated’ or ‘parasitical’ uses of language precisely in this way – not as statements intended to report facts or describe events but as utterances with a different force – utterances produced with the intention of stimulating our imagination, provoking laughter, engaging or shaping our emotions, inviting us to look at things in a new light or from a different perspective, enlightening and enhancing the way we conduct our lives? In that case, though ‘non-serious’ in the precise, technical sense Austin attributes to the term, the etiolated uses of language he refers to might, in the end, turn out to be some of the most important uses there are.

Notes 1. Austin writes: ‘But let me hasten to add that these distinctions are not hard and fast’ (1975: 16). 2. ‘It appears to me that it does not matter in principle at all how we decide in particular cases – though we may agree, either on the facts or by introducing further definitions, to prefer one solution rather than another’ (Austin 1975: 29). 3. ‘One could say that I “went through a form of” naming the vessel but that my “action” was “void” or “without effect” because I was not a proper person, had not the “capacity” to perform it’ (Austin 1975: 23). 4. See Keenan 1976: 264. Keenan’s article is a reply to Robinson 1974. 5. ‘It is the distinction between illocutions and perlocutions which seems likeliest to give trouble’ (Austin 1975: 110). 6. A speech action can have countless effects beyond the speaker. You may cause me to cut my finger by getting me to shut the gate by telling me that there is a bull in the field. Austin was not interested in these very remote effects beyond the speaker but only in those which feature in the characterization of a typical speech (speaker/listener) situation. The phrase ‘bound up with effects on the listener’ (or ‘on the audience’) is crucial and indicative of Austin’s interests.

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7. In a footnote Davidson adds: ‘Of course a writer, like a speaker, may manage things so that in his work we interpret a familiar word in a novel way. But that can’t be the usual situation. We understand the word “cat”, whether in fiction or in an advertisement for cat food, if we can tell a cat when we see one; the introduction of a fictional cat in a story does not change the list of objects to which the word applies any more than it changes the meaning of the word’ (ibid.). 8. ‘One of the conditions of the successful performance of the speech-act of reference is that there must exist an object that the speaker is referring to. Thus by pretending to refer [the narrator] pretends that there is an object to be referred to ... It is the pretended reference which creates the fictional character and the shared pretence which enables us to talk about the character’ (Searle 1979: 71). 9. In his discussion of non-serious, non-standard uses of language, New introduced the concept of para-illocutionary acts, defined by him as ‘acts in which the utterer produces a sentence that could be used to perform an illocutionary act in order to perform an altogether different kind of act ... the act of non-deceptively pretending to perform an illocutionary act (stating, asking, commanding, promising, or whatever)’ (ibid.: 93). As New points out adjectives like ‘non-serious’ and ‘non-standard’ used to describe literary tropes like irony, metaphor, etc., are not derogatory. Such tropes are ‘an accomplishment, not a defect’ (ibid.: 43). 10. See Derrida 1988: 133–134. For Searle’s response, see Searle 1977: 198–208 and Searle 1983: 174–179. For further criticism of Austin on the subject of this paper see Culler 1982, especially 110–125; Miller 2001; and De Gaynesford 2009. 11. For the opposite view about audience reaction to fiction see Radford and Weston 1975. Mounce’s article offers a critical response to Radford and Weston. 12. We respond to what happens on the stage not in the belief that we are confronted by a real situation; we respond, rather, as if it were real, knowing it not to be so. Mounce brings out the meaning of this distinction by means of the following example. When we criticize a friend for behaving at a party as if he did not know us, or as if we were strangers, we imply that there were things he did which were exactly the same sort of things he would do if we (really) were strangers. It does not mean either that for a while he had forgotten who we were, or that he only pretended to do those things which he would do if we were strangers. We criticize him for really behaving that way, for actually doing those things, and for failing to do others. For example, he refused to talk to us, he stayed as far away from us as he could. We do not criticize him for pretending not to talk to us, or for pretending to keep his distance. It is by actually refusing to talk to us, by avoiding our company, that he pretended not to know us. The same is true of our reactions at the theatre. In our response we do not pretend to be moved, we do not pretend to be shocked and disturbed, we genuinely and honestly are; we do not pretend to feel pity and fear, we genuinely and honestly do. That, in fact, is part of our enjoyment of the performance. 13. In a naturalistic or realistic mode of representation, actors represent characters doing things by themselves pretending to do those things. The

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15.

16. 17.

Joe Friggieri attempt to imitate actions by seeking to replicate them tends to be much less present in the context of some non-naturalistic theatrical systems, for instance in ballet. In Japanese ‘Noh’ theatre an actor may represent a character running away not by actually leaving the stage, but simply by some sort of formal movement. A mime may represent somebody shouting or screaming by keeping his eyes and mouth wide-open for a few seconds, or by forming a circle with his fingers and holding it in front of his face. You may represent a war realistically by dressing actors up as soldiers and ‘staging’ a fight. But the same effect may be achieved by stylized gestures in ballet. In such contexts, killing can be symbolized without imitation weapons, real lunging, or fake blood. In opera the performers might do some speaking, but primarily they sing, just as in ballet they dance. Some kind of conventionally endorsed sign-system is necessary, but not all representing has to be of the realistic sort that we naturally call ‘pretending’. The consideration made in the previous footnote about the representation of non-speech actions also applies to the representation of speech actions in the theatre, where you could also have naturalistic and non-naturalistic representation. In a naturalistic setting, actor A represents character C drinking wine by drinking some kind of liquid which either is wine or looks sufficiently like it. In a non-naturalistic setting, a mime may represent the same action by imitating the movements involved, without the help of a liquid or a container. Can a mime imitate somebody speaking? Well, he can certainly open and close his mouth in a manner which imitates the movement of the lips during speech, and he can also produce such facial expressions and movements of the hands which normally accompany speech, especially animated speech. But in order to convey meanings he must use sign language. The point is that there is no representation of speech-acts which is not symbolic – because they themselves are symbolic. Austin makes us note, however, that the limit overstepped (as in his famous hyena case) is not a boundary between pretending to be (i.e playing the role, acting the part of) Hamlet and really being Hamlet, but between pretending to be (i.e representing) Hamlet and committing a crime – in Austin’s words ‘behaving like an uncivilised tough’ (1979: 256). The compulsory presence of a ‘teller’ in narrative fiction is one of the essential axioms defended by Booth (1961). In literary criticism, Fowler explains, the term ‘point of view’ is used in two senses: one aesthetic/perceptual, the other ideological. In the first sense, ‘point of view’ means something like ‘viewing position’ in the visual arts, the angle from which the object of representation may be seen. ‘Paintings are usually composed with a perspective construction which demands viewing from a specific point ... The artist structures the work in such a way as to dictate the viewing position the ideal spectator has to adopt. Analogously in literary texts the author must orient himself and his reader with respect to the content of his represented world’ (ibid.: 72–73). In the second sense, ‘point of view’ means attitude towards or opinion about the object of representation. ‘Inescapably a narrative text implies through its wording a narrative voice, the tone of an implicit speaker taking a line on his subject and adopting a stance towards his readers’ (ibid.: 75).

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18. For Richard Ohmann literary texts imitate or represent speech-acts which themselves have never happened – they are ‘pseudo’ or ‘virtual’ speech-acts – and this is a way of defining literature itself. See Ohmann (1971). 19. Lewis continues: ‘This is most apparent when the fiction is told in the first person. Conan Doyle pretended to be a doctor named Watson, engaged in publishing truthful memories of events he himself had witnessed. But the case of third-person narrative is not essentially different. The author purports to be telling the truth about matters he has somehow come to know about, though how he has found out about them is left unsaid. That is why there is a pragmatic paradox akin to contradiction in a third-person narrative that ends “and so none were left to tell the tale”.’ 20. See Searle 1979: 62. Specifically, we assume that the poet is not committing himself to the truth of the expressed proposition; that he need not be in a position to provide evidence or reasons for the truth of the expressed proposition; that he does not commit himself to a belief in the truth of the expressed proposition. 21. Beardsley 1958: 239–240. Quoted by Kamber 1977, Beardsley’s view is this: ‘In general the correct principle seems to be that the speaker of a literary work cannot be identified with the author ... unless the author has provided a pragmatic context, or a claim of one, that connects the speaker with himself’ (ibid.: 240). 22. ‘The specific features of poetry have the function of differentiating it from speech and altering the circuit of communication within which it is inscribed. As the traditional theories tell us, poetry is making; to write a poem is a very different act from speaking to a friend’ (ibid.: 162). 23. ‘The lyric is characteristically the triumph of the apostrophic’ (Culler 1981: 149).

5 How to Do Things without Words Tom Grimwood and Paul K. Miller

5.1

Introduction

The impact of J.L. Austin’s Speech-Act Theory has resonated throughout the social sciences over the last three decades, not least in its catalysis of the so-called linguistic turn and the rise of cultural studies. Since this original shockwave, a great deal of innovation and progress in the study of ordinary language itself has emanated from these social sciences, not least among which is Harvey Sacks’ Conversation Analytic approach (see Sacks 1972, 1984, 1992a, 1992b). Pioneered by Sacks, and strongly influenced by1 the methods of ethnomethodologist Harold Garfinkel (1967, 1996, 2007), Conversation Analysis (henceforth CA) has, over the last four decades, built on many of the foundational principles of Austin’s work in developing a working corpus of research addressing how ordinary conversation works in concrete, empirical situations. The flow of intellectual influence with respect to the understanding of how ‘ordinary language’ works has, however, been largely monodirectional; ideas have moved steadily from philosophy into the realms of the social sciences, with very little converse drift. In this chapter it is argued that, despite this historically-ingrained disciplinary tide, there is much that CA can ‘give back’ to Austin scholars – particularly in terms of how dialogue might be pragmatically conceptualized. As a thematic lynchpin, focus falls chiefly upon Sacks’ criticisms of the persistent employment of invented and ‘ideal’ cases of language-use endemic to the Speech-Act tradition. Using such idealizations is, from Sacks’ perspective, inimical to any claim regarding the provision of insight into the ‘ordinary’ language that actually manifests in real social interactions. Furthermore, the implications of this important charge are elucidated herein with reference to one particular substantive2 component of conversational 70

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practice in which the discrepancies between ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ examples become especially salient: silence. One might, perhaps logically, raise questions regarding whether conversational silence is meaningful and/or problematic for Austin’s speech-act theory at all. It is, after all, the very absence of speech. Drawing upon work in the CA tradition, however, this chapter will make the case that silence can be, and frequently is, a profoundly meaningful component of our ordinary interactions. The chapter will further examine how situated uses of silence, as constructed (and constructive) modes of communication, highlight certain formative features of conversation that are either overlooked or underplayed in Austin’s account: in particular, the importance of sequencing, the ad hoc construction of context, and the ways in which ownership is ascribed to cases of ‘non-speech.’

5.2

Conversation analysis and philosophical inquiry

There are, of course, interesting discussions to be had on the subject of silence from within Austin’s theory in and of itself. The more general emphasis of this chapter is, however, upon the relationship between Austin’s work and one of the social scientific traditions that followed in his wake. To these ends, it is valuable to note that Sacks described CA, from its outset, as being concerned primarily with the ‘technology of conversation’ (1984: 413): that is, with the taken-for-granted (though highly skilled) techniques through which members of society construct and maintain their local social order. Garfinkel (1967: 2) dubs these techniques ‘ethnomethods;’ practices that comprise the tacit background conventions upon which people draw in their day-to-day activities. For example, the ideas that comprise ‘common sense’ are, for Garfinkel, not only a kind of heuristic rationality, but are also embedded within social practices and interactions that are recurrently performed and legitimated. Thus, for practitioners of ethnomethodology and CA, it is the business of doing everyday things that gives rise to the very notion of what the ‘everyday’ is. Like Austin, both Sacks and Garfinkel argue that ordinary language had been largely treated as a residual category in academic study. Just as Austin’s How to Do Things with Words stresses the importance of social convention, context and interlocutory ‘uptake’ for meaningful interaction to occur, so the analysis of conversation in terms of the rules and practices which generate values must be supplemented by interrogation of how meaning is intersubjectively and locally constructed. As aforementioned, however, Sacks’ own reflections on Austinian method are

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not entirely uncritical. In particular, while praising Austin for his movement into ‘ordinary language philosophy’ and sharing his emphasis on the importance of residual categories, Sacks (1992b) argues that Austin’s work is centrally paralysed by its repeated use of invented examples as evidence to support assertions, examples which are, through their very fictionality, isolate (i.e decoupled from any local, pragmatic context of transmission or interpretation). Despite Austin’s famous dismissal of literature (or etiolations) as ‘unreal,’ his idealizations of the commonplace linguistic activities of everyday life – promising, betting, naming a ship and so on – are only empirical data in the loosest of senses. Sacks, meanwhile, argues that one only has to examine real cases of talk as they unfold in order to observe their context-specificity and ultimate turn-by-turn unpredictability. As such: One cannot invent new sequences of conversation and feel happy with them. You may be able to take ‘a question and answer’, but if we have to extend it very far, then the issue of whether somebody would really say that, after, say, the fifth utterance, is one for which we could not confidently argue. One doesn’t have a strong intuition for sequencing in conversation. (Sacks 1992b: 5)3 Consequently, from a conversation analytic point of view, How to Do Things with Words could be said to be more of an examination of assumed commonplaces, than an analysis of embodied ordinary language. While such commonplaces are, to a degree, essential in any form of argument – there must be, after all, some shared sense of what we are arguing over to start with – they carry with them certain risks. Perhaps the most fundamental of these is that relying upon what Searle (1977: 204) terms the ‘fairly obvious’ for authority risks defining ‘ordinariness’ itself in an entirely unreflexive manner. Conceptualizing what exactly constitutes ordinary language, meanwhile, is also far more troublesome than it may putatively appear. Two particular complexities of this order are particularly pertinent to the issue of silence, and they will be explored in turn. Firstly, a distinct problem arises from trying to understand ‘everydayness’ in terms of a non-everyday, that is idealized, structure of meaning. This mode of understanding can be seen, perhaps most pressingly, in Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1959) famous distinction between langue (language) and parole (speech). Centrally, Saussure proposed that la langue is homogeneous in character, an abstract set of underpinning principles (grammar, syntax and so forth) which is social, systematic and analysable, ‘a self-contained whole and principle of classification’

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(1959: 9) without which no meaningful incidence of parole would be possible. Parole, on the other hand, is ‘many-sided and heterogeneous; straddling several areas simultaneously. We cannot put it into any category of human facts, for we cannot discover its unity’ (ibid.). Saussure thus maintains that language ‘is not a function of the speaker; it is a product passively assimilated by the individual. It never requires premeditation, and reflection enters in only for the purposes of classification’ (1959: 14). In short, everyday speech is just too ‘messy’ an object for formal investigation and, consequently, langue is for Saussure the only touchstone from which proper analysis can proceed. Nominally, at least, Austin seems keen to avoid this kind of clean/ messy bifurcation. Rather than regard ordinary language as a distorted and misleading version of some ideal and logically coherent communication, for Austin (just as for Wittgenstein) it is the ‘philosopher’s misunderstanding and misuse (even abuse) of ordinary language – not ordinary language itself – that generates philosophical confusion’ (Fogelin 2009: 8). Sacks argues, however, that through the very practice of employing invented examples, such philosophies simply reintroduce just such a distinction, by ignoring aspects of conversation which, whilst essential to communicative interaction, nevertheless may not fit cleanly within a propositional framework. The result is a tension within the very idea of an ‘ordinary language philosophy’ itself: a tension between language in its everyday, mundane sense, with all of its slip ups, miscommunications, and mishearings, and the scientific–philosophical requirement of systematic explanation. Ordinary language philosophy can either, from this point of view, be ‘ordinary’ or ‘philosophical.’ Being both at the same time is somewhat more problematic. This leads us to our second complexity, which relates to the nature of ‘commonplaces’ themselves. While we may well chiefly identify commonplace sayings (‘I name this ship ... ,’ ‘I take this man to be my husband ... ,’ etc.) in terms of a collection of recognisable words, it is not always the case that commonplaces are fully defined by verbal usage. Indeed, certain topics of discussion could be said to be rendered ‘ordinary’ precisely by a certain resistance to being talked about: mental illness, for example.4 To a degree, one could find Sacks’ critique of Austin slightly superficial. While the two may share certain basic assumptions, it could well be argued, the philosopher and the social scientist are effectively doing different things, asking different questions of the everyday, and thus, unsurprisingly, utilizing slightly different sources to reach slightly different conclusions. Such a charge, however, leads us to an unhelpful

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disciplinary impasse. To put it in the most general terms, we would be upholding a broad assumption that social scientists can criticize philosophers for lacking empirical evidence and depending too much on thought-experiments; philosophers, meanwhile, can criticize social scientists for simply reporting the world in debilitative detail without providing definitive guiding frameworks for understanding it. This impasse is particularly unhelpful when we consider how the relationship between Austin and Sacks is typically cast as one-way. It reproduces academic divisions whereby the philosopher provides the big thesis and the sociologist (in this case) provides the empirical hypothesis. It does not leave space for conversation analysts to effectively ‘talk back’ to scholars of Austin’s ordinary language philosophy. Exploration of the role of silence in conversation, as a case study, however, provides us with some ways of thinking past this ostensive chasm.

5.3

Why study silence?

If the premise of speech-act theory is that saying can also be doing, then one could argue that not-saying might be something of a non-problem. Austin’s preliminary discussion in How to Do Things with Words introduces the distinction between constative and performative speech-acts. The former verifiable by its referential truth or falsity: ‘the cat sat on the mat’ is either true or false, depending on whether the cat is actually sitting on the floor coverings or not. The latter establishes its truth only through its performance. Saying ‘I name this ship’ is not verifiable by an external reference, because the speaker is, by speaking the sentence, also doing the act. For both of these, it is initially difficult to see how saying nothing can be categorized as either a constative or a performative statement. Saying nothing is simply not speaking at all, and therefore seems rather irrelevant to what is, after all, a speech-act theory. In some respects, Austin himself lays this argument to rest later in his lecture series by utilizing two new categories of statement that capture in more detail the force of a statement (the ‘act’ of the speech) rather than its referential meaning; illocutionary and perlocutionary speech-acts. Crucially, he notes that both types of act can be ‘brought off non-verbally’ (Austin 1975: 119), on the condition that they are ‘conventionally’ or ‘non-conventionally’ non-verbal. Indeed, G.J. Warnock goes further than this when he claims that perlocutionary effects ‘will very often be producible ... in some completely non-verbal way’ (Warnock 1989: 123 [emphasis added]). Austin has in mind here particular non-verbal actions; the raising of a hand to stop someone, in

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place of a verbal warning, for example. As such, the structure of the nonverbal act follows that of its verbal equivalent. It is noteworthy here that Austin’s particular discussion substitutes the absence of speech with a physical action. Gesture is, very arguably, not identical with silence. It is not clear whether this is simply a pedagogical strategy to make the point clear through ‘obvious’ (ideal) examples, or a more prescriptive limitation on the understanding of speech-acts. Perhaps non-verbal acts actually require, for Austin, some kind of visual action – after all, one problem of describing a non-verbal act in terms of conventions is that such conventions are presumably based on a degree of repetition. It may well, however, be difficult to recognize when silence is a repetition of a previous silence, or a completely new silence. Either way, using these particular examples of non-verbal communication allows Austin to retain the unit of measure that remains consistent throughout his Speech-Act Theory, which is the sentence uttered by someone, or the action done by someone. This is to say, while Austin disputes philosophy’s reliance on constative propositions, his examples often retain the form of the propositional unit: the single ‘statement’ uttered by someone, a single action done by someone. If we are to adopt this position as default, we are not left with a strong understanding of silence itself as an affective aspect of conversation, but rather as its incidence simply being a ‘gap’ between more interesting things. If we are to take Austin’s comments as-read, we might well seem limited to treating silence as some kind of substitute speech. Of course, literally saying nothing – as opposed to the wider remit of non-verbal communication – is still used in public speaking: rhetorical orators have long used dramatic pauses and rhetorical questions to amplify their expression. It should be noted, though, that these are usually based on conventions of monologue rather than dialogue. That is to say, the audience is taken to be essentially passive (at least, if the illocution is successful), and, by the wider conventions that guarantee its success, they are not expected to interrupt. Silence, in this sense, is not ambiguous although this lack of ambiguity depends on conventions of speaking that go well beyond a mere propositional framework. The distinction between active and passive audiences is, perhaps, a subtle but telling incongruity between that which is taken as ordinary language and that which is understood to be ordinary conversation. Moving aside from the conventions of public oration, then, Helen Steward has discussed the case of silence in her book The Ontology of Mind. Steward’s argument is that while ‘events’ are generally philosophically identified as some kind of change, there can also be events that are

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changeless. She adds that the class of such events is ‘extremely small’ (Steward 1997: 70). ‘[J]ust occasionally,’ she suggests, ‘we do have reason to use the language of happening even in the absence of change.’ The most fruitful example is ‘the saying of nothing,’ which, she explains, may be ‘itself merely a continuation of a silence that has persisted, perhaps, for many hours,’ but can nevertheless mark the development of something with significance: Sometimes, as it were, we use our language to carve out events from a part of space and time where things remain unaltered. Usually, there is nothing to command our attention in such dreary scenes, but from time to time, an aspect of an unchanging situation can have a significance which warrants the use of the language of events. (Steward 1997: 71) Steward’s interrogation of silence is brief, but instructive: not just in the positive manner in which saying nothing is shown to have a relevance to the study of language and events, but also from a more critical perspective in the limits of what Steward’s approach allows her to say. First of all, it is not clear why Steward sees the need to dismiss the significance of saying nothing as inherently ‘dreary,’ or to accentuate the marginality of these events (normality, Steward seems to suggest, does not feature heavy doses of silence and inaction).5 Secondly, as a hypothetical example, and exemption, silence is inevitably somewhat abstract in Steward’s account. As a result, there simply ‘is’ silence, as a case problem for the language of events as changes. This seems to confirm a pre-existing order of meaning. Silence is not speaking; it is the emptying of language from conversation, and in turn (given that this is taken to be an ‘extremely small’ group of cases) speaking is generally where real meaning lies. We could speculate that there is a wider philosophical ‘convention’ for dealing with silence in play here, one which might be summarized in Wittgenstein’s famous conclusion to the Tractatus that we should ‘pass over in silence’ that of which we cannot speak about. In short: silence is where philosophy stops (Wittgenstein 1961: 74). However questionable the context of the early Wittgenstein’s statement now seems, it remains fair to say that the absence of speech is generally seen as either an anomaly or a negation in much philosophical thinking, just as it is in the tradition of cognitive science (Heritage 1984). Fundamentally, silence represents nothing and is, therefore, also ostensibly nothing. In the same way, dialogical rhetoric argues that silence displays weakness

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to the opposition (see Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1971: 108–109).6 Hence, we seem to be circuitously arriving back at Austin’s initial stance on silence, which stemmed from the notion that the very absence of a proposition renders propositional analysis something of a problem task.7

5.4

Context and speech-acts

The rather straightforward problem with the implicit ordering of words above silence is that it will always deal with silence as an anomaly, or exception to the norm. But it is not clear that this is necessarily the case. Austin himself locates the authority of ‘everyday’ speech within ordinary language’s resistance to the limits of constative statements. The originality of Austin’s work, in this sense, is to emphasize the force of words themselves as much as that of their referents. But if meaning is located in force, then nobody could reasonably dispute that silence can be extremely powerful. Consider, for example, the different dynamics at work when one member of a relationship observes to the other that they’re being particularly quiet today; or the long drawn-out pauses on the telephone between both members as that relationship inevitably breaks down; or finally the inevitable silence as one member waits and wills for the other to call. Consider the tense silence at the beginning of an academic seminar when no student wants to answer the tutor’s question; or the moments of anticipation when an interlocutor hesitates to respond to a complex question; an anticipation that hinges on the ambiguity of whether they are thinking through a complex answer, or simply not understanding the question. We could consider a possible Austinian defence here, and argue that all of these examples, while recognisable, are nonetheless breakdowns of communication rather than ‘successful’ interactions. To this end, there are a number of more successful silences we might identify: two minute silences, silent protests, ritual silences such as prayer and so on, all of which suggest an altogether more constructive function – silence itself as an organized social practice. The point herein is that silence communicates, and does so in ways that cannot be completely satisfied by any straightforward analogy with the propositional spoken word. Silence is as much a part of everyday conversation as non-silence (statistically and functionally). True, it may still be used to indicate, and/or be interpreted as, dissatisfaction without active criticism or puzzlement without correction (Davidson 1984); it may be indicative of ‘extreme politeness’

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(Tannen 1989) or nervous hesitation, uncertainty, ignorance, simple lack of interest, and so on. But that is not to say that such symbols do not flood our day-to-day activities and, while mundane, they are certainly not trivial. The problem, perhaps, is not silence itself, but a contextual framework that allows us to identify silence as meaningful or not. It is this, after all, that meaningful silence is an anomaly or exception to. But in turn, perhaps this is not a single ‘convention,’ but rather a number of competing layers of context. Context is, of course, something of a sticking point within Speech-Act Theory. We will remember the much-quoted line from How to Do Things with Words, where Austin argues, provisionally, that for a performative utterance to succeed, ‘there must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, the procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances’ (1975: 26). In terms of analysing conversation, such a provision (however open to exploration) provides a healthy ground upon which to interrogate ordinary language. We have also seen that Austin is not averse to the idea of non-verbal ‘acts’ that do things. As far as this goes, introducing silence into the category of speech-acts does not seem as awkward as it may have first appeared, and we have previously discussed Austin’s own attempts at doing so. But there are two issues that need to be raised at this stage. Firstly, there is something of an inherent ambiguity to all of the hypothetical examples above that problematizes the notion of context as a relatively static ground upon which meaning and non-meaning is decided. For Austin, this attention to the possible failures of ordinary language leads to two important points: on the one hand, it reasserts the need for a philosophical account of everyday conversation, to safeguard the judgement of the ‘right-ness’ or ‘wrong-ness’ of a speech-act. On the other hand, while the ‘uttering of the words is, indeed, usually a, or even the, leading incident in the performance of the act,’ Austin notes that the speech itself ‘is far from being usually, even if it is ever, the sole thing necessary if the act is to be deemed to have been performed’ (1975: 8). The task of designating felicitous and infelicitous speech-acts requires attending to the significance of context, or, in Austin’s words, the total speech situation. ‘We must,’ he argues, ‘consider the total situation in which the utterance is issued – the total speech-act – if we are to see the parallel between statements and performative utterances, and how each can go wrong’ (1975: 52). As such, Austin stresses the need to move beyond propositional understandings of language. But

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the very impossibility of ‘saturating’ or completely satisfying any given ‘total speech-act’ or context moves Austin later on in his lectures to reintroduce the intention of the speaker as a determinant of meaning. The same is often done for silence: for example, when the question of the meaning of silence is turned into a purely psychological one, such as ‘Why are you being quiet?’ This return to intentionalism, however, risks situating our understanding of silence within the realm of monologue, rather than dialogue. Secondly, a problem arises when Austin, by privileging a certain idea of intention as the mark of success for an illocutionary act, essentially ‘fills in’ the gaps of silence with more language (albeit presumed, acted, or necessitated language). But this tacitly accepts the hierarchy of speech over non-speech before we have engaged with any actual data. As such, it is not surprising that the essential ambiguity of silent moments – the absence of an explicit intention, the difficulty in recognizing conventions and so on – is rather too quickly reduced to ‘non-meaning.’ Furthermore, it does not matter from this point on how many invented examples are brought forward to support the case, as they will all implicitly conform to the presupposed model. The data becomes a mere illustration of what is effectively the necessary structure for philosophically understanding everyday language. It can be argued, however, that this implicit ordering of silence as an anomaly of speech leads Austin back to a form of intentionalism that would seem to remove any need to look at conversational dialogue in the first place. In turn, the precedence of the speaker’s intention removes the various dynamic aspects of silence that can give it such force – its ambiguities, uncertainties and tensions, as well as its potential to express trust and respect. We therefore need to sidestep the recourse to intention that establishes a particular order of convention or context.

5.5

Sacks, CA and silence

Whereas Austin writes of the total speech situation, Harvey Sacks – like Harold Garfinkel – points to an altogether different model of context, based on the ethnomethods utilized by participants in everyday conversation themselves. Rather than context being taken as a relatively static, mutually familiar grounding upon which statements ‘make sense,’ and which can be read-off by the analyst, the immediate context of any utterance is taken to be the surrounding talk; typically, the previous and subsequent utterances in the conversation. These utterances both influence and verify intersubjective meaning in-situ, which is to say that talk

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itself is both context-shaped and context-renewing (Heritage 1984). As such: The situation of action is essentially transformable. It is identifiable as the reflexive product of the organized activities of the participants. As such, it is on-goingly discovered, maintained, and altered as a project and a product of ordinary actions. Situational constitution is essentially a ‘local’ and immanent product of methodic procedure rather than a result of ‘pre-existing’ agreement on ‘matters of fact.’ (Heritage 1984: 132) A key focus of all studies in CA, thus, is upon the way that conversation unfolds turn-by-turn, rather than propositionally. Participants use prior turns as a resource in the design of their utterances, and these utterances (and those of others) themselves facilitate and delimit the range of possible following turns. As such, the observation of naturallyoccurring conversation allows for an analyst to provide a description of the interpretative work, the practical reasoning, being done by the participants regarding what has been said and what, thus, ought to be said in order to maintain the flow of communication. Interlocutors do not simply produce an isolated sentence following another. Steve Levinson notes that participants in conversation analyse and respond to their fellow speakers (1983: 321) and, in their response to a prior turn, they display their analysis of it.8 This ‘proof procedure’ (Wooffitt 1992: 68) is central to all work in CA, which universally emphasises how, while different levels of ‘convention’ and ‘context’ play decisive roles in the unfolding of conversation, these are played out step-by-step. Rather than conforming to pre-defined and pre-agreed sets of institutional-contextual rules, participants in conversation actually build an ad hoc ‘architecture of intersubjectivity’ (Heritage 1984: 254) in the business of talking. It is through this shift of emphasis that silence becomes less of an anomaly in conversation, and instead just as significant as speech itself. For Sacks, interpersonal ‘sense’ is situationally rendered in the moment-by-moment unfolding of real, ordinary conversations. In the same way that Garfinkel challenges the notion of the ‘everyday’ as a stable category, suggesting that the everyday is itself constructed within everyday interaction, so too the meaning of any silence is operationalized within particular, transformable contexts. The lack of intuition for how a conversation might develop is an ad hoc issue for interlocutors. This is what makes it communication at all: if we could predict with accuracy how a conversation will unfold, then

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we could all simply prescribe our activity in any circumstance a priori and effectively mutually orate with no need to pay attention to each other. But as analysts of speech, we have much the same problem when inventing examples. From a given starting point, Sacks asks, how many subsequent turns of a real conversation could we predict with confidence? One might not presume that one can gauge the kind of answer a question receives, but one might reasonably presume an answer will follow a question. But is even that necessarily a strong presumption? Questions can be followed by a range of acts that do not comfortably categorize as ‘answers’ – rebuttals, jokes, questions about the question, calls for clarification and so forth. It follows that, rather than attempt to analyse an utterance, account or description as a meaningful ‘thing’ in isolation, CA instead situates any given utterance of any length in the context of its immediate interactive milieu to show how the former is oriented to the latter, and, thus, generate an understanding of specific meanings derived from the empirical talk of the participants in interaction themselves, rather than on some categories of ‘sense’ pre-defined by a researcher. In this sense, while at first silence may prospectively mean anything, the sequencing of conversation often gives a different picture. Consider the sequence of talk below from Atkinson and Drew (1979: 52). 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

A: Is there something bothering you or not? (1.0)9 A: Yes or no (1.5) A: Eh? B: No.

This exchange illuminates several important points. The first, and hardly revolutionary, issue is that the question is ultimately followed by an answer. The statements are an example of adjacency pairing (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974): two utterances which are (a) adjacent, (b) produced by different speakers, and (c) ordered as a first and second part. Perhaps more pertinently perhaps, B does not initially provide a response to A’s question (Line 2), causing A to reiterate the question. This further demonstrates that, first, the rules of adjacency pairing are not inveterate or mechanical (i.e a question will not necessarily be followed directly by an answer); but rather, second, that the repetition of the question indicates that the questioner expects a reply, thus adjacency pairings have a normative character. The two parts of a pair are ‘relatively ordered’ (Sacks

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1992b: 521). This ordering is noticeably absent from Austin’s account of situational ambiguity. For Austin, utterances are taken on their own, for the sake of analytic clarity; but, simply put, such a move to clarity steps rather too quickly over the fundamental issue of how the situation of the situational ambiguity is constructed within the discourse itself, as much as the ambiguity is. In the case above, we can clearly see how the second pair-part is thus made ‘conditionally relevant’ by the production of the first (Atkinson and Drew 1979). Where such a pair-part is not then produced, it is likely to be ‘seen to be absent’ (Sacks 1992b: 191), as in this case. Furthermore, the fact that A does not repeat the question in full, but rather twice reformulates it in progressively truncated form, demonstrates that he interprets the silence (or non-utterance) not as being resultant of B having ‘failed to hear,’ which would make relevant a full repetition of the question, but of an active reluctance to answer. In doing so, speaker A also contextually assigns those silences to speaker B. The exchange is finally ended by the provision of a firm answer by B, completing the pair. In short, both participants visibly carry out situationally-relevant interpretative work during the interaction regarding the nature of the prior turns (or non-turns). By examining the sequential unfolding of the conversation, two short periods during which nothing is said can be seen to be, in-context, highly meaningful products of a particular speaker. The fact that each act is shaped by context, but also renews this context with each ‘turn,’ renders interaction yet more unpredictable. The sands shift for the participants in the interaction with each turn. It is very difficult to predict what kind of utterance might cause offence, or be deemed inappropriate without attention to the specific unfolding of real sequences.

5.6

Silence and authority

An example of such a ‘real sequence’ may help to illustrate this point. Consider this transcript10 of a doctor delivering a diagnosis to a patient with clinical depression. Doctor: Yes, well [patient’s name], it strikes me that you have depression. Not severe, but it’s just as well you came in. I know there are some misperceptions about depression, it’s not an uncommon illness though and we can sort out treatment now. And in a minor case like this, there should be no problem. It’s not a big deal at all. Patient: Well, you’re the doctor!

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Initially, this would seem to be nothing other than a straightforward account of what has been said. If we observe the extant silences within this conversation, however, our understanding of the interaction is perhaps slightly differen:11 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

D: Yes (.2) well [Patient’s Name] it strikes me that you (.) have depression (.) not severe but it’s just as well you came in (1.0) D: I know there are some (.) misperceptions about depression (.5) D: it’s not an uncommon illness though (.) and we can sort out treatment now (1.5) D: and in a minor case like this (.) there should be no problem (1.0) D: it’s not a big deal at all (.5) P: well (.) you’re the doctor

The patient’s failure to immediately acknowledge (affirmatively or negatively) the diagnosis (in Line 4) is interpreted by the doctor as the noticeable absence of a turn. Following this one second silence, the doctor sets to work on ‘downgrading’ the hearable import of that diagnosis across a series of turns, further downgrading after each subsequent silence until the patient finally offers a response. This indicates that (a) the doctor interprets the patient’s failure to speak within 0.5 to 1.5 seconds of an utterance is an output of a reluctance to answer, and (b) that this reluctance is an output of some form of discomfort or dissatisfaction with the diagnosis of depression itself. In short, these microscopic lapses in activity are of sufficient duration for the doctor to monitor them as being prefatory to some mode of rejection, and precipitate further action from him designed to mitigate such an unfavourable or difficult outcome. As such, the doctor makes use of the contextual resources to achieve an interpretation of the patient’s (in)actions, moving to alter that context and, thereby, the possible range of future actions. In this sense, we can observe the inherent reflexivity of context and action at work. The constant reflexive shifts in the contexts of silence also bring to light the dimensions of power within our everyday conversations. A pause of one second may seem of relatively little consequence, but it is

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precisely these kinds of pauses that often prompt us to identify, firstly, whose silence it is (i.e is the speaker simply gathering breath, or is their fellow interlocutor actively withholding response?), and secondly, why they are being silent (i.e Have they not heard? Are they resistant? Or upset? And so forth.). This does not, of course, need to return us to a psychologically intentionalist stance (mentioned previously in the context of Austin’s own account). In effect, we do not need to; the next ‘turn’ in any conversation will provide us with a strong sense of exactly why the respondent is not talking back. They might rephrase an initial statement, for example, and in doing so once again reconfigure the conditions of the conversation (as we will, by doing so, hearably imply to the respondent themselves that they have not understood us). Speech-acts do not simply make sense ‘within’ context: they are themselves integral and dynamic features of those contexts.

5.7

Implications for Austin

The two key themes central to this chapter – that conversation must be dealt with in its full sequential context, and that the limits of this context are constructed within conversation itself – press the philosophy of language to reconsider the abstractions it has previously made for the sake of clarity. We will remember that, for Austin, illocutionary intention is fulfilled on the sole condition that it is recognized: ‘The performance of an illocutionary act involves the securing of uptake’ (1975: 117 [Emphasis Added]). This remains the case in the examples explored above; but what we additionally notice is that the sequencing of this ‘uptake’ as a continuous process demonstrates the reflexivity of social interaction and its contexts. Each participant analyses and engages with the situation they are in, and in acting provides an interactional contribution that moves the event forward. What renders silence such an interesting case study is that it highlights both the way that speakers account for happenings and, reflexively, their own interpersonal role in accounting for it. Arguably, then, the problem for Austin is not his appeal to context per se, but rather the appeal to the orthodoxy of context. In effect, the orator is standing on a plinth, rather than within the shifting sands of real communication, and (as rhetoricians as far back as Gorgias in the fifth century BCE will tell us) presuming a fixed audience is very bad speaking, illocutionary or not. As such, the problem could well be raised for Austin’s examples of both speech and non-speech, not that they are

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invented, but that they are not inventive. In sum, thus, if we want to produce a strong and systematic philosophy of the form and function of silence within ordinary language, then we may need to take stronger account of the flexibility and mobility of local contexts, and the manner in which silence itself is integrated into, and rendered meaningful within, sequences of real speech-acts.

Notes 1. And sometimes directly integrated with; see Garfinkel and Sacks (1970). 2. Or wholly insubstantive, depending upon one’s point of view. 3. It is noteworthy at this point, for those unfamiliar with Sacks’ work, that the rather conversational manner in which the bulk of his work is presented is a direct output of his premature death in 1975. At that stage, he had published comparatively little formal research. The mass of his thought was, however, conveyed through his lectures programmes at UCLA where it was captured on tape, and transcribed, by his students. This corpus of transcripts was subsequently assembled into the two-volumes of Lectures on Conversation (Sacks 1992a, 1992b). 4. This point was captured by a recent advert that pressed the need to ‘talk’ about mental illness, implying that a major obstacle to understanding certain conditions was the refusal to recognize it as something one could talk about in public spaces. 5. The remark that silence is usually ‘dreary’ is even more curious when it carries the assumption that we would rather listen to someone saying anything at all than nothing. Standing idioms such as ‘silence is golden’ would appear to indicate that there is a distinct everyday position favouring the converse. 6. Likewise, as Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca note, silence can be appropriated as an ‘admission,’ either of a lack of response or a confirmation of a given fact (1971: 108). In both cases, this supports the salient conceptualization of silence as ‘non-thought.’ 7. There are categories that would seem the exception to this rule, of course. One could think of Theodor Adorno’s ‘inexpressible’ (1990); Rae Langton’s use of the ‘unspeakable’ (1993); Judith Butler’s work on censorship (1997), etc. We could also look back to medieval negative theology and the significance of apophaticism. All of these could be said to give us an account of ‘meaningfully saying nothing.’ They also take us into discussions of particular institutional and legal conventions that are beyond the scope of this paper to address. 8. At its simplest level, if speaker B answers a question posed by speaker A, then we can confidently assert that speaker B has interpreted speaker A’s prior utterance as a question in need of an answer. 9. Used here is the standard expression within CA for designating the length of a silence in seconds. 10. Data excerpted from Miller (2004). 11. Note that, herein, D = Doctor and P = Patient.

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Part II Ordinary Language and Philosophical Method

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6 Austin’s Method Hanno Birken-Bertsch

it is necessary for a philosopher to become a scientist. (Ayer 1936a: 248) words ... mark ... distinctions. (Austin 1962: 3) It must ... become important to comprehend the whole situation involved, with all its characteristics, as precisely as possible. (Lewin 1930/1931: 166) There is a broad understanding of what J.L. Austin’s method is. To follow this method you, as a group, would choose an area of discourse, collect the relevant vocabulary and imagine examples of possible circumstances to use those words. Having done so, you would attempt to develop general accounts of your findings and compare them with the results of other researchers. There is, however, an almost equally widespread doubt about whether Austin’s method is a philosophical one at all. Philosophers are supposed to deal with problems or concepts, not with vocabulary. They look into matters that are somehow deep and basic, not some area of discourse, and they do whatever they do alone, leaving group work to scientists and non-academics. So Austin’s method stands in need of some explanation. This attempt to provide explanation will begin with a look at the standard account of Austin’s method and quickly lead to a comparison with Bertrand Russell. It is central to get this right, both the similarity of their plans for philosophy and the radical difference in their choice of where to set in with philosophical work. It is my contention that Austin’s method can only be understood properly if the demands it is meant to meet are taken into view. 89

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6.1

The standard account of Austin’s method

The standard description of Austin’s method is due to his Oxford colleague J.O. Urmson. Urmson distinguishes the five stages alluded to in the first lines above: A philosopher or, preferably, a group of philosophers using this technique begins [1st stage] by choosing an area of discourse in which it is interested, often one germane to some great philosophical issue. The vocabulary of this area of discourse is then [2nd stage] collected, first by thinking of and listing all the words belonging to it that one can – not just the most discussed words or those that at first sight seem most important – then by looking up synonyms and synonyms of synonyms in dictionaries, by reading the nonphilosophical literature of the field, and so on. Alongside the activity of collecting the vocabulary one notes expressions within which the vocabulary can legitimately occur and, still more important, expressions including the vocabulary that seem to be a priori plausible but that can nonetheless be recognized as unusable. The next [3rd] stage is to make up ‘stories’ in which the legitimate words and phrases occur; in particular, one makes up stories in which it is clear that one can appropriately use one dictionary ‘synonym’ but not another ... In the light of these data one can then [4th stage] proceed to attempt to give some account of the meaning of the terms and their interrelationships that will explain the data. A particularly crucial point, which is the touchstone of success, is whether one’s account of the matter will adequately explain why we cannot say the things that we have noted as ‘plausible’ yet that in fact we would not say. At this [5th] stage, but not earlier, it becomes profitable to examine what other philosophers and grammarians have said about the same region of discourse. (Urmson 1967a: 212; cf. Urmson 1965: 500–503) What is going on here? A group of philosophers chooses not a traditional topic, but an area of discourse, collects the expressions in that area and starts to make up stories to exemplify possible uses of these expressions. Although the area of discourse is said to often be akin to some philosophical issue, it does not become quite clear why it needs philosophers to do the collecting and the inventing. However, some sophistication should be required to explore the synonymity relations: Words may mean the same, but be unfit to replace one another in well

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established phrases. From all this, nets of relations between the expressions seem to emerge, called ‘data’. Of what kind the accounts to be given shall be is not easy to surmise. The review of other philosophers’ opinions, with which Aristotle used to open his lectures, comes last in this procedure. But is that the whole of Austin’s method? Before turning to this question we need to admit that Urmson’s report is well informed and not in open contradiction to anything Austin says. As sources for his description Urmson refers to Austin’s ‘A Plea for Excuses’ ([1956/1957] 1979), his ‘Ifs and Cans’ ([1956] 1979) and the still unpublished notes entitled ‘Something About One Way of Possibly Doing One Part of Philosophy’ (cf. Urmson 1967a: 212; Urmson 1965: 500). He also lists the French volume ‘La philosophie analytique’, the proceedings from the French-British conference at Royaumont Abbey near Paris in April 1958 in which both Urmson himself and Austin among several other well-known philosophers of the time participated (Austin [1958] 1962, partially translated by G.J. Warnock as Austin 1963). The question of whether Urmson’s account depicts Austin’s method needs a qualified answer. Roughly, the answer is that what it presents is not Austin’s method because it is not the whole of Austin’s method. Urmson confines his attention to aspects of the inner structure of the method and leaves out the question of its motivation and possible aims. Urmson’s claim ‘that there was nothing essentially new in Austin’s philosophical aims’ does not alter this assessment because he does not help us to see aims and methods go together in the first place (Urmson 1967a: 211; cf. Urmson 1965: 506).

6.2 The need to introduce the scientific method in philosophy The background against which Austin’s method needs to be seen is the relation between philosophy and the sciences. In modern times philosophy has come ever increasingly under pressure to define its position towards everything scientific. The sciences’ tremendous success forces philosophy to explain itself and its lack of similar results. One way to react to this demand is to emphasize the difference between philosophy and the sciences. Philosophy may then be presented as the natural ally of poetry and the arts, forming some kind of bulwark against everything scientific. Another way to relate, and the more prominent one, is to join the ranks of the powerful competitors and turn philosophy into a science. Edmund Husserl famously suggested

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that we should make philosophy into a ‘rigorous science’ (Husserl 1910). Bertrand Russell made known his wish to introduce the scientific method into philosophy in the subtitle of the book Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy (Russell 1914), passing off his own logical analysis as the scientific method. Austin followed Russell in his preference for a robust method at the expense of ambitious results and in his modesty: ‘we become glad to know anything in philosophy, however seemingly trivial’ (Russell 1914: 240), cherishing ‘discoveries, however small’ (Austin [1956/1957] 1979: 183). Both Russell and Austin want to begin philosophizing with something that they, like scientists, refer to as ‘data.’ But differences arise concerning the question what the data consist in: In every philosophical problem, our investigation starts from what may be called ‘data,’ by which I mean matters of common knowledge, vague, complex, inexact, as common knowledge always is, but yet somehow commanding our assent as on the whole and in some interpretation pretty certainly true. (Russell 1914: 65) By the time Austin’s thought developed – he enrolled at Oxford in 1929 and was elected fellow at All Souls in 1933 – the idea of common knowledge, or, with a slightly different bent, common sense, as starting point for philosophy had gathered steam. G.E. Moore, Russell’s former colleague at Cambridge, had come forward with ‘A Defence of Common Sense’ (Moore 1925), still discussed twelve years later by the Oxford philosophers Austin Duncan-Jones and A.J. Ayer under the heading ‘Does Philosophy Analyse Common Sense?’ (Duncan-Jones 1937; Ayer 1937). The cliché has it that Austin is part and parcel of that movement, hailed by Ayer as ‘the analytic movement in contemporary British philosophy’ (Ayer 1936b: 53). But the contrast to Russell, and even more so Moore, is striking and far too fundamental for the cliché to be true in any simple way. Yes, philosophy, like the sciences, needs to start from data, but it needs, as the sciences do, to start from agreed data. And no, these data must not be ‘vague, complex, inexact.’ So Austin’s first move beyond Russell is to demand agreement on data, his second to insist on the determinateness of the relevant data. People who knew him well, like his colleague Geoffrey Warnock, say that for Austin ‘the only serious aim in philosophy ought to be to get things really settled ... with some agreed, solid conclusions at the end’ (Warnock 1971: 95). Similarly, he wanted, in the famous Saturday

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morning meetings with younger colleagues, first male-only, then including women (Warnock 2000: 18), ‘above all to get us believe seriously in the possibility of agreement’ (Warnock 1973b: 43; cf. 34). In Austin’s own words we find the thought expressed very clearly at the meeting in Royaumont: I add that too often it’s that which is missing in philosophy: a preliminary ‘datum’ about which agreement could be established at the beginning. ... And I would go so far as to say that several of the experimental sciences have discovered their initial starting point and the right direction to pursue precisely in that manner: by reaching agreement about the way to determine a certain given. (Austin [1958] 1962: 334; cf. Austin 1979: 183) So the sciences are indeed emulated, although not with respect to their experimental machinery, but with respect to an argumentative momentum easily overlooked. Scientists may differ in interpretations, but they share, at least on the level of the people working in one area or team, the understanding of what is to count as data to work on. This kind of agreement (or ‘consent’, Austin [1958] 1962: 348) among fellow researchers is, for Austin, also needed to reach the starting point, the data, in philosophy.

6.3

Language as the data source for philosophy

What we have so far is the stricture on philosophical method to proceed by agreement in order to produce data: ‘If we can reach this agreement, we shall have some data (“experimental” data, in fact) which we can then go on to explain’ (Austin 1979: 274). It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this move in the context of the search for a place for philosophy in modern times. A data source of one’s own would secure independence from and co-equality with the sciences or, as we then should say, the other sciences. Yet so far we know neither where the data are supposed to come from nor by which procedures they shall be handled. The standard description of Austin’s method makes us expect, more or less rightly so, that the answer to the question of the data source is language and that the answer to the question of the data handling will include the invention of stories, the detection of synonymity relations and the like. There is more on the first question, the question about the matter of Austin’s method, in this and the next sections. The second question, the one about the

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procedures applied on the material, will be the topic of Section 6.6. The answers to both questions will pave the way to understanding Austin’s second move beyond Russell, the refusal to brand the common as vague, in Section 6.7. Language is, for Austin, the data source for philosophy. If language is the source, the question is what we get when we tap into it. In this respect Austin follows John Cook Wilson (1849–1915), an Oxford philosopher doubtful of the way philosophy is usually done. Cook Wilson writes: The authority of language is too often forgotten in philosophy, with serious results. Distinctions made or applied in ordinary language are more likely to be right than wrong. Developed, as they have been, in what may be called the natural course of thinking, under the influence of experience and in the apprehension of particular truths, whether of everyday life or of science, they are not due to any preconceived theory. (Wilson 1926: 874) It’s distinctions that really matter, not language. Language just happens to be the most convenient medium to retrieve distinctions from because that is where many of them are developed, stored and applied. The distinctions we find in language deserve our attention because they have been established not from a merely theoretical point of view, but by practical interest in a to and fro between thinking and experience: ‘Distinctions current in language can never be safely neglected’ (Wilson 1926: 46; cf. 101, 102). Austin adds a Darwinian touch to Cook Wilson’s picture, but leaves it otherwise intact: our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connexions they have found worth marking, in the lifetimes of many generations: these surely are likely to be more numerous, more sound, since they have stood up to the long test of the survival of the fittest, and more subtle, at least in all ordinary and reasonably practical matters, than any that you or I are likely to think up in our arm-chairs of an afternoon – the most favoured alternative method. (Austin 1979: 182) This picture of language as the storage of valued distinctions has been attacked as unduly conservative. Austin and perhaps more so philosophers close to him have been regarded as criticizing other philosophers

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for the mere deviation from traditional language. Lingual correctness then would have replaced philosophical argument. To this Ernest Gellner, then preparing his Ph.D. in anthropology after studies in philosophy, rightly remarked: Important ideas and intellectual progress consist generally not of making a clever move within an existing game, but of a change in a ‘game’ – that is, a system of concepts – a change which improves it. (Gellner 1959: 198) Siding with the inherited thought, Austin and his colleagues would, continued Gellner wrongly, depend on an ‘inverted vision’ of thought, treating ‘genuine thought as disease and dead thought as the paradigm of health’ (ibid.). Philosophies like Austin’s would therefore mount ‘an attack on thought’ (ibid.). What Gellner misses and with him Keith Graham, who also saw ‘conservatism’ and ‘hostility to a new terminology and new ways of looking at the world’ in Austin’s philosophy (Graham 1977: 38), is the focus on distinctions and the inevitability of making use of them. Language, firstly, is tapped as a source for distinctions, not judgements. Austin and before him Cook Wilson were not so much concerned with the Wittgensteinian ‘Übereinstimmung in den Urteilen’ (Wittgenstein 1953: 88 No. 242), in English ‘congruence in judgments’ – or ‘intersection,’ ‘overlap,’ however not Elizabeth Anscombe’s ‘agreement’ – as with the tools to draw distinctions in all we encounter. Gellner’s worry concerning progress, secondly, is Austin’s worry. Yes, ‘important ideas and intellectual progress consist generally not of making a clever move within an existing game.’ But the rules of the game are much harder to challenge than Gellner or Graham suppose. The intention to bring about a change in the game does not by itself produce such a change. What Gellner and Graham consider to be ‘genuine thought’ or ‘new ways of looking at the world’ is, from an Austinian point of view, likely to be neither, but rather an unintended repetition of common views or even a ‘deliberate absurdity’ in which belief and the recognition of evidence go astray (Fischer 2005: 74). To achieve exactly the kind of progress Gellner talks about, Austin moves the centre of action away from the individual philosopher to the group, from the personal to the impersonal, from opinion to fact, thereby following the lead of the sciences.

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6.4

Distinctions in and beyond language

For the quest for distinctions Austin recommends three ‘systematic aids’ when discussing, in an exemplary sort of way, the subject of excuses. These aids shed further light on what he wants to extract from his main data source, from language, and from other possible sources. The first is, famously, the dictionary ‘– quite a concise one will do, but the use must be thorough’ (Austin 1979: 186). He advises us to read the dictionary from cover to cover and to list the relevant words or to simply look up the relevant entries. By recommending a dictionary, and a concise one moreover, Austin makes a very specific pick from what linguistic research has to offer. ‘This,’ as C.G. New uncovers, ‘suggests that the unique documentation of ordinary usage contained in the unabridged O.E.D. is just not relevant’ (New 1966: 374). Indeed so. It is not empirical work this is about. Austin has no intention to conduct surveys, count occurrences or compile statistics. He put, as Robert Schwartz explains, ‘more stock in the pronouncements of the O.E.D. than in those of the person on the street’ (Schwartz 2004: 258). Thus Austin’s preference for the dictionary, the concise one that is, fits to the picture of language he shares with Cook Wilson: The distinctions captured in dictionaries reflect a culture’s long run efforts to cope with real, if everyday, problems. (Schwartz 2004: 258) The idea is that the dictionary offers effective distinctions, with the abridged version of a fully documented dictionary combining a broad data base with the required focus on distinctions alone, leaving documentation as slag behind. The second systematic aid Austin recommends is the law. Its workings, on the one hand, ensure that the distinctions used in it are relevant. To distinctions drawn in a process that eventually may either lead to time in prison or not a certain relevancy can hardly be denied. The same workings of the law, on the other hand, put pressure on the language used. Firstly, there is the ‘overriding requirement that a decision be reached, and a relatively black and white decision – guilty or not guilty – for the plaintiff or for the defendant’ (Austin [1956/1957] 1979: 188). Then there are the requirements to use established formulations and, more so in Common than Scottish or Continental law, to refer to precedents. All three requirements link the distinctions used in law with real life decisions, but keep them, by the same token, rather coarse-grained. This tendency towards schematized moves and results

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is countered only by the creativity of the lawyers: ‘if a distinction drawn is a sound one, even though not yet recognized in law, a lawyer can be relied upon to take note of it, for it may be dangerous not to – if he does not, his opponent may’ (Austin 1979: 188). The third systematic aid or ‘source-book’ is psychology in a broad sense, including, that is, anthropology and animal studies (Austin 1979: 189). Austin’s interest again goes for distinctions, not language: ‘some varieties of behaviour, some ways of acting or explanations of the doing of actions, are here noticed and classified which have not been observed or named by ordinary men and hallowed by ordinary language’ (Austin 1979: 189). So Austin expects to learn to draw even more distinctions, with regard to human behaviour and doings, by listening to psychologists, if it was not for the ‘contempt for the “jargon” of psychology’ cultivated among philosophers – this contempt presenting a ‘real danger’ for the project of collecting distinctions wherever they may come up (Austin 1979: 189). The three systematic aids help to collect distinctions. The dictionary allows us to access known distinctions in language. With the law we have got action-relevant distinctions in a formalized language. Psychology helps us to go beyond the realm of those distinctions that so far have left their stamp on language.

6.5

Completeness and complexity

Austin is searching for distinctions, not judgements. This is one result of the previous sections. Another is that language, although the main data source for philosophy, is so for practical reasons. The moment there is a chance to find further distinctions beyond language Austin does not hesitate to move on to psychology, anthropology and animal studies. More important than loyalty to language is the intended completeness of the data: Here is the essential for me: a complete and meticulous inventory of everything pertaining to the subject we are examining; and choice of a restricted subject, at the beginning. (Austin [1958] 1962: 332) Completeness of the collection of distinctions in and beyond language can be reached only for a restricted subject. So the careful choice of the subject right at the start, Urmson’s first stage (see above), is needed to balance the tendency to completeness. Given a sufficiently restricted subject we, drawing on the dictionary and the other source-books,

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‘can make a complete list proceeding in this fashion’ (Austin [1958] 1962: 233). Austin was not the first to demand completeness within the context of the discussion of philosophical methods. René Descartes had replaced the complex rules of medieval logic by four simple ones. According to the fourth, I should ‘faire partout des dénombrements si entiers, et des revues si générales, que je fusse assuré de ne rien omettre’ (Descartes 1637: 20), ‘always do enumerations so whole and reviews so general that I will be assured to omit nothing.’ When in Royaumont, Austin appeals to this rule and this rule only: In general, we only discover the configuration of a field and its precise limits truly by turning it upside down in every sense. We can furthermore recall the golden rule formulated by Descartes, so difficult to apply in practice, on complete enumerations which alone allow us to limit right from the start that with which we are going to occupy ourselves. (Austin [1958] 1962: 232) Austin does not expand on completeness any further. His insistence upon the need to aim for completeness should nevertheless not be overlooked because it adumbrates once more how positive his project was designed to become, very different from the image that appears to have been established by both his artificially casual talks and by the reports about the Saturday mornings, ignoring that the former were tailored on to the occasion ‘for the purpose ... of effecting a dialogue among his opponents and philosophical colleagues’ (Moorhead 1983: 217) and the latter represented a weekend and not a workday activity, serving the purpose of preventing fulltime tutors from ‘sinking into the condition of weary, repetitive hacks’ (Warnock 1973b: 42). Completeness, or what can be reached on the way to it, may foster insights. In addition to correctness, what a list of expressions, or rather distinctions, needs to serve the uses Austin has set for it, is completeness: We have got a list of expressions of all kinds in front of us, complete but chaotic. On which case is each of them applied? In other words, we utilize the multiplicity of expressions supplied by the richness of our language, to direct our attention to the multiplicity and richness of our experiences. Language serves us as a means to observe the living facts [les faits vivants], which constitute our experience and which we would, without it, too much have the tendency not to see. (Austin [1958] 1962: 333)

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For these uses completeness in the strict sense may not seem required, the multiplicity of expressions offering enough to work on. Clearly, however, the aim of the undertaking is given: If our list is sufficiently large at the beginning, the diversity of expressions which we can employ entices our attention to the extraordinary complexity of situations in which we are called to speak. That is to say that language sheds light on the complexity of life. (Austin [1958] 1962: 333) Yet completeness proper figures for Austin as a means, or even a promise, to finally arrive at new perspectives on long debated issues. Three years before Royaumont, Austin concludes his William James lectures at Harvard with an example of how his analysis of speech acts might be relevant for old philosophical problems. Here, completeness is demanded of a list of illocutionary acts, that is of acts performed ‘in saying something’ (Austin 1975: 99): Philosophers have long been interested in the word ‘good’ ... But we shall not get really clear about this word ‘good’ and what we use it to do until, ideally, we have a complete list of those illocutionary acts of which commending, grading, &c., are isolated specimens – until we know how many such acts there are and what are their relationships and inter-connexions. (Austin 1975: 163 f.) If we reach completeness in the collection of relevant distinctions, we come to a vantage point. Surveying both those distinctions that we considered important right from the start as well as those that had to be added, perhaps even against doubts concerning their possible triviality, we get a full picture of a terrain, which may happen to deviate from the picture we would have drawn based on intimate acquaintance. It is from a point like this that Austin must have expected to emanate the kind of intellectual progress Gellner wanted so much, but contemplated so little.

6.6

The handling of the data

Agreement needs to be reached on data, we learned in Section 6.2. The required data are extracted from language, as seen in Section 6.3, but, according to Section 6.4, not from language alone. The completeness of the data helps, with Section 6.5, to capture ‘the extraordinary complexity of situations in which we are called to speak’ and may

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strengthen the impartiality of the results. The question remains: How are the data handled upon which agreement needs to be reached and which have been retrieved from language and other sources? Austin gives us a procedure, or at least the name of it, paralleling it with its most prestigious rival: several of the experimental sciences have discovered their initial starting point and the right direction to pursue precisely in that manner: by reaching agreement about the way to determine a certain given. In the case of physics, by use of the experimental method. In our case, by the impartial research of ‘What would one say when?’ This gives us a point of departure because ... an agreement on the ‘What would one say when?’ brings about, constitutes already, an agreement about a certain manner, one, to describe and seize the facts. (Austin [1958] 1962: 334) So the kind of data handling Austin sets next to the experimental method of physics is ‘What would one say when?’ translating the French ‘Qu’est-ce qu’on dirait quand?’ If we want to follow Austin’s choice of words in his English texts, we need to go with ‘What should we say when?’ The two, however, are not the same. The French one is unambiguously descriptive (cf. Graham 1977: 267), the English one not: by an accident of English grammar, ‘we should say’ can mean either ‘we would as a matter of fact say’ (to put it into bad grammar), or ‘we ought to say’ (Graham 1977: 43; cf. Graham 1981: 145). Graham’s query whether to understand the question rather in a descriptive or a normative sense is reflected in the quite diverse reception of the procedure in America. Benson Mates, on the one hand, reads the whole approach as ‘an armchair version of the extensional method’ (Mates 1958a: 166). Willard Van Orman Quine, on the other hand, is certain that he recognizes ‘introspective semantics’ (Quine 1965: 509). Yet both are in agreement with respect to their verdict, which unsurprisingly happens to be of a negative tendency. But let us stick to Graham’s query concerning a descriptive and a normative sense of Austin’s formula. The distinction does not only allow for the deployment Graham favours. This is the activity the formulation is supposed to refer to:

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We must ... imagine some cases (imagine them carefully and in detail and comprehensively) and try to reach agreement upon what we should in fact say concerning them ([1958] 1979: 274) or, with respect to the example of the word ‘racy,’ situations which we should describe correctly by means of sentences containing the words ‘racy’ ‘raciness’, &c., and again other situations where we should not use these words. (Austin 1979: 57) The idea of the activity is to track and describe what would be said, if all distinctions available in some language, and the norms of that language, are fully observed. Using Graham’s dichotomy we can give a meaning to Austin’s formulation that avoids the disjunction of being either normative or descriptive. The need to nest the distinctions comes from the fact that when we are talking about language we are talking about a rule system, a normative system that is. By the same token we are talking about something that is there, that can be described. As empirically observable behaviour may, for whatever contingent reasons, go against the rules, a prediction of behaviour is uninteresting. What matters are the describable attempts to follow the given norms to their utmost consequence. The French phrasing ‘What would one say when?’ is therefore welcome if read under the condition that one would want to comply with the rules as far as feasible. Interestingly enough, Austin’s original phrasing ‘What should we say when?’ is, as it seems, apt to invite just the wrong kind of discussion. The idea is not a deduction of the philosophical principles of what must, in some absolute understanding, be said when, but an attempt to describe, based on the normative sense of several educated individuals, what needs to be said when to put matters as straight as possible while using the given language and its rules is the one and only aim. It is in this respect that Austin is optimistic, and needs to be, as he bases his approach on the agreements reached by that process: In any case, for me, the essential thing is, at the beginning, to arrive at an agreement on the question ‘What would one say when? ... .’ As I see it, experience proves widely that one arrives at agreement on the ‘What would one say when?’ concerning this or that matter, although I concede to you that this is often long and difficult. As long

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as this may take, one can arrive there nevertheless; and on the basis of that accord, on that given, on that acquisition, we can begin to open up our little garden corner. (Austin [1958] 1962: 334) For more on the techniques that are used in determining what we should say when, Urmson’s account is helpful. The invention of stories and the detection of synonymity have their part in this, but they are all just tricks to an end, and this end is the explanation of what we should say when.

6.7 The speech situation and the determinateness of utterances When we say things, we do so in situations. Austin paraphrases his ‘what we should say when’ with ‘what words we should use in what situations’ (Austin 1979: 182). The natural habitats for linguistic items are situations. That is where they can be found, and that is from which they can be abstracted. Central for Austin’s method is the insight that this abstraction changes the items abstracted. Outside of their natural habitat linguistic items may wither like freshly picked field flowers. Philosophers should not take what is the result of the abstraction for the nature of the abstracted items. If we want to examine ‘words (or “meanings”, whatever they may be)’, we need to take the situation into account in which they are uttered (Austin 1979: 182). There is, although unreflected in the literature, hardly any advice Austin has given more often: for some years we have been realizing more and more clearly that the occasion of an utterance matters seriously. (Austin 1975: 100) It is important to take the speech-situation as a whole. (Austin 1975: 138) what we have to study is not the sentence but the issuing of an utterance in a speech situation. (Austin 1975: 139) The total speech act in the total speech situation is the only actual phenomenon which, in the last resort, we are engaged in elucidating. (Austin 1975: 148) We have to turn to the situation in which the words of interest are uttered because the words alone do not suffice. For example, with respect to the possible ontological implications of ‘looks like’ or ‘sounds like’ Austin

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comes to the conclusion that the words themselves remain silent on that very question: In saying, ‘That sounds like a flute’ all I am saying is that the sound is of a certain character; this may or may not be, and may or may not be intended and taken as, evidence of what the instruoment is, what is making the sound. How it is intended and taken will depend on further facts about the occasion of utterance; the words themselves imply nothing either way. (Austin 1962: 40) Words are uttered and understood in situations. They add to these situations inter alia what may be called their meaning. There is, however, ‘a second dimension’ in which words can be linked to the situations in which they occur: Besides what we understand by the ‘meaning’ of an expression – and I am well aware just how obscure that term can be, even if we restrict it to its ordinary, everyday use – we always have what we may call, for the sake of the name, its ‘force.’ ... We have here a second dimension, so to speak. (Austin 1963: 43, translated by G.J. Warnock from Austin [1958] 1962: 293 f.) An expression like ‘I slept badly last night’ has, in the first dimension, a certain meaning and, in the second dimension, a certain force (Austin 1963: 43, translated by G.J. Warnock from Austin [1958] 1962: 293 f.), answering the question ‘how ... it is to be taken’ (Austin 1975: 73): The expression ‘I slept badly last night’ firstly has the meaning that the speaker did not sleep well in the previous night and secondly may have the force of a complaint about some circumstances, that of an explanation to a physician, or that of a warning about one’s mood, all depending on the speech situation. Russell gives us the example ‘There are a number of people in this room at this moment’ (Russell 1918/1919: 497). He does not see that the expression, with a given unproblematic meaning, lends itself to serve very different forces. Someone might use it to warn a friend not to commit some folly; another understates by it the fact that a room is already full of people. Whatever the force and the situation, it is through them that the expression receives the determinateness real language typically has.

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Russell misses this. He deplores instead that in philosophy ‘the data ... are always rather vague and ambiguous’: when you come to try and define what this room is, and what it is for a person to be in a room, and how you are going to distinguish one person from another, and so forth, you find that what you have said is most fearfully vague and that you really do not know what you meant. (Russell 1918/1919: 497) Ignoring situation and force, Russell feels a threat of vagueness that makes him portray philosophy as the knight in shining armour on an almost desperate mission: The most that can be done is to examine and purify our common knowledge by an internal scrutiny, assuming the canons by which it has been obtained, and applying them with more care and with more precision. (Russell 1914: 66 f.) Just as Russell finds the data for philosophy ‘vague, complex, inexact’ and calls on ‘philosophical analysis’ to remedy this (Russell 1914: 65, 66), Ayer takes it for granted that ‘one’s references to material things are vague in their application to phenomena’ (Ayer 1940: 242). He needs to explain why a statement about sense-data cannot not properly be said to have been ‘entailed by a given statement about a material thing’ (Ayer 1940: 240). His denouncement as vague of our common ways to refer to material items in our environment prompts Austin’s rebuttal: What Ayer seems to have in mind is that being a cricket-ball, for instance, does not entail being looked at rather than felt, looked at in any special light or from any particular distance or angle, felt with the hand rather than the foot, & c. ... This of course is perfectly true; and the only comment required is that it constitutes no ground at all for saying that ‘That is a cricket-ball’ is vague. Why should we say that it is vague ‘in its application to phenomena’? The expression is surely not meant to ‘apply to phenomena.’ It is meant to identify a particular kind of ball – a kind which is, in fact, quite precisely defined – and this it does perfectly satisfactorily. (Austin 1962: 129) At first sight, the position of Russell and Ayer appeared to be defined by a thesis about common knowledge or common ways to refer. But now this

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thesis seems to be itself the consequence of a prior determination, privileging one use of words above all others, the thesis that words are meant to be applied to phenomena, primarily or basically. But this use of words may not even be one to be taken seriously, if we follow Avner Baz: normally, to apply something is to make some use of it – do some work with it – whereas the philosopher’s ‘application’ of a word is precisely not a use of the word. ... applying a word is pictured as simply attaching the word to something in the world – just as one might attach a label to an object. But of course, even attaching a label to an object normally has a point, and understanding it is ultimately a matter of seeing that point, whereas the philosopher’s ‘application of a word’ has no (non-theoretical) point. (Baz 2010: 46 note) Russell’s and Ayer’s position hence can be understood as result of a fixation on one use of words that happens to be none, ‘the philosopher’s “application” – the sheer attachment of word to item or case’ (Baz 2010: 47; Baz 2012: 44). Pressing every other use of words into this Procrustean bed, they fail to recognize the functions they would have and take the functionality they do not register for vagueness. Enter Austin as modern Theseus. It is important to see that privileging of the application of words to phenomena is coupled with a corresponding conception of meaning. As the idea is to relate word and phenomenon, the word needs to be thought of as stable as possible, leading to the ‘one single, specifiable, always-the-same meaning’ Austin mistrusts (Austin 1962: 64). From here, we can ask whether this ‘meaning’ would have to count as an Aristotelian concept in the sense of Kurt Lewin (1890–1947), who presented a stunning diagnosis of ancient and modern thinking in 1930, translated into English only one year later. Lewin contrasts two ideal types of concepts, the Aristotelian and Galilean, taking physics as the paradigm: The real difference lies ... in the fact that the kind and direction of the physical vectors in Aristotelian dynamics are completely determined in advance by the nature of the object concerned. ... Galileo’s procedure ... includes a penetrating investigation of precisely the situation factors. (Lewin 1930/1931: 164) An analysis along Aristotelian lines would focus on the nature of the object concerned, one single, specifiable, always-the-same nature. An

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analysis along Galilean Lines, on the other hand, would not ask how the object has behaved before, but how it interacts with the situation factors. The meaning concept we found coupled with the fixation on ‘application’ makes for a good physical object with its always-the-same nature, turning Russell and Ayer into Aristotelians. Austin, on the other hand, is a Galilean who shuts out everything that does not belong into the situation to be explained: The total speech act in the total speech situation is the only actual phenomenon which, in the last resort, we are engaged in elucidating. (Austin 1975: 148) This formulation seems strangely inflated and has therefore drawn sharp criticism from Anthony Manser: The repetition of ‘total’ gives an air of inclusiveness, but it is not clear what either the ‘total speech-act’ or the ‘total speech situation’ are meant to be, nor how the latter is supposed to be distinguished from the total situation, which would include not only the relations of the people involved but also the social structure as a whole. It seems improbable that such a totality could be meaningfully spelt out. (Manser 1975: 115) Where Austin writes ‘total,’ Lewin has ‘whole’: Galilean concepts ... refer to the whole situation in its full concrete individuality. (Lewin 1930/1931: 168) reference to the totality of the concrete whole situation must take the place of reference to the largest possible historical collection of frequent repetitions. (Lewin 1930/1931: 175) The reason why both add such encompassing qualifications to the already rather sweeping concept of ‘situation’ is easier to understand in the case of Lewin because of the contrast he presents between Aristotelian and Galilean concepts. Besides bringing in an external factor, that is the nature of the object or the ‘meaning,’ the Aristotelian concept privileges those aspects of the situation that are said to depend on this nature or ‘meaning.’ The Galilean concept does not distinguish between natural and contingent aspects. So the function of adding ‘whole’ and, in Austin’s formulations, ‘total’ is a negative one: Galilean concepts refer

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to the unrestrictedly investigated situation in its unrestrictedly investigated concrete individuality. The unrestrictedly investigated speech-act in the unrestrictedly investigated speech situation is the only actual phenomenon which, in the last resort, we are engaged in elucidating. If seen in the perspective opened up by Lewin, the level on which Austin was acting as a philosopher becomes more visible. Like Russell, he takes up the challenge of redefining philosophy in the face of the successes of the modern sciences. In insisting on the agreement on data as a necessary feature of scientific work and, even more so, in rejecting the denunciation of the common as vague, he goes beyond Russell and not only him – Austin thrusts aside the idea of analysis as the dissection of the vague. The method he devised for philosophy to compete with the sciences does not aim at concepts as intensional semantics does, but at distinctions. Language is the main source for these distinctions, but rather out of convenience. Distinctions can also be uncovered by the sciences. The method then used to work with these distinctions, however, is fully dependent on language as it consists in asking what we say when. The ‘when’ is spelled out as ‘situation.’ Austin’s advice is to take the ‘total’ situation into account, as opposed to a situation limited to the relation between some fixed ‘meaning’ and a phenomenon the word is supposed to be ‘applied’ to. If we follow Austin and leave behind the limitation of the situation to the relation of the application of words to phenomena Russell and Ayer favour, we may be undertaking a step Lewin considered decisive for modern research, the step from Aristotelian to Galilean thinking. With Austin, philosophers are still supposed to deal with problems and concepts, but they will need to examine vocabulary, supplemented by results of the social sciences and the humanities. They will still want to look into matters that are somehow deep and basic, but need to know that the will to do so does not guarantee a result that is anything more than trivial. The labours of scrutinizing some area of discourse may be unavoidable, but can be shared, as scientists and non-academics very well show.

7 Getting the Philosopher Out of the Armchair: J.L. Austin’s Response to Logical Positivism in Comparison to That of Arne Naess Siobhan Chapman

7.1

Introduction

The story of the development of Austin’s views on language begins with his growing disquiet over logical positivism, or at least over a version of logical positivism filtered through his personal discussions with A.J. Ayer and subsequently through his reading of Ayer’s 1936 polemic Language, Truth and Logic. Ayer explained that, for the logical positivists, the fact that a statement could be expressed in everyday language was no guarantee that it was meaningful. Meaningful statements, those which could play a legitimate part in scientific discussion, were restricted to analytic statements that were necessarily true by virtue of the meanings of the words they contained, to the statements of mathematics and logic, and to that subset of synthetic sentences which could be subject to empirical verification (Ayer 1971: 7ff.). Austin considered such claims to be unempirical, a priori and, crucially, at odds with everyday experience of language use. This chapter will consider Austin’s response to logical positivism by comparing it with that of his near contemporary, the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess. It will focus not on the specifics of what Austin and Naess said about logical positivism, but on the approaches to language study that they each developed in reaction against it. It will begin with a consideration of the slightly earlier, more fully published, but now less well-known response from Naess. Despite an apparently mutual belief in the philosophical importance of everyday language, and a shared concern that its study should be given 108

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a firmer empirical basis than it had been afforded in logical positivism, Austin’s and Naess’s work on language followed very different paths. This can tell us much about the philosophical differences between the two men, and between the movements each is associated with: ordinary language philosophy and empirical semantics respectively. Further, the fact that two serious philosophers each intent on freeing the study of language from what they saw as an unempirical framework of analysis could and did differ vehemently over questions of methodology can tell us something about the fraught issue of what constitutes the data of linguistic research. It also hints towards the related question of whether it is legitimate for accounts of language to make reference to any notion of ‘shared’, ‘conventional’ or ‘literal’ meaning. These issues are of more than historical interest. A version of the debate between Austin and Naess is still being played out in present-day linguistics.

7.2

Naess and empirical semantics

Naess is nowadays celebrated chiefly for his work in Deep Ecology, but in the mid-twentieth century his credentials in the philosophy of language in general and as a commentator on logical positivism in particular were impeccable. He travelled to Vienna in 1934, and was one of the few outsiders to be invited to attend meetings of the Vienna Circle. His subsequent work was cited by many of the leading analytic philosophers of the day, including Quine, Tarski, Ayer, Popper, and Carnap. With Carnap he maintained a long-standing personal correspondence. Naess was impressed by the collaborative way in which the members of the Vienna Circle worked, by their commitment to clarity and precision in what could meaningfully be said in the discourses of philosophy and science, and by their insistence that all knowledge claims should have firm empirical bases. But he quickly developed misgivings about some of their more extreme claims about language. In particular, he was uneasy about the Vienna Circle’s readiness to dismiss many statements that seemed perfectly acceptable to speakers of a language as ‘meaningless’ or ‘pseudo statements’, on the grounds that they were neither analytic, logical nor verifiable. It seemed to Naess that if something could be stated in ordinary language then it deserved to be treated seriously, even by philosophers. Related to this concern for ordinary language, Naess was troubled by the readiness of the members of the Vienna Circle to make claims about the meanings of words, and therefore the contribution that these made to the meanings of statements, apparently without feeling

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the need to offer any empirical evidence in support of these claims. An account of a treatise Naess wrote during his time in Vienna suggests two principal objections to the work of logical positivists in general, and of Carnap in particular. Firstly, Carnap assumed, without empirical justification or supporting evidence, that natural language expressions could be seen as straightforwardly analogous to their apparent logical equivalents: for instance that natural language ‘if ... then’ simply means the same as the logical conditional ‘→’. Secondly, the doctrines of logical positivism placed severe restrictions on what was allowable in terms of scientific methodology; Carnap insisted that all permissible data must be expressible in scientific language (Storheim 1959). Naess’s concern for the distinctive characteristics of ordinary as opposed to formal or logical language, and his interest in a broad approach to empirical methodology, led him to develop his own philosophy of language that was unique, controversial and, at the time, unprecedented. This formed the basis of what became known as the Oslo school of philosophy, or the empirical semantics movement. Naess’s philosophy was distinguished and defined in part by his methodology. He eschewed the traditional methods of introspection and formal analysis, and insisted that all claims about language must be based on empirical evidence about ordinary usage. Naess’s favoured methodology was the use of questionnaires, in which questions directly concerned with certain significant terms, or else designed to test subjects’ understanding of some philosophically important aspect of language, were presented to people who were not themselves philosophically trained. Naess pointed out that, despite their drawbacks, questionnaires were necessary because it was in practice unfeasible to try to collect a sufficient number of instances of people talking spontaneously about any particular topic. Questionnaires remained Naess’s main methodological tool throughout his career in empirical semantics, although he later experimented with other techniques such as occurrence analysis, in which instances of the use of particular terms in a range of non-philosophical texts were recorded and analysed. Naess’s method for analysing his data, whether collected by questionnaire or by occurrence analysis, was statistical. Naess’s earliest book-length study based on this methodology was ‘Truth’ as Conceived by Those Who Are Not Professional Philosophers, published in Oslo in 1938. He observed that philosophers of different schools had made many conflicting claims about the correct definition of ‘truth’. Furthermore, they often appealed to a notion of the ‘common understanding’ of ‘truth’ or the ‘everyday meaning’ of

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the term. They did so either to emphasize the advantages of their conception over this common understanding or else to urge that their conception of ‘truth’ had the advantage of coinciding with the everyday. Naess and his team of assistants asked 250 non-philosophically trained subjects to comment on how they would apply the term ‘true’. He concluded that many previous philosophers had made unjustified claims about the common understanding of ‘truth’ because they had not sought any empirical evidence. It was in fact an error even to assume that there was a single, identifiable everyday understanding of the term ‘true’; non-philosophers displayed just as wide a range of understandings of the term as professional philosophers. Perhaps even more controversially, Naess claimed that the definitions offered by the non-philosophers were remarkably similar in substance to philosophical definitions; he identified in his questionnaire results non-technical accounts of the understandings of ‘truth’ current in, for instance, logical positivism, correspondence theory, pragmatism and relativism. ‘Truth’ as Conceived by Those Who Are Not Professional Philosophers offered a challenge to a range of established philosophies, and indeed to any notion that professional philosophers were privileged in their access to the understanding of philosophically loaded expressions. Naess was very enthusiastic about the methodology he had developed, and ambitious for its further application, claiming that ‘There are scarcely any of the traditional philosophic problems which are not suitable for this procedure’ (Naess 1938: 162). His goal was to free philosophy from the pre-established patterns it had fallen into, and the traditional ‘sides’ in any debate with which young philosophers needed to align themselves if they were to be taken seriously, and to make possible a genuinely empirical and open-minded study of philosophical topics. In later work, he turned his attention to other linguistic topics central to philosophical concerns which were then current, particularly synonymy and analyticity. He claimed to find empirical support neither for the notion that any expression could be said to ‘mean the same’ as another expression, nor for the notion that some sentences would always be judged to be necessarily true just because of the meanings of the words they contained. There was room for the terms ‘synonymous’ and ‘analytic’ in the discussion of language, but they must always be seen as relative to context, to speaker and to interpreter. He presented an account of synonymity in relation to his conception of ‘preciseness’. Natural language is inherently imprecise, subject to the vagaries of individual contexts and speakers. But forms of expression can be more or

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less precise according to how many interpretations they allow, and this is an empirical matter. If two sentences T and U are synonymous (equipollent) for at least some persons in some situations, T will be said to be a possible interpretation of U and U a possible interpretation of T. If all interpretations of T are also interpretations of U, whereas some interpretations of U are not interpretations of T for some persons in some situations, we say that T is more precise than U for those persons in those situations. (Naess 1949: 227) Instead of discussing sentences as having ‘meaning’, Naess discussed them as being more or less synonymous with other sentences, a relationship that was itself always relative to context. In later work Naess also argued that the distinction between analytic and synthetic, too, was always relative to context (Naess 1966). In fact, for Naess any account of linguistic meaning, not just that in relation to these specific technical terms, must allow that it is not fixed, but fluid, variable and subject to a variety of contextual changes. Naess was of course not the only philosopher of the mid-twentieth century to be questioning the validity of such philosophically salient concepts as synonymity, analyticity and indeed linguistic meaning itself (see, for instance, Quine 1951). But he continued to distinguish himself by his insistence that all claims about such matters must be based on observable evidence. He even attracted some guarded praise from his philosophical contemporaries; Benson Mates commented ‘how easy it is to criticize the empirical procedures utilized by [Naess], and how difficult to propose any that are better’ (Mates 1958b: 553). These empirical procedures were positioning him ever more clearly in opposition to logical positivism, which relied on the notion that linguistic meaning could be known in isolation from any context of use, and that the words contained in a statement contributed to determining whether it was true, false or meaningless.

7.3

Austin and ordinary language philosophy

When Austin began to hear about logical positivism from Ayer, when both were young dons at Oxford in the years immediately before the Second World War, he, like Naess, was initially excited by the promise of a new philosophical approach that would do away with the vagueness and imprecision of metaphysical speculation. Also like Naess he soon

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began to express doubts about the validity of the claims of logical positivism, and in particular of the assumptions about language on which they were based. The main focus of Austin’s objection to the work of the logical positivists was that although they claimed that the philosopher’s task should be the rigorous analysis of language, they never actually undertook any such analysis. They never actually engaged in the systematic study of language that their philosophy seemed to require. Austin proposed to undertake such a study, and insisted that the focus should be on ordinary language, or the language used in everyday interactions, outside of technical philosophical discussion. Austin was motivated not just by a conviction that ordinary language deserved serious attention in its own right, but also by a belief that philosophical inquiry could be assisted by, indeed should always start from, careful attention to the terms and distinctions apparent in ordinary language. In the following often-quoted passage he sets out what might be seen as a manifesto, or an apologia, for ordinary language philosophy. Our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connections they have found worth marking, in the lifetimes of many generations: these surely are likely to be more numerous, more sound, since they have stood up to the long test of the survival of the fittest, and more subtle, at least in all ordinary and reasonable practical matters, than any that you or I are likely to think up in our arm-chairs of an afternoon – the most favoured alternative method. (Austin 1979: 182) For Austin, careful attention to the vocabulary surrounding any particular area of experience would give access to our human understanding of that area. Nothing was hidden beneath the surface of language, and there was no need to translate ordinary language into more technical or more precise terms. Austin’s specific method in studying ordinary language was strikingly idiosyncratic but was deliberately and purposefully selected. He himself wrote very little on methodology, but his colleague J.O. Urmson later described how Austin went about his philosophical inquiries (in Urmson et al. 1965). Austin believed that the resources and possibilities of ordinary language were intuitively available to the speaker of the language, but that an investigation of these intuitions was best undertaken collaboratively. Whenever possible he worked in a team, gathering a group of like-minded colleagues around him. Once some area of philosophical interest had been chosen for

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analysis, they would begin by compiling a list of as many terms, vocabulary items and expressions as possible associated with that area. In this, introspection could be supplemented by consulting various published sources, legal texts, thesauri and dictionaries. The next task was to compare the items in this list in terms of when and where they would be applicable, and what they would mean on different occasions of use. This might involve considering the possibility or otherwise of substituting one expression for another, or even making up short invented dialogues to demonstrate acceptable or unacceptable usages. In this way, the team were able to build up a general picture of the resources of the language in relation to a particular area of experience. Then and only then was it permissible to consult what previous philosophers had said on the subject, with an eye perhaps to evaluating their claims and drawing up a better or alternative account that accorded with general understanding as exemplified in ordinary language. Austin and his followers were insistent that, despite the introspective and intuitive basis of their working method, their philosophy of language was empirical and objective. This was because it was collaborative; the effect of a group working together avoided the problems of subjectivity and bias that might beset a lone researcher. Urmson claimed that once accounts of some area or areas of philosophical investigation had been established, ‘it is an empirical question whether the accounts given are correct and adequate, for they can be checked against the data collected’ (Urmson et al. 1965: 80). Austin and his team were impressed by how consistently they reached consensus over ordinary usage, a fact that further increased their confidence in the objective credibility of their findings. Despite the high regard in which Austin and others held his methodology, it in fact formed the basis of relatively few philosophical insights. Austin was perhaps better at instigating the collection of linguistic data relevant to a particular topic than at seeing the programme through or developing his own philosophical theories. He did take on contemporary philosophies of perception, in particular Ayer’s interpretation of logical positivism according to which what we perceive are not physical objects themselves but individual sense impressions. Austin considered how people actually use words such as ‘looks’, ‘seems’, ‘appears’, or what they would describe as ‘apparent’, ‘imaginary’ or ‘real’, in order to argue that ordinary language is quite capable of expressing the experiences of perception without recourse to technical and unjustified terminology such as ‘sense impressions’ or ‘sense data’ (Austin 1962). In a move reminiscent of later work by Quine and indeed by Naess, Austin also

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attacked the analytic/synthetic distinction, on the grounds that it relied on the meaningless phrase ‘the meaning of a word’. This phrase was much used by philosophers but had no counterpart in real life; ‘there is no simple and handy appendage of a word called “the meaning of (the word) ‘x’”’ (Austin 1979: 62, original emphasis). Rather, philosophers should concentrate on the question of why people call different things by the same name. In relation to the conception of ‘truth’, too, Austin argued that philosophers had gone astray, and had done so because they had not attended to the everyday use of the term. Austin’s approach to this was rather different from Naess’s slightly earlier treatment. His emphasis was not so much on the range of possible understandings of the term ‘true’ as on the limits to its applicability. The reductive philosophical distinction between ‘true’ and ‘false’ did not correspond to the range of different ways in which people react to statements, or indeed to the fact that for some uses of language the question of truth or falsity simply seems inappropriate. Austin identified the ‘descriptive fallacy’ in much traditional and contemporary philosophy, which explained the prevalence of the belief that ‘true’ and ‘false’ were sufficient descriptions of sentences. The descriptive fallacy was the mistaken and unempirical assumption that language is used to make descriptions of the world, and that these descriptions can appropriately and adequately be judged in terms of truth or falsity. Austin’s counter claim that making statements of fact is only one, and not even the most significant, of the things that we do when we use language led to the development of the ideas for which he is now best known: the ideas that were later labelled as ‘speech act theory’. Austin’s main contention in his work on speech acts was that philosophers should pay attention to language as a form of action, and not just to the acts we perform of saying something but the acts we perform in saying something. Such a consideration makes it apparent that we do a great many things with our words other than issuing descriptions of the world. The variety of things that we do with words should feature in any serious description of language. It was necessary in relation to any individual act of speaking to distinguish three separate acts being performed. The locutionary act was the act of uttering a certain string of words, and could be explained with reference to their meaning in the language in question. The illocutionary act depended on the conventional use of these words, but also the particular intention with which a speaker uttered them on this occasion; it comprised the force of what was said. Finally the perlocutionary act was concerned with the result

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or consequence of the act of speaking; with what effect the speaker had on the addressee. So for a single utterance it might be possible to define the locution as ‘He said to me, “You can’t do that”’, the illocution as ‘He protested against my doing it’ and the perlocution as ‘He pulled me up, checked me’ (Austin 1975: 102). Contemporary criticisms of Austin and the approach to philosophy he championed centred around a few specific aspects of his programme. Some critics straightforwardly objected to his focus on ordinary language. Responding to a critique of his own theory of descriptions developed within ordinary language philosophy, Russell complained that many contemporary philosophers: ‘Are persuaded that common speech is good enough not only for daily life, but also for philosophy. I, on the contrary, am persuaded that common speech is full of vagueness and inaccuracy, and that any attempt to be precise and accurate requires modification of common speech both as regards vocabulary and as regards syntax’ (Russell 1957: 387; see also Gellner 1959). Elsewhere, Russell argued that Austin’s particular choices of subjects for study were far from representative of the speaking public, a fact that was bound to skew his findings, and that if Austin really wanted to study ordinary language his methodology should be very different; ‘What in fact [philosophers of ordinary language] believe in is not common usage, as determined by mass observation, statistics, medians, standard deviations, and the rest of the apparatus. What they believe in is the usage of persons who have their amount of education, neither more nor less’ (Russell 1953: 304; see also Mundle 1979). Even critics who were not necessarily hostile to Austin’s aspiration of basing philosophical discussion on ordinary usage saw his particular method and choice of data type as flawed and unempirical. They argued that intuition was simply not an accurate guide to usage: ‘What we think we do with words is not necessarily what we actually do with them’ (New 1966: 155; see also Fodor 1964; Mates 1958a). Another group of Austin’s critics argued that the positing of various different levels of meaning, or types of act, for any individual occurrence of speech was unwarranted. Austin was accused by some of being unempirical in his philosophy of language because no supporting evidence for or intuitive recognition of this distinction between levels could be found. For many, the illocutionary act was the only legitimate one. An expression meant simply what the speaker intended it to mean. Max Black complained that: ‘The only proper unit for investigation seems to be what Austin has called an illocutionary act and the supposed

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locutionary act is at best a dubious abstraction’ (Black 1963: 410; see also Cohen 1964). There is no escaping the fact that Austin’s notion of the locutionary act relies on some conception of shared, conventional or literal meaning: that is, meaning that can be identified and determined in isolation from any particular occasion of use. The locutionary act is central to Austin’s programme as a whole. Without distinguishing between the locutionary and the illocutionary it becomes impossible to distinguish between the ‘meaning’ of a linguistic expression and the ‘force’ it may have when uttered in a particular context, a distinction which is clearly necessary to Austin’s programme: (e.g Austin 1975: 100). However, in relation to how people understand and respond to actual utterances, the locutionary act is something of an abstraction. Austin himself seems to have been uneasy about his own reliance on literal meaning. He played down its significance, claiming that: ‘The total speech act in the total speech situation is the only actual phenomenon which, in the last resort, we are engaged in elucidating’ (Austin 1975: 148, original emphasis). Nevertheless, and despite his own earlier insistence that an abstract notion of ‘meaning’ in relation to language was an empty and unempirical category, Austin seemed ultimately unable to escape relying on an understanding of core or literal meaning in his own most successful philosophy.

7.4

Why Austin and Naess disagreed

The similarities between Austin and Naess in terms of their unease over logical positivism, their belief in the importance to philosophers of consulting ordinary linguistic usage, and their insistence that this should be investigated empirically are striking and might suggest that the two should have found much to agree on. Naess referred often in his writings to the importance of an empirical approach to all areas of philosophical investigation, for instance: In contemporary philosophical literature questions are raised and answered which admittedly are empirical. Why not try to test the answers by procedures used in contemporary science? That is one way philosophy can be a mother science. But one cannot expect professional psychologists, physicists or others to do the job – they have their own favourite questions. The philosophically inclined must carry it out himself. (Naess 1953: 5)

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Austin, too, although less explicit in his writings about what he was doing and why, saw his own local investigations as potentially the start of something much bigger. Writing after Austin’s death, Urmson commented that: Austin regarded this method as empirical and scientific, one that could lead to definitely established results ... . He seriously hoped that a new science might emerge from the kind of investigations he undertook, a new kind of linguistics incorporating workers from both the existing linguistic and philosophical fields. (Urmson 1967b: 25) Nevertheless, the two philosophers disagreed vehemently, criticized each other publicly and, on the one occasion when they met, found little common ground. There were perhaps two main types of differences between them: the obvious methodological differences but also some more telling, but apparently unacknowledged, differences concerning the status of conventional or literal meaning. Naess and Austin both claimed that philosophers should start with the careful accumulation and analysis of data, but they differed both over what counted as the appropriate data, and also over how the data should be analysed. Naess’s data consisted of the spontaneous usage or the elicited responses of a large number of subjects who were selected in part because of their lack of formal philosophical training. These were analysed statistically. Austin observed and recorded the judgements and intuitions of himself and of his immediate colleagues, and scrutinized these for any apparent patterns or generalizations. A signal disagreement between the two seems to have been over whether philosophers were appropriate subjects for the empirical study of ordinary language, or more generally whether the observer could legitimately also serve as the observed. As he was expounding the benefits of his method, Naess complained that ‘hypotheses about usage outside the exact sciences and the science of law, mostly tend to be based on arm chair methods involving questionnaires put forth and answered by the same person’ (Naess 1947/1951, vol. 2: 14). Later, after he had become aware of contemporary trends in Britain, he explicitly criticized Austin’s reliance on intuition: ‘With the ordinary language movement at Oxford one has, so far, paid little attention to intersubjective methods for testing hypotheses about functions or jobs of language, and to the special tasks of scientific discourse’ (Naess 1961: 178). Some of Austin’s criticisms of Naess have been reported or echoed by his students and colleagues. Urmson argued that ‘The device of a

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statistical survey of “what people would say” by means of a questionnaire is no substitute for the group, (1) because there cannot be the necessary detail in the questionnaire, (2) because the untrained answerers can so easily make mistakes, (3) because we are raising questions where unanimity is both desirable and obtainable’ (Urmson et al. 1965: 80). Warnock reported on Austin’s own response. I remember that he once came back from America – I think in 1956 – a good deal perturbed by what he thought to be the increasing prestige there of Arne Naess. This must have been because he thought he saw the right purpose – a more empirical, ‘objective’ way of doing philosophy, offering the hope of getting things actually settled by patient industry – in danger of being compromised by what he took to be radically wrong methods. ‘It’s infiltrating from the West’, he said, shaking his head. (Warnock 1973b: 43) Warnock has also reported on what was apparently the only face-toface meeting between Austin and Naess, which took place in Berkeley in 1958 and which again seems to have focussed on the merit of collaborative teamwork among philosophers versus the collection of questionnaire data from sources outside the group (Warnock 1963: 14). However, there are signs of a philosophically more significant difference between Austin and Naess, although not one that was afforded an explicit airing by either of them. A clue to this can be found in Urmson’s comment that Austin’s group regarded unanimity about linguistic matters as both desirable and attainable. This conviction underpinned Austin’s philosophy, explaining his belief that his chosen methodology could get to what he saw as ‘the facts’ about the language, and also the conviction with which he commented on how words and phrases are used in everyday life. For Naess, such unanimity was neither desirable nor attainable. Increasingly throughout his work he emphasized the fluid and unpredictable nature of language: how any notion of meaning must always be seen as relative to context, speaker and interpreter. Naess even refrained from making statements about how a word or expression is used. At most he would offer a range of types of use and interpretation, with an indication of the statistical frequency of each type. Despite his early rejection of the philosophical plausibility of the expression ‘the meaning of a word’, Austin was not ultimately able to escape from an implicit commitment to the idea that words were associated with some semantic content, and that this association was relatively stable and invariant across contexts. Austin’s distinction between locution

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and illocution, and with it the whole successful and influential edifice of speech act theory, depended on such a commitment. By contrast, nowhere in Naess’s accounts of truth, of analyticity and of synonymy is there any room for shared, conventional or literal meaning.

7.5

Naess, Austin and linguistics

Naess and Austin each harboured ambitions that the specific methodology he was pioneering would form the basis of a new and scientific study of language. Modern linguistics, which has flourished as a recognisably independent discipline during the last half century or so, cannot of course be seen as the direct fulfilment of either of these hopes. Nevertheless, both Naess’s style of philosophy and Austin’s have resonances in different branches of present-day linguistics. The relationship between Austin and linguistics is the more clearly established. His foundational work in speech act theory had a direct effect on the development of the study of the relationship between meaning and context in pragmatics. Naess has had less of an immediate impact on linguistics, although his aspirations and methodologies can be seen as closely related to relatively recent developments such as sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics (see Chapman 2008 for further discussion). The beliefs about language that Naess and Austin held in common look prescient in the light of subsequent developments in linguistics. The issues that divided them can be seen as having foreshadowed debates that are still pertinent in linguistics today. The shared beliefs relate to the insistence by both Naess and Austin that natural language was a legitimate focus of study in its own right. This was in opposition to the logical positivists, who had claimed to be centrally concerned with the analysis of language but had both stipulated prescriptive rules about how language could and could not meaningfully be used and also based their philosophy on unsubstantiated claims about meaning. Present-day linguists of all persuasions agree that it is natural language, not an artificially restricted or logically perfected version of language, that should receive serious attention. The first and most obvious difference between Naess and Austin, the methodological difference, is resonant of the debate surrounding one of the most controversial aspects of present-day linguistics: the nature of the appropriate data for analysis and the means by which this analysis should best be conducted. The most divisive and often the most vitriolic version of this debate is over the question of whether linguistic data is best intuited, often by individual linguistic researchers themselves, or

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best elicited or collected from informants and subjects other than the researcher. At the centre of this debate is Noam Chomsky, who since the late 1950s has maintained that, since language is primarily a mental structure, the most appropriate type of data for its analysis are the intuitive responses of a native speaker to questions of grammaticality. For Chomsky, the researcher’s own intuitions about his or her language are exactly on a par with those of any other native speaker. Ranged against Chomsky are his critics from various fields such as sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics and discourse analysis who argue that individual grammaticality judgements are likely to be subjectively skewed and to be a poor representation of the language as a whole, as it is spoken by a wide and varied community of speakers. The sociolinguist William Labov has claimed that introspective data may have a place but must be treated with extreme caution by linguistics because they are ‘poorly controlled’ (Labov 1975: 119), while corpus linguists have celebrated the genuine and ‘everyday’ nature of their data: ‘Corpora are based on naturally occurring texts or spoken languages, which are created everyday by non-expert language users’ (Fellbaum et al. 2004: 32). Norman Fairclough, a pioneer of critical discourse analysis, suggests that the ‘neglect of language practice’ results in an ‘idealized view of language, which isolates it from the social and historical matrix outside of which it cannot actually exist’ (Fairclough 1989: 7). Naess and Austin clashed over the value of the judgements of professional philosophers versus those of ordinary speakers with no philosophical training as input into descriptions of language. It is tempting, but would be inexcusably simplistic and reductive, to see this clash as a forerunner of that between Chomsky and his critics. Austin was an admirer of Chomsky’s ambition to establish a descriptive and explanatory account of language in the form of a generative grammar, but in his own work he was certainly no Chomskyan. Even the methodologies endorsed by Chomsky and by Austin were dissimilar. For Chomsky, individual intuitions were sufficient in themselves. Collected or elicited data might provide ancillary support, but did not materially alter the status of the genuine insight offered by ‘the enormous mass of unquestionable data’ available from speaker intuition (Chomsky 1965: 20). For Austin, intuitive data achieved a measure of objective credibility only if they were reached by group consensus. Austin’s followers were rather scathing of some of Chomsky’s individual claims about language, citing his methodology as the source of his error. Urmson argued that Chomsky’s dismissal of some strings as simply ungrammatical in English followed from his not having taken time with collaborators to think

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through the range of possible contexts: ‘Chomsky should have been working in a group’ (Urmson et al. 1965: 80). The disagreement between Naess and Austin may not present any neat parallels with the debate between Chomsky and his critics, but it does nevertheless relate to a general dichotomy in present-day linguistics of which that debate is one example. That is over the question of whether a language is best seen as a settled, shared system, or a fluid set of communicative practices. The notion that at least some elements of linguistic meaning must be shared or dictated by linguistic convention, the position that Austin seems rather uncomfortably to have occupied, remains unavoidable for many present-day linguists. For instance, pragmatics, with its concern for establishing how contextual factors contribute to altering or filling out meaning, seems to rely on such a notion. There are many different schools of thought within pragmatics, but the very notion of ‘pragmatic principles’ seems to rely on the existence of some shared element of linguistic meaning on which such principles can operate. As Carston explains: It is widely observed that there is often a divergence between what a person says and what she means, between the meaning of the linguistic expression she uses and the meaning she seeks to communicate by using it. Some distinction or other of this sort is made by virtually everyone working in pragmatics and its reality is confirmed by our daily experience as speakers and hearers. (Carston 2002: 15) In other branches of linguistics, the notion of shared linguistic meaning has been challenged and, by some, rejected. In the context of corpus linguistics, for instance, Teubert has concluded that ‘There is no true and no fixed meaning. Everyone can paraphrase a unit of meaning however they like, therefore the meaning of any lexical item type is always provisional’ (Teubert 2005: 6–7. For rejections of shared linguistic meaning from other points of view see, for example, Harris 1996; Sampson 2001). Austin’s belief that careful discussion of examples would lead to consensus about meaning is evidence of a commitment to the former position. So too is his reluctant insistence on a shared and relatively stable system underlying and in part explaining the interpretation of individual uses of language in context. Naess’s approach was deliberately unrestrained by such notions; in empirical semantics, individual context and individual speaker were all, and nothing could confidently be said about meaning without reference to these factors. Jan Berg

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observed that in empirical semantics, in contrast to the way in which concepts such as synonymy were traditionally discussed in philosophy: ‘even the persons who use the language, and the situations in which the language is used are taken into account throughout’ (Berg 1968: 228, original emphasis). Naess’s and Austin’s reactions against logical positivism had similar origins and similar motivations, but followed different paths and involved them in different practices in the study of language. The similarities reflect what are some of the defining assumptions of present-day linguistics, while the differences foreshadowed some central divisions in the discipline. Although he was always uneasy about it, Austin’s philosophy rested on the assumption that there was a fixed or shared component of meaning regardless of contexts and speakers. Naess explicitly rejected this assumption, insisting that meaning was endlessly fluid across situations and users. While Naess’s is ultimately the more radical of the two departures from the dogmas of logical positivism, both Austin’s and Naess’s positions have their advocates in present-day linguistics.

8 Verbal Fallacies and Philosophical Intuitions: The Continuing Relevance of Ordinary Language Analysis Eugen Fischer

In his brilliant if enigmatic lectures Sense and Sensibilia, J.L. Austin sought to ‘dissolve philosophical worries’ including what is now (since Smith 2002) known as ‘the problem of perception’. His treatment of this problem affords one of the finest examples of ordinary language philosophy: It attempts to ‘dissolve’ a major philosophical problem through an analysis of what we would say and infer when, designed to ‘unpick’ or expose, ‘one by one, a mass of seductive (mainly verbal) fallacies’ in the ‘arguments’ that engender the problem (Austin 1962: 4–5). Partly due to intriguing points of contact with the currently much-discussed movement of experimental philosophy, this work is currently attracting again significant attention (see Gustafsson 2011). Friends and detractors alike have frequently ascribed a problematic aim and approach to ordinary language philosophers. These philosophers supposedly seek to effect ‘semantic dissolutions’ of philosophical problems by exposing lack of truth or meaning in philosophical claims that engender the problems and in the questions that articulate them. The ordinary language approach allegedly consists in exposing these semantic defects by bringing out clashes with common-sense and deviations from established linguistic usage (e.g Hanfling 2000: 32–35). This approach is vulnerable to two simple but devastating objections: Both common-sense convictions and established linguistic practices ‘can everywhere be supplemented and improved upon and superseded’, as none other than Austin pointed out with reference to natural language (Austin 1979: 185). Hence falsity cannot be inferred from clashes with 124

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common-sense convictions, nor meaninglessness from deviation from ordinary language. Second, the introduction of the semantics-pragmatics distinction has been taken to ‘undercut most “ordinary language” philosophising’ (Robinson 2001: 52), namely inferences from such deviation: What speakers say and infer in any ordinary context is determined both by the semantic properties of expressions and more general pragmatic rules which are defeasible. Where deviation from ordinary linguistic practice involves violation of defeasible rules, it is liable to engender confusion but need not lead to falsehood, let alone meaninglessness. In particular this second objection, originating from Grice (1961), has not gone unanswered.1 But, jointly or singly, these two objections have led even philosophers who admired the brilliance of ordinary language philosophy at its Austinian best to take a rather dim view of its ultimate philosophical relevance (e.g Hanfling 2000: 32–33). By building on a methodological idea from experimental philosophy and findings from psycholinguistics, we will now develop Austin’s approach in Sense and Sensibilia in a way that facilitates a different kind of ‘dissolution’ of one important class of philosophical problems, a dissolution which exposes epistemic, rather than semantic, defects in the intuitions and arguments that raise them, and which is not touched by those two objections. While lacking the space to simultaneously pursue exegetical ambitions, we will thus show that ordinary language analysis of the kind practiced in key parts of Austin’s classic is of continued philosophical relevance (pace Snowdon, this volume). Many philosophical problems are engendered by apparently valid arguments which take us from intuitively plausible assumptions to conclusions at odds with some common-sense conviction that p. Such philosophical paradoxes motivate questions of the form: How is it possible that p, given that q? where q is the conclusion of the paradoxical argument or the last step the querist still accepts, in extremis its initial premises. ‘The’ problem of perception is raised by a variety of arguments – including arguments from illusion, from hallucination, from science, from secondary qualities, etc. (see Robinson 2001; Smith 2002; Martin 2003) – which converge on the conclusion that, in sense-perception, we are not aware, or at any rate not directly aware, of public physical objects but only of ‘perceptions’ or ‘sense-data’. We shall focus, like Austin, on arguments from illusion, which were particularly influential among the philosophers to whom he responded (incl. Russell 1912; Broad 1923; Price 1932; Ayer

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1940) and which attract significant attention again, today (Smith 2002; Fish 2009; Crane 2011). These arguments proceed from familiar cases of non-veridical perception (unhappily labelled ‘illusions’), where things look or otherwise appear different than they are: ‘When viewed sideways, round coins look elliptical’, etc. The apparent clash of the arguments’ conclusion with our conviction that we see, hear, and feel coins and coaches in our physical environment motivates the question of how it is possible for us to [correctly say that we] perceive physical objects – given that we are (directly) aware only of private sense-data (q = conclusion, Ayer 1940), or given that there are cases of ‘illusion’ (q = premise, Smith 2002; Crane 2011). In contrast with semantic problem-dissolutions, epistemic dissolutions seek to dissolve problems arising from paradoxes by showing them illmotivated, namely, by showing that the thinkers worried by the problem have no right either to believe that the assumptions that engender it are true or to think that these assumptions are incompatible with p (i.e that in conjunction with p they entail a contradiction or otherwise unacceptable conclusion). For problems engendered by several converging arguments, this approach involves patient examination of one argument after another. With a view to dissolving the problem of perception, Austin – who hunts down both semantic and epistemic defects – commences such an examination by scrutiny of the argument from illusion. Findings from psycholinguistics will allow us to identify the true risks and perils of violating the – malleable and often defeasible – rules of ordinary language, and to appreciate how the analysis of ‘what we would say and infer when’ can contribute to the main moves potentially involved in the epistemic dissolution of problems such as the problem of perception: Such analysis helps (1) to reveal the need to justify intuitively plausible premises of paradoxical arguments, (2) to show that this need is not met, and (3) to expose conflicts between compelling claims and common-sense convictions as merely apparent. Through a case study on the argument from illusion, this paper will establish (1) and (2), and hint at (3).

8.1

Exposing merely apparent truisms

Like many other paradoxes, the argument from illusion proceeds from intuitively compelling assumptions that appear to need no further argumentative support – and are duly maintained without such support. What is now regarded as the standard version of the argument

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from illusion (Robinson 2001; Smith 2002; Crane 2011) employs the Phenomenal Principle: Whenever something looks or otherwise appears F to a subject S, she is (directly) aware of something that is F. This principle allows us to move from descriptions of cases of non-veridical perception (‘When viewed sideways, a round coin looks elliptical’) to particular phenomenal judgments: S is (directly) aware of something that is F (say, elliptical). By Leibniz’s Law (If b has a property that a lacks, a ≠ b), the subject is aware not of the physical object viewed (the round coin), which merely looks F (elliptical) to S, but of something else. Various steps then generalize from this negative conclusion about one kind of non-veridical case to all cases of perception. In the context of this argument, the phenomenal judgment is not perceptual but inferred, namely from verbal statements of (generalizations from) perceptual judgments, such as ‘When viewed sideways, round coins look elliptical’. Typically, champions of the argument are unable to say anything informative about why they confidently make such phenomenal judgments: They certainly do not report applying the Phenomenal Principle, which is virtually unintelligible in the absence of concrete examples illustrating it, and is typically accepted only on the strength of particular phenomenal judgments (rather than vice versa). Arguably, the phenomenal judgments philosophers are prone to make in considering cases of non-veridical perception result from inferences that are unconscious and, more generally, automatic.2 If so, philosophers’ characterization of the argument as resting on an ‘appeal to intuition’ (Robinson 2001: 54) is also psychologically accurate: Phenomenal judgments then are what cognitive psychologists call intuitions:3 non-perceptual judgments which are based on largely automatic inferences (Kahneman and Frederick 2005: 268; cf. Evans 2010: 314) and immediately strike the thinkers inclined to make them as plausible (regardless of whether or not these thinkers accept those judgments upon further reflection).4 These phenomenal intuitions are powerful and hard to avoid (Robinson 2001: 54; cf. Smith 2002: 35ff.). The need to justify these judgments is obscured by the fact that they are often expressed in the same terms as actual truisms about the situations at issue: The argument is most frequently developed from cases

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where something looks a shape or size F it is not, from a certain perspective or distance (e.g Russell 1912: 2–3; Broad 1923: 239ff.; Price 1932: 28; Ayer 1940: 3; Ayer 1956: 86; Robinson 2001: 53; Smith 2002: 53). Before introducing technical terms, many philosophers express phenomenal judgments about such and related situations by saying subjects are ‘aware’ or ‘conscious of’ an ‘F patch’ (e.g Price 1932: 3) or ‘F speck’ (e.g Ayer 1940: 22f.). In such situations and, more generally, in familiar situations of nonveridical perception, we ordinarily use expressions of the form ‘F patch’ or ‘F speck’ in two kinds of cases, and without implying that anything actually is that shape, size, or colour: We use those expressions 1. when we cannot tell what we are looking at, so we can only pick it out by a description of its looks (from here, now), as when a rambler points into a valley and asks, ‘Do you see that small red patch? Might that be our car?’ 2. when we seek to convey economically how something looks for a particular protagonist, as in this passage from a novel: ‘Who was the person at the bottom of the pool? Morini could see him or her, a tiny speck trying to climb the rock that had now become a mountain, and the sight of this person, so far away, filled his eyes with tears’ (Bolaño 2009: 47). The small red patch may turn out to be our car; and ‘tiny speck’ refers to a climber (whether man or woman the protagonist cannot tell). There is no suggestion that the thing (vehicle, person) we talk about is small or tiny (a Mini or a dwarf), merely that it looks small (looks the size of a small patch or tiny speck), from here, now. On this Reading R, it is perfectly true and uncontroversial to say that a subject ‘is aware of’ or at any rate ‘sees’ an ‘elliptical speck’ when looking sideways at a coin – which then looks elliptical. This reading is consistent with a familiar – metaphorical (cp. Gibbs and Colston 2012: 48–54) – usage which has us describe things in terms of others that look similar, in a particular respect: Except in tales of the supernatural, ‘A ghost opened the door’ means the door was opened by someone looking in some way like a ghost (pale as a ghost, or dressed up as a ghost, etc.). This usage allows us to say that S is aware of ‘an elliptical patch’ when viewing a coin sideways: This means that S is aware of something that looks elliptical (the shape of an elliptical patch) to her (from there, now).

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This usage stems from basic principles of linguistic communication pinned down by pragmatic maxims, such as Grice’s (1989) Maxim of Manner: ‘Be as brief, precise, and clear as you can!’ When – unlike in case (1), but as in standard statements of arguments from illusion – we already know what a subject is looking at, this maxim obliges us to call a spade a spade, so that we may resort to ‘patch talk’ only if we want to convey economically what the object viewed looks like to the subject – as in case (2).5 Pragmatic maxims can of course be defeated, e.g by norms of politeness or stylistic conventions. But no such defeaters seem relevant in statements of arguments from illusion. These arguments tell us explicitly what object (coin, etc.) is viewed. As competent speakers, philosophers should therefore spontaneously interpret their talk of, say, an ‘elliptical patch’ as referring to the round coin the subject is explicitly assumed to look at, and as conveying how that object looks to her, from there and then (Reading R). So they should balk at the phenomenal judgment that the subject then is aware of something that is elliptical, and should regard the further inference (with Leibniz’s Law) to ‘The subject is aware of something other than the coin, which is round’ as every bit as poor a joke as the remark: ‘At the fancy-dress party, a ghost opened the door. I don’t believe in ghosts and entered without greeting.’ Both turn on the literal interpretation of a well-established metaphorical usage. On the traditional conception outlined at the outset, philosophical ordinary language analysis would have us infer from this finding that phenomenal judgments are plainly wrong: ‘In the situations at issue, subjects simply see nothing that actually is elliptical.’ The epistemic approach to problem-dissolution has us draw different conclusions that are clearly not open to charges of dogmatism: Phenomenal judgments about familiar situations of non-veridical perception are distinct from actual truisms that may be expressed by the same words (on Reading R) and in conflict with common-sense (as implicit in that reading). According to the ‘default and challenge model’ of justification (e.g Williams 2001: 25) which Austin, too, seems to employ (Leite 2011), endorsement by common-sense makes acceptance the – appropriate – default response to a claim, namely, in the absence of positive reasons for doubt. By contrast, claims in conflict with common-sense require positive reasons in support. Hence, proponents of arguments from illusion are only justified in accepting phenomenal judgments if they are able to provide such reasons.

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8.2

Psychology for philosophy

These philosophers generally develop no arguments to support their phenomenal judgments.6 Rather, they appeal to their intuition (Robinson 2001: 54). Such an appeal provides a suitable reason just in case the mere fact that the given thinker has the intuitions at issue, as and when he has them, speaks for their truth. When an intuitive judgment at odds with common-sense is accepted in the absence of supporting argument, we can thus determine whether proponents have the right to accept the judgment as true by determining whether this intuition has such ‘probative force’. It has such force, e.g, in case the thinker has the intuition due to a cognitive process that reliably generates true judgments about the subject matter at hand (cp. Sosa 2007), at least under the relevant conditions. An intuition has no probative force if it is due to a process that is unreliable, in general or under the circumstances (cp. Leben 2012). When an intuition in need of justification is accepted in the absence of argument, a psychological explanation which identifies the cognitive processes generating the intuition can hence help us assess the thinker’s right to accept the intuition as true – without naturalistic fallacy. Currently this approach is prominently advocated by some experimental philosophers: First we use ... experimental results to develop a theory about the underlying psychological processes that generate people’s intuitions; then we use our theory about the psychological processes to determine whether or not those intuitions are warranted. (Knobe and Nichols 2008: 8)7 Experimental work in psycholinguistics has shown that those ‘underlying psychological processes’ crucially include processes of automatic inference shaped by dominant uses of words – which ordinary language analysis helps uncover. Such analysis can contribute to explanations of philosophically relevant intuitions, which are verifiable by psychological experiment. We will now engage in such ‘psychologically enhanced ordinary language analysis’, in developing an explanation of phenomenal intuitions. In psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology, automatic inferences – about which thinkers need not be able to tell us anything – are studied through experiments including reading time measurements: Subjects read texts where sentences (‘Steve threw the fragile vase against the wall’)

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which imply predictions (the vase will have broken) are followed a little later by statements inconsistent with those predictions (‘Steve picked up the vase and dusted it off’). Experimenters interpret longer reading times for such ‘inconsistent’ statements or their immediate sequels as evidence of automatic predictive inferences which engender comprehension difficulties (Klin et al. 1999; Harmon-Vukic´ et al. 2009). Social (cp. Uleman et al. 2008) and cognitive psychologists (e.g Sloman 1996; Morewedge and Kahneman 2010), seek to explain such and other automatic inferences as the result of simple associative processes in semantic memory that can duplicate even complex inferences. Such simple processes are postulated on the basis of priming-experiments which reveal that some concepts are activated (made more readily available for use) when we encounter verbal stimuli: Subjects are presented first with a stimulus or prime (word, sentence, short text) and then a probe word or string of letters, and have to either read out the word or decide whether the string forms a proper word. When subjects need less time for such ‘naming’ or ‘lexical decision tasks’ where probe and prime are related (‘bank’-‘money’ rather than ‘bank’-‘honey’), researchers infer that the prime activated the probe concept (e.g Peleg and Giora 2011). Several psycholinguistic studies (reviewed by Giora 2003) have investigated in this way how two different kinds of processes contribute to utterance understanding: Stimulus-driven processes are wholly determined by current and immediately preceding verbal input. Expectation-driven processes are influenced also by previously processed stimuli and the deliverances of other cognitive processes. One crucial finding, articulated by the well supported graded salience hypothesis (Giora 2003; Peleg and Giora 2011), is that, as each verbal stimulus (word or idiomatic expression) is encountered, a stimulus-driven process activates all the concepts constitutive of the expression’s different meanings or senses, or representing key semantic and prototypical features associated with that expression,8 and does so irrespective of linguistic or other context. The more frequently the subject uses or encounters a sense, or the more prototypical she deems a property for a term, the more rapidly and strongly the relevant property – or other concept – is activated sometimes so strongly that it cannot be subsequently suppressed even by inconsistent outputs of parallel expectation-driven processes. E.g: 1. The ambiguous stimulus ‘mint’ activates semantic properties associated with its most frequently used sense (probe: ‘candy’), even where this is contextually irrelevant (prime: ‘All buildings collapsed except the mint.’).

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2. Stimulus expressions that, in their most frequent use, are associated with stereotypes (stand for prototype-concepts) activate the relevant stereotypical features irrepressibly strongly even in clearly inappropriate contexts, as in this notoriously difficult riddle (Giora 2003: 13): A young man and his father had a severe car accident. The father died, and the young man was rushed to hospital. The surgeon at the emergency room refused to operate on him, saying, ‘I can’t. He’s my son.’ – How is this possible? The difficulty subjects typically experience at this point results from the automatic inference to the conclusion that the speaker possesses all the prototypical properties of surgeons – including the stereotypical gender – and illustrates how such conclusions may prevail over those of expectation-driven inferences which take context into account: Since the father is dead, the speaker must clearly be the only remaining parent, the mother. Like nouns (‘surgeon’), also verbs can be associated with stereotypical features, namely of actions (‘sewing’-‘needle’), agents (‘arrest’-‘police’), and direct objects or ‘patients’ (‘manipulate’-‘naïve’) (McRae et al. 1997; Ferretti et al. 2001), which are then activated particularly swiftly and strongly. Crucially, activation of dominant senses and stereotypical features occurs not only in language comprehension but – as some ingenious studies (overview: Giora 2003: 134–136) have shown – also in text production. By activating stereotypical features of dominant application-situations of words, these stimulus-driven processes can duplicate not only semantic but also pragmatic inferences: Where, say, a verb is most frequently used in situations in which its preference over others licenses pragmatic inferences to attributions of properties, e.g, to the patient affected by the action or event, these ‘patient-properties’ may become stereotypically associated with the verb. Where this happens, the processes outlined will lead to preferential activation of the relevant property-concepts whenever the verb is used, and facilitate stereotypebased inferences, namely, automatic attributions of the stereotypical properties to given patients. These psycholinguistic findings reveal that some ordinary language is privileged – not normatively but psychologically: The uses of words a subject employs and encounters most frequently shape associative memory processes that duplicate semantic and pragmatic inferences. This gives empirical content to Austin’s observation that philosophers’ ‘tampering with words’ can have ‘unforeseen repercussions’ (cp. Austin

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1962: 63): In many cases, philosophers will use and encounter wellestablished terms most frequently in certain familiar senses. When they give such terms a new use without realizing its novelty, they will hence unwittingly continue to make leaps of thought which duplicate semantic and pragmatic inferences licensed by the terms’ familiar use. Where a word can be applied only in the new sense, such inferences will engender paradoxical intuitions. This is particularly consequential where the new use is motivated not by any individual thinker’s idiosyncrasies but by features characteristic of philosophical reflection quite generally, like the desire to argue at a very general or abstract level.

8.3

From linguistic analysis to psychological explanation

Philosophers who wish to argue, in general and simultaneously, about all of our five different senses tend to use the familiar verb ‘to perceive’ as shorthand for the cumbersome disjunction ‘to see or hear or smell or taste or feel’. To talk about how things then look or sound or smell or taste or feel to the perceiver, early analytic and current philosophers alike make a generic use of the verbs ‘seem’ or ‘appear’ – e.g, in setting out the cases inspiring arguments from illusion.9 Already Austin pointed out, however, that in their most frequent ordinary uses, both words are used with different implications than the supposedly merely more specific term ‘looks’ is in its intended ‘phenomenal’ use: In contrast with ‘looks F’, ‘seems F’ is typically used with implicit reference to specific evidence (which may be inconclusive), while ‘appears F’ is used with reference to special circumstances (in which appearances may deceive us) (Austin 1962: 36–37): 1. ‘She looks chic’ – straightforward enough; 2. ‘She seems (to be) chic’ – from these photographs, etc.; 3. ‘She appears to be chic’ – ... in unsophisticated, provincial circles. Standard formulations of the argument from illusion proceed from explicit assumptions about how things look to others or to unspecified subjects, in familiar situations of non-veridical perception (e.g Russell 1912: 2; Broad 1923: 240–241, 246; Ayer 1940: 3; Robinson 2001: 57–58; Crane 2011). In such situations, pragmatic maxims have us make different inferences from those different expressions:10 We take for granted that adults and school children alike know how familiar medium-sized objects look from different distances and angles, and in different lighting. Accordingly, when we apply ‘looks F to S’ to familiar

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situations of non-veridical perception, we merely describe what something looks like to the subject, without implying that the subject is inclined to judge or believe this thing is F. But we implicate just this when, in talk about such situations, we use ‘seems F’ (with its implicit reference to evidence supporting judgment) and ‘appears F’ (with its implicit reference to circumstances affecting judgment): ‘X seems F to S’ and ‘X appears F to S’, respectively, offer the most economical way to convey that the subject is inclined to judge or believe that X is F on the basis of some evidence (which may be afforded by the way X looks to S) or that the subject is so inclined under certain circumstances (which may be those under which she now views X), respectively. Taking speakers to abide by the Maxim of Manner – ‘Be as brief, precise, and clear as you can!’ (Grice 1989) – we thus take their preference of either of these two expressions over ‘X looks F to S’ to show that they do not just mean to characterize how X looks to S but mean to convey that S is inclined to judge or believe that X is F. The same maxim licenses inferences from the preference of ‘seems’ and ‘appears F to S’ over verbs and expressions like ‘S sees/perceives X to be F’ or ‘S sees/perceives that X is F’ which imply the subject makes a (i) definite and (ii) true judgment: The pragmatic implication from ‘seems’ and ‘appears’ is that either (i) S is merely inclined to judge that X is F or (ii) makes a judgment that is not true. Either way, S does not know whether X is F, whether it is the size, shape, or colour it seems or appears. (The evidence is inconclusive, or the circumstances deceptive.) Philosophers’ stock examples invoke objects like pennies which are a standard or characteristic size, shape, and colour (cp. Broad 1923: 239ff.; Ayer 1940: 3; Ayer 1956: 86; and Robinson 2001: 53). In such cases, the subject’s ignorance of these properties implies she does not know what object (penny, pound, weight) she faces. Pragmatic inferences are of course defeasible. But if in most situations of the expression’s most frequent use they are not defeated, inferable properties of the verb’s stated or tacit subject or object will become stereotypical of the application-situations of the expression. Where this happens, automatic processes will facilitate leaps from those verbal stimuli to attributions of the pertinent property, akin to our above leap from the surgeon vignette to the conclusion that the speaker is male. In the same way, we will leap from sentences of the form ‘X seems/ appears F to S’ to the conclusion that the patient S is inclined to judge that X is F, and is ignorant of the (different) true size, shape, or colour of X, or even of its nature. Stimulus-driven processes will prompt such

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stereotype-based inferences, regardless of contextual cues – even when such cues suggest the falsity of the conclusion, as the father’s death did in the surgeon vignette, and the familiarity of philosophical stock examples of ‘illusions’ does now. These automatic processes thus have speakers reared on ordinary English leap from philosophers’ common descriptions of their stock scenarios of non-veridical perception to intuitive attributions of misguided doxastic inclinations and ignorance. The outputs of such automatic processes can be suppressed or modified in more effortful conscious reflection (Kahneman and Frederick 2005; Evans 2010; Morewedge and Kahneman 2010). But when thinkers make the new generic use of ‘appear’ and ‘seem’, without realizing the novelty, they will, even upon reflection, find it perfectly correct to say that the coin appears elliptical – and fail to realize that this does not carry the same implications as when these words are employed in their dominant use. The fact that those terms do not even defeasibly imply ignorance, in their presently relevant generic use, is hence not available for conscious reflection, while no pragmatic defeaters (social conventions, etc.) are salient. The conflict with common-sense attributions of knowledge in the philosophical stock cases, finally, will be deemed irrelevant by philosophers who believe our everyday epistemic practices inadequate (such as Russell 1912: 1–2; cp. Austin 1962: 9 on Ayer 1940: 1–2). As a result those intuitive attributions of ignorance are liable to go through unchallenged. Elementary deductive inferences lead from such attributions to the conclusion that the viewer is not aware of the object she is viewing – neither in the ordinary sense of ‘is aware of’, nor in the technical sense of ‘directly aware’: The Oxford English Dictionary explains the former as follows: (OED) be aware of = to have cognizance, know, viz. have knowledge as obtained by observation or information. In this standard use, the verb marks the possession of knowledge, acquired through observation or otherwise (being told, etc.). Either way, ‘awareness’ implies knowledge. When used with direct object (‘S is aware of x / an F’), it entails that S knows that it is x / an F she is aware of.11 The classical technical terms ‘directly’ and ‘immediately aware’ then impose the further requirement that the subject acquire this knowledge without – conscious – inference or other intellectual process (Russell 1912: 4; Price 1932: 3; cp. Fischer 2011: 114–116).12 Hence, if S does not know what she is viewing, then, by modus tollens, she is not aware of

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that object – neither in the plain sense, nor ‘directly’. This inference is largely effortless.13 Spontaneous protest against this negative conclusion then leads to the phenomenal judgments we seek to explain, in a way our above analysis of ‘patch-talk’ can explain: When I look at a penny from the side I am certainly aware of something; and it is certainly plausible to hold that this something is elliptical in the same plain [!] sense in which a suitably bent piece of wire, looked at from straight above, is elliptical. (Broad 1923: 240) The negative conclusion that we are not aware of the coin makes us protest that we are ‘aware of something’ but feel unsure what this ‘something’ is (if it is not the penny we look at). When we cannot tell, and don’t know, what it is we are seeing, we often resort to ‘patch-talk’ (Section 8.1). In line with this well-established usage, philosophers informally characterize the object of awareness as ‘an elliptical patch’ (ibid.). The prior negative conclusion explains not only this choice of words but also its literal application: The conclusion that the subject is not aware of the object she is looking at prevents the ordinary metaphorical interpretation of ‘elliptical patch’ as referring to an object looked at which looks elliptical (from there and then), and thus leads to the default literal interpretation of the expression as equivalent to ‘a patch that is elliptical’. Whence the phenomenal judgment: ‘The subject is aware of something that is elliptical.’ Intuitive judgments can be spontaneous responses to previous intuitions; they may be largely automatically inferred from premises that were themselves inferred thus. In efforts to provide ex-post facto rationalizations of intuitions which belong to such a sequence, thinkers may seize on other intuitions in it, but the resulting arguments need not reflect the order of the relevant judgments in the initial intuitive reasoning. The present account explains phenomenal judgments as part of such a sequence of intuitions – which gets reversed in current standard formulations of arguments from illusion (Robinson 2001; Smith 2002; Crane 2011) but is preserved in key passages from Russell (1912: 1–3) Broad (1923: 236, 240), Price (1932: 3), and Ayer (1940, 1–4). This explanation supports various predictions, also about philosophical texts, and can be confirmed (or disconfirmed) by text analysis, by ‘offline’ experiments (sentence-completion, listing, and plausibility rating tasks) to elicit agent- and patient-properties stereotypically associated with ‘appears’ and ‘seems’ (cp. McRae et al. 1997), and by

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‘online’ sentence-by-sentence reading-time measurements for texts where stereotype-based predictions are first facilitated and then contradicted (‘To the viewer, the thing seemed to be elliptical. He immediately knew it wasn’t.’). These studies remain to be done (but cp. Fischer forthcoming).

8.4

Conclusion

On the conventional conception of ordinary language analysis as contributing to semantic problem-dissolution, we should infer from the elicited difference in pragmatic implications that we can describe familiar cases of non-veridical perception by saying that the object ‘looks F’ to the subject but not by saying that it ‘seems’ or ‘appears F’ to her: ‘The latter expressions’, the conventional conception would have us complain, ‘implicate that the subject does not know what size, shape, or colour the object is, but common sense tells us that she does. Hence already the very first premise of arguments from illusion is wrong.’ This conclusion seems open to the charge of dogmatism: Why should we go along with common-sense and its perhaps low epistemic standards? It also seems open to the objection that claims may be true when their pragmatic implications are defeated (when pragmatically inferable ‘doubt or denial conditions’ are not satisfied, cp. Grice 1961). In the present pursuit of an epistemic dissolution, by contrast, we regard the initial premises of arguments from illusion as involving an unacknowledged but entirely legitimate new generic use of those terms, as shorthand for ‘looks or sounds, etc.’, and do not quarrel with the truth of these premises. Rather, we use the explanatory account obtained to assess the probative force of the phenomenal intuitions they prompt. This account traces these intuitions ultimately back to automatic attributions of patient-properties which are stereotypically associated with the verbs ‘seems’ and ‘appears’, in their dominant uses. Such automatic attributions are generally reliable to the extent to which stereotypes are accurate (as verb-related stereotypes mostly are) and relevant. Stereotypical attributes are associated with the verbs’ dominant use, however, and stereotypes are irrelevant where words are given a non-dominant use, such as the new generic use we identified. Where words are given such a use, as in the initial premises of arguments from illusion, stereotype-based inferences will systematically lead to predictable wrong attributions. Where we fail to notice the deviation from the dominant use, as authors and readers of those arguments typically do,

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the conclusions of these particularly effortless inferences will strike us as plausible.14 They are cognitive illusions: subjectively plausible but wrong intuitions due to processes of automatic cognition that are generally reliable but predictably generate wrong judgments under specific conditions (cp. Pohl 2004). The stereotype-based intuitions we have when considering standard formulations of the initial premises of arguments from illusion are cognitive illusions. These illusions prompt the phenomenal intuitions to be assessed. The fact that we have the latter in response to cognitive illusions does not speak for their truth. Lack of probative force is thus inferred from the provenance of these intuitions – and not from their conflict with common-sense or from the violation of defeasible pragmatic rules (cp. Section 8.1). For such argumentatively unsupported but paradoxical intuitions (Section 8.1), lack of probative force implies we lack the right to accept them (Section 8.2). By uncovering this lack, we show the argument from illusion unsound and contribute to showing the problem of perception ill-motivated (introduction). We have thus explored how a classic philosophical problem can be dissolved by developing psychological explanations of intuitions that let us assess their probative force. This approach is relevant more generally to the extent to which philosophical problems are ultimately engendered by paradoxical intuitions philosophers accept in the absence of argument. Recent case-studies suggest that this extent is significant (Fischer 2011). Analyses of what we would ordinarily say and infer when can contribute to this enterprise at least where paradoxical intuitions are generated by stereotype-based inferences and, more generally, stimulusdriven association processes that are shaped by the verbal stimuli’s most frequent use. We considered one kind of case in which this is liable to happen: When philosophers give new uses to established terms, without realizing the novelty, they are prone to make and accept stereotypebased inferences licensed only by the still dominant established use, from premises employing the new use. This is bound to generate paradoxical intuitions. Such unwitting ‘crossing of uses’ could be described as a ‘seductive verbal fallacy’. We have thus traced paradoxical intuitions back to seductive verbal fallacies. But we have not invoked any normative privilege for common-sense or ordinary language in deriving lack of probative force. When embedded in the fresh approach, ordinary language analysis is not open to the key objections we considered. Ordinary language matters to philosophy even if it is not normatively but only psychologically privileged: when it determines not the bounds of sense but our leaps of thought.15

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Notes 1. E.g, Travis (1991) and Recanati (2004: 146ff.) have argued that the way Grice draws the semantics-pragmatics distinction is inconsistent with a – correct – Austinian view of the scope of context-sensitivity in natural language. 2. Inferences and other cognitive processes are automatic – rather than controlled – to the extent to which they possess these operationally defined properties (Bargh 1994; Moors and De Houwer 2006): A process is effortless if it requires no attention, so that performance is not impaired by multitasking, unconscious to the extent to which the subject is unable to report its course as opposed to express its outcome (judgment, decision, etc.), nonintentional if it is initiated regardless of the aims or goals the subject pursues, and autonomous if, once it is initiated, the subject cannot end it or alter its course. Cognitive processes may possess some but not all of these properties, and each property to different degrees. The automatic/controlled distinction is no neat dichotomy. 3. Cappelen (2012) discusses the different uses of ‘intuition’ in ordinary English and philosophy, respectively. 4. Kahneman and Frederick (2005) develop this condition within the influential framework of dual process theories of cognition (Evans 2010). 5. This point can also be developed with neo-Gricean theories (e.g Horn 2004) and assumes only that the statements at issue are advanced and interpreted in a manner consistent with pragmatic maxims or heuristics, not that these are actually deployed in controlled or automatic cognition. 6. The one exception is a circular argument mooted by Broad (1923: 240f.) and developed by Smith (2002: 36–37). 7. Despite this manifesto statement, the movement’s mainstream conducts rather different survey work which I cannot discuss here, though it has been repeatedly linked to ordinary language philosophy. Conversely, the project outlined has been actually pursued by philosophers reluctant to style themselves ‘experimental’. 8. Many classificatory nouns (‘bird’, ‘bank-teller’) (Rosch and Mervis 1975; Tversky and Kahneman 1983) and verbs (‘accuse’) (McRae et al. 1997) stand for ‘prototype-style concepts’ under which things and events get automatically subsumed in virtue of possessing prototypical features: Individuals (and sub-categories) with more of these features are judged more rapidly to belong to the category at issue, and to be better examples of the category; subjects rate the features as more typical for members of the category and name them sooner and more frequently when asked for such typical features. 9. E.g Broad (1923: 236, my italics): ‘When I judge a penny looks elliptical’ but ‘This seems to me elliptical, or red, or hot’ when covering different sensemodalities. Or Brogaard (forthcoming: 8): ‘the appear words “look”, “feel”, “taste”, “smell”, or “sound” are’ 10. For this reason, the debates about the pragmatic implications and semantics of ‘looks F’ initiated, respectively, by Grice (1961) and Jackson (1977; cp. Brogaard forthcoming) – are tangential to the presently decisive issue. 11. By contrast, ‘seeing’, ‘hearing’, etc. require no recognition (Fischer 2011: 114–116) and are hence compatible with lack of awareness – ordinary and ‘direct’ (below).

140 Eugen Fischer 12. Some authors exclude inferences by admitting as objects of ‘direct awareness’ only things to which the appearance/reality-distinction does not apply (e.g Ayer 1940: 59, 61, 69), so that no inference is required to find out whether they merely appear or actually are F (cp. Broad 1923: 239–240, 248). 13. The precise extent to which these elementary inferences display this and other features of automaticity is as yet unclear, however, as the automaticity of deductive inferences has been studied almost exclusively through priming studies, which have established automaticity for modus ponens (Reverberi et al. 2012) and negation within verbal oppositions (here: ‘aware’-‘unaware’, ‘knowledge’-‘ignorance’) (Deutsch et al. 2009), but which do not identify all effortless processes detected through other experimental paradigms. 14. Stereotype-based inferences are effortless, such ‘fluency’ is a meta-cognitive consensus and accuracy cue (Alter and Oppenheimer 2009), and this cue is not spontaneously discounted (Oppenheimer 2004) where we fail to notice the deviation that renders the stereotype irrelevant. 15. I thank Peter Hacker, Michael Hymers, Adam Leite, and Kevin Reuter for helpful comments.

9 Sense and Sensibilia and the Significance of Linguistic Phenomenology Roberta Locatelli

Today, Austin seems confined to a (not memorable) page in the history of philosophy. As Warnock remarked, his reception has been marked not merely by ordinary misconstrual of what Austin wrote, but, more importantly, by apparent misunderstanding of ... what he had tried to do in philosophy, and of his reasons for so trying. (Warnock 1973a: v) Austin’s method was described as a pedantic description of how English is used, ‘the philosophical interest of which ... is by no means always clear’ and which, moreover, is so trivial that ‘a fine scholar of English could have made a better job of it’ (Harrod 1963). His focus on ordinary language was interpreted as a substantial lack of interest in the phenomena studied, as a deliberate refusal to see the source of philosophical problems, and as mocking philosophical enquiry.1 Alternatively his method was depicted as aiming at solving or dissolving philosophical problems only by means of looking at how words are ordinarily used. Austin was hence seen as assuming that the mere observation of ordinary language would reveal metaphysical and factual truths about our object of enquiry and that any use of language which departs from the ordinary use is false.2 Being depicted for so long in this way, the current dismissal of his work is no surprise. We will not explore in this essay the sociological and historical reasons for such a long-standing misunderstanding and consequent dismissal of Austin’s work. Our aim is to analyse some aspects of Austin’s philosophical approach in order to counter the caricature that some hurried history of philosophy has made of it. 141

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This will be done through an examination of ‘A Plea for Excuses’ (1979), one of the rare occasions on which Austin discusses at some length his own method, and Sense and Sensibilia, the series of lectures he gave between 1947 and 1959, edited posthumously by G.J. Warnock. Sense and Sensibilia will serve us as a case study to show that, contrary to what is widely held, linguistic phenomenology can bring a positive contribution to philosophical enquiry, one that goes far beyond making some negative points local to a specific debate or certain philosophical misuses of ordinary words. In ‘A Plea for Excuses’, Austin calls his approach ‘linguistic phenomenology’, hoping that this might help counter some misunderstandings suggested by the prevailing slogans ‘ordinary language’, ‘linguistic’ or ‘analytic’ philosophy, labels under which are lumped together post-Wittgensteinians and Oxford philosophers as different as Austin and Strawson. Austin characterizes linguistic phenomenology as follows: When we examine what we should say when, what words we should use in what situations, we are looking again not merely at words (or ‘meanings’, whatever they may be) but also at the realities we use the words to talk about: we are using a sharpened awareness of words to sharpen our perception of, though not as the final arbiter of, the phenomena. (1979: 182) Austin makes clear that the object of his inquiry is not the language, but the ‘realities we use the words to talk about’. It is a ‘phenomenology’ in the sense that its objects of inquiry are the phenomena; and it is ‘linguistic’ because ‘words are our tools’ (ibid.) and we can sharpen our awareness of reality only through sharpening our tools. It is also quite clear that the analysis of language is not supposed to deliver some truths about the world, as if the distinctions that ordinary language draws would transparently reflect essential distinctions in the world. The analysis of ordinary language can at best enable us to ‘forearm ourselves against the traps that language sets us’ (ibid.). Linguistic phenomenology is hence primarily therapeutic: a therapy that language addresses to itself, having however always as its final aim the knowledge of the world. The therapy is often directed toward philosophical language, which is, in his view, far more likely to mislead us than ordinary language, because of philosophers’ proclivity to ‘oversimplification, schematization, and constant obsessive repetition of the same small range of jejune “examples”’ (Austin 1962: 3).

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9.1 Sense and Sensibilia is an apt place to assess the nature of this therapeutic approach. In these lectures Austin criticizes the theory whereby we never directly perceive material objects, but rather sense-data. Austin’s main target is Ayer’s book The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, but he traces this idea as far back as Heraclitus. This view is motivated by an argument that could be reconstructed as follows: 1. The ordinary man believes that we directly perceive material objects (Naïve Realism – thesis to reject). 2. There are cases of illusion where the material objects the man of the street takes to be the objects of perception are presented as having properties they do not possess. 3. Any perception, veridical or illusory, has a (direct) object of perception. 4. Two objects having contradictory properties are numerically distinct. 5. In illusion the direct object of perception is not a material object, but a sense-datum. 6. Illusions are qualitatively very similar or even identical to veridical perceptions. 7. If we cannot introspectively distinguish the objects of two experiences, then those experiences must have objects of the same sort. 8. All experiences have sense-data rather than material objects as their direct object. Austin’s attitude toward such a venerable tradition couldn’t be more relentless: the argument is said to rely on ‘a mass of seductive (mainly verbal) fallacies [and] a wide variety of concealed motives’ (Austin 1962: 5), most of which spread from philosophers’ tendency to overgeneralize, which lead them to overlook the phenomena they are supposed to elucidate. In doing so, it is easy for philosophers to overlook the contexts in which it makes sense to use certain expressions, and stretch their meaning to the point where they become misleading or even nonsense (Austin 1979: 58). Asking ourselves under which conditions it makes sense to use certain expressions can allow us to identify the ‘traps that language sets us, ... realize their inadequacies and arbitrariness, and re-look at the world without blinkers’ (Austin 1979: 181). This doesn’t mean that the only legitimate language is ordinary language or that an appeal to ordinary language is always right and

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suffices to solve (or dissolve) philosophical problems. Quite the contrary: the traps that language sets us are constitutive of ordinary language, of its limits and its being designed to work only in certain circumstances. Austin is not driven by faith in the omnipotence of ordinary language (as he is often depicted), but by the acknowledgment of its limits: The difficulty is just that: there is no short description which is not misleading: the only thing to do, and that can easily be done, is to set out the description of the facts at length. Ordinary language breaks down in extraordinary cases. ... Now no doubt an ideal language would not break down, whatever happened. In doing physics for example, where our language is tightened up in order precisely to describe complicated and unusual cases concisely, we prepare linguistically for the worst. In ordinary language we do not: words fail us. If we talk as though an ordinary must be like an ideal language, we shall misrepresent the facts. (Austin 1979: 68) Austin doesn’t blame philosophical jargon for not conforming to ordinary use: departing from ordinary use is in principle permitted and sometimes required.3 Philosophers should be aware of the limits of language and start with detailed description of the facts, avoiding lumping together in ‘short descriptions’ different phenomena. Alternatively, if ordinary language ‘breaks down’, philosophers can introduce an artificial language, or technical words, but in that case they have the duty to define clearly their technical vocabulary and their standards of accuracy and truth. The problem, according to Austin, is that most often philosophers use ordinary language words in a special way without signalling it, or without providing the appropriate standards of correctness for their new use, and ‘without [even] realizing’ (1962: 15) that one is departing from the common-sense use.

9.2 Sense and Sensibilia offers several examples of philosophical misuse of ordinary terms, that is words introduced as if everybody were familiar with their meaning, just because they are ordinarily used, but that occur in sentences in which, if we apply the ordinary standards of appropriateness, sound clearly false or nonsensical. A first example is, once again, in the very question which structures the traditional debate on perception: ‘what are the objects of perception?

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Of what things does perception make us immediately aware?’ This is, for Austin, an instance of the ‘fallacy of asking about “nothing-inparticular”’ (Austin 1979: 58) that characterizes many philosophical debates. To this question broadly two replies are available: either one thinks that we are directly aware of material objects, or that we are aware of material objects only indirectly through being prima facie aware of sense-data. The first one is supposed to be the common-sense view while the second one is the view to which the reflection on perceptual illusions should commit us. Austin complains that this dispute is spurious, because it isn’t clear what ‘material objects’, as opposed to ‘sense-data’, means and hence what the competing views are supposed to be committed to. Prima facie, it doesn’t seem difficult to say what ‘material objects’ means: ordinarily people use this expression to refer to ‘moderate-sized specimens of dry goods’ (Austin 1962: 8). However, if we take ‘material objects’ under this acceptation, the idea that the ordinary man thinks that we directly perceive only material objects would be false: we all are prepared to admit that we experience, for instance, voices, mountains, rainbows, gases and so on, which are not material objects in the common-sense use of the term (ibid.). This would already make the sense-datum theory appear less needed, since it is presented as a solution to the inadequacy of the view whereby we perceive material objects to account for cases in which no material object is seen. But the latter is not the naïve realist view. Austin suggests then that the sense-datum theorist uses ‘material object’ ‘from the very beginning, simply as a foil for “sense-data”’ (ibid.). However, at the same time the notion of sense-datum is not autonomously defined:4 it is introduced as an entity we must appeal to when no material object is available to be perceived, and the only thing on which all the sense-datum theorists agree about those strange objects is that they are non-material. In a similar vein, Austin criticizes the use of the word ‘directly’: a typical case of a word, which already has a very special use [connected with the idea of a deviation of direction], being gradually stretched, without caution or definition or any limit, until it becomes, first perhaps obscurely metaphorical, but ultimately meaningless. (1962: 15) But what better exemplifies Austin’s approach is his complaint that the examples of illusion proposed in support of premiss (2) cover a variety of different phenomena, going from cases of perspectival changes to

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mirages, passing through a variety of cases such as optical illusions, mirror-images, apparent deformation of objects due to refraction in water, drug-induced alterations of vision, apparent variations in taste and felt warmth (1962: 20–21). Austin points out that most of these cases cannot be considered illusions in any interesting sense. My face reflected in a mirror, the coin that looks elliptical from some points of view, or the stick looking bent when partly immersed in water look exactly how we expect them to look (1962: 26): the stick in the water looks different from the stick out of water just because they are two different situations: a stick in water and a stick out of water. We might ignore the laws of refraction or fail to notice the water, but it’s not the fault of the experience: experience presents us exactly with what is there to be seen. The same can be said of perspectival changes. When a coin looks more and more elliptical when I move around the table on which it is, my experience is not misleading me: quite the contrary, it is allowing me to be aware of the spatial relations between me and the coin (the experience would mislead me, and I would be puzzled, if the appearance of the coin didn’t change from whatever distance and position I see it: our perception of tridimensional objects in space depends on these laws of perspective we are all familiar with). If most of the cases mentioned by Ayer are not genuine illusions, there are still cases which it is appropriate to refer to as illusion (typical cases are optical illusions). However, Austin thinks that also the following premiss (3) hinges on a (possibly deliberate) misconception of illusion, in particular on conflating the notions of delusion and illusion. Ayer in fact says of all cases of illusions mentioned that they are delusive. Austin notices that illusions and delusions are altogether different phenomena and the respective notions bring mutually incompatible implications. Delusions are grossly disordered beliefs, typically delusions of grandeur or of persecution. Sometimes ‘delusion’ can refer to cases where perceptual experience is involved – for instance when one sees pink rats. But even in this case the appropriateness of the word ‘delusion’ depends on the wrong belief one holds, not on experience per se: if one hallucinated pink rats without believing that there actually are pink rats, one wouldn’t be deluded. But, still, it cannot be applied to all cases in which one takes at face value what one experiences. The term ‘delusion’ ‘suggests that something totally unreal is conjured up’ (Austin 1962: 23). This is not true of optical illusions: when I see the Müller-Lyer diagram, nothing is conjured up, I see something material, an arrangement of lines and

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arrows, even if a line appears longer than it actually is. Premiss (3), for Austin, ‘positively trades on not distinguishing illusion from delusions’ (1962: 25): the notion of illusion carries the idea that there is really something that we see, while the notion of delusion suggests that the thing that is seen is unreal, definitely not material. Saying that all illusions are delusions, the argument can go on saying that in illusion there is something that we see, but this thing cannot be a material object; hence it has to be a sense-datum.

9.3 This last remark of Austin’s is seen by many philosophers as a paradigmatic example of the intrinsic limits of Austin’s method. Even those who do not credit the caricature of Austin’s linguistic phenomenology consider Austin’s criticism of the argument from illusion somehow ‘disingenuous’ (Martin 1997: 103). Martin (manuscript) esteems that Austin’s arguments are at best successful against a limited range of opponents: the sensedatum theorists of his time. His assessment of the problem of perception is hence of little interest to the current debate and not convincing.5 Austin’s insistence, almost word by word, on the idiosyncrasies of Ayer’s presentation makes him fail to appreciate the deep motivations that appealed to so many philosophers since Heraclitus. One of the deepest motivations seems to rely precisely on premiss (3), which states a principle, known as the phenomenal principle, which is often deemed obvious and uncontroversial: When I say ‘This table appears brown to me’ it is quite plain that I am acquainted with an actual instance of brownness (or equally plainly with a pair of instances when I see double). This cannot indeed be proven, but it is absolutely evident and indubitable. (Price 1932: 108) Austin considers that this principle derives its purported obviousness from not distinguishing between illusion and delusion. But, Martin points out, it is hardly likely that so many philosophers in different times and traditions have been liable to accept this principle only in virtue of a linguistic confusion. The principle seems motivated by the phenomenological remark that, even when one’s experience is hallucinatory, or illusory, it seems to the subject that there is an object. In other words, if we confine ourselves to the domain of what is introspectively detectable, the subject seems to be presented with an object (an object

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of awareness) in the case of hallucination no less than in the case of veridical perception. It seems hence that, whether there is some object in the world or not, some object of awareness is present to the mind. This seems a phenomenological datum, not simply an assumption that has arisen from a linguistic confusion. Certainly, Austin is right in stressing that, even if we acknowledge that we are aware of something in the case of hallucination no less than in the case of perception, there is no need to postulate an entity of which we are aware. However, as Martin (manuscript) shows, behind this possibly inaccurate notion of ‘object of awareness’ there is an insight which is pretty undeniable: in both hallucination and veridical perception one is aware of something, in both cases it appears to the subject as if there were something out there. If one is worried about the reification suggested by words such as ‘object’ and ‘something’, one can reformulate this idea in a more neutral way: in both perception and hallucination there is a visual appearance and it is not possible, for the subject, to tell through introspection alone whether or not she is veridically perceiving or not. Or so most contemporary philosophers think. Given that, another concern arises. If the visual experience that I have in the case of veridical perception is such that I can have it even when no object is there (when I hallucinate), then it seems that perception and hallucination are states of mind of the same kind. One can then mount another argument, the argument from hallucination: 1*. Naïve realism (NR) claims that experiencing (at least in certain cases) is being sensorily conscious of mind-independent objects. 2*. In a case of perfect hallucination, one has an experience which is introspectively indistinguishable from an experience one may have in a veridical case. 3*. In a case of perfect hallucination, there is no mind-independent object one is aware of. Hence: 4*. In the case of perfect hallucination, one is not conscious of mindindependent objects. 5*. Two experiences which introspectively appear the same must be fundamentally identical and require the same account. Hence: 6*. NR cannot be true. Notice that this argument isn’t committed to any of the errors committed by the sense-datum theorists:

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1. The disingenuous qualification as illusory of ‘far too familiar’ cases is abandoned in favour of hallucinations alone. Thus, the argument doesn’t trade on the conflation of ‘delusion’ and ‘illusion’. 2. The opposition direct-indirect is not used any more: NR (the view of the man of the street) is formulated in a way that Austin could be willing to accept, since it doesn’t rely on the oppositions ‘direct-indirect’. 3. The spurious opposition between material object and sense-datum doesn’t figure either. Indeed, the problem doesn’t have anymore to do with the object of experience, but with the nature of experience itself. 4. It isn’t any more assumed that experience has always an object of awareness (premiss 3). 5. Accordingly, the conclusion is not any more that the direct objects of perception are sense-data, but simply that naïve realism cannot be true, leaving open what alternative account one shall adopt. Philosophers of perception are currently engaged with this latter argument. One, very widespread, way of addressing the argument consists in accepting all the premisses of the argument but thinking that NR can be preserved through a deeper understanding of the structure of perception. Perceptual experience is hence conceived as a representational state whose content represents that something is such-and-such. If the experience is veridical, the object represented in the content of experience is mind-independent. If the experience is illusory, the content of the experience attributes to a mind-independent object properties that it doesn’t have. If one hallucinates, the object represented doesn’t exist. Although the object represented in experience may or may not exist, the sameness of account between perception and hallucination prescribed by premiss (4*) is preserved: both perception and hallucination are representational states and in this respect they are of the same psychological kind. Knowing whether what is represented in perception exists is a further, extrinsic question, which doesn’t affect the fundamental nature of experience. At the same time also, the core intuition of NR that experiencing (at least in certain cases) is being sensorily conscious of mind-independent objects is preserved, because when experience is veridical what is represented is a mind-independent object. Even if representationalism preserves the mind-independentness of the object of perception, it rejects another claim contained in our ordinary intuition about perception, and hence in NR, namely that the mindindependent objects determine (in part, but crucially) the phenomenal character of one’s perception, what it is like to perceive them (see Martin 2004). Moreover, some contend to representationalism that it introduces

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an interface between the subject and the mind-independent reality (See McDowell 1996; Putnam 1999). For these reasons some philosophers think that representationalism is inadequate and NR should be preserved by rejecting one or more premisses of the argument from hallucination. Whatever our evaluation of this controversy is, all parties seem to agree that Austin’s criticism is helpless against this line of reasoning, as it is too narrowly focused on the specific theory promoted by Ayer. This failure is often attributed to his method of linguistic phenomenology that would prevent him going beyond the letter of Ayer’s formulation and acknowledging the real motivations beyond the argument. Hence, Sense and Sensibilia is considered outdated: even if it played a very important role in getting rid of many fallacies contained in the sense-datum theory and in reshaping the terms of the philosophical debate in perception, it cannot be of any use once the debate has shifted to those new issues. In the following section I will argue that Sense and Sensibilia contains indeed the resources to counter the argument from hallucination and to answer worries that go beyond the local debate on sense-data. I will also show that this contribution isn’t separable from Austin’s specific methodology.

9.4 As we have seen, Austin’s general complaint toward the argument from illusion was the lack of interest in the phenomena considered by the argument, namely different kind of illusions (or alleged illusions). This inattention to the phenomena is manifest not only at the stage where many different cases (form perspectival changes to mirages) are lumped together under the labels ‘delusion’ and ‘illusion’, but also at a later stage (premiss 7) of the argument, where it is assumed that those cases are phenomenally indistinguishable from normal cases of perception. He writes: We should be wise not to accept too readily the statement that what he is experiencing [when hallucinating] is ‘similar in character to what he would be experiencing if he were seeing a real oasis’. For is it at all likely, really, to be very similar? And, looking ahead, if we were to concede this point we should find the concession being used against us at a later stage – namely, at the stage where we shall be invited to agree that we see sense-data always, in normal cases too. (Austin 1962: 32)

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This criticism can be extended from the argument from illusion to the updated argument from hallucinations, where, in premiss (2*), it is assumed that a perfect hallucination is indistinguishable from a veridical perception. Interestingly, in this passage, Austin seems to have in mind a restricted version of the argument in which only hallucinations are considered. He implicitly suggests that Ayer’s argument can be blocked at two different stages, according to what phenomena are considered. If we consider cases such as mirror-images, the stick in the water, the coin which appears elliptical, or cases of optical illusions, the argument can be blocked at the initial stage (2–5): we mischaracterize these phenomena if we say that in these cases we do not perceive a physical object. A case of hallucination, instead, is ‘significantly more amenable to the treatment it is given’ (ibid.); however, hallucinations seem ‘a good deal less useful’ (ibid.) when it comes to the second stage of the argument (6–8), where in virtue of the indistinguishability between these cases and the normal cases, the denial of NR is generalized to all cases of perception. It is worth pointing out that the updated argument from hallucination expands the stage (6–8) of the traditional argument from illusion. In fact, he notices, for many obvious cases of hallucinations, saying that what one experiences is exactly like what one would experience if she had a corresponding successful perception, is at least ‘perfectly extraordinary’ (Austin 1962: 48). Maybe those hallucinations are ‘narrated in the same terms as [successful] experiences’ (ibid.), but they aren’t qualitatively identical to the latter: When we are hit on the head we sometimes say that we ‘see stars’; but for all that, seeing stars when you are hit on the head is not ‘qualitatively’ indistinguishable from seeing stars when you look at the sky. Again, it is simply not true to say that seeing a bright green afterimage against a white wall is exactly like seeing a bright green patch actually on the wall; or that seeing a white wall through blue spectacles is exactly like seeing a blue wall; or that seeing pink rats in D.T.s is exactly like really seeing pink rats. (1962: 49) Once again, Austin warns us about the traps that language sets us: the fact that we can sometimes describe a hallucination using the same terms we would use to describe a normal perception doesn’t mean that one case is exactly like the other. One might fail to realize that one is hallucinating (it is, indeed, a definitional character of hallucinations that we are liable to take them, at

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least momentarily, as normal perceptions); however, this doesn’t mean that hallucinations are perfectly indistinguishable from perceptions. Clinical studies of pathological hallucinations, as well as the less severe hallucinations we might all undergo, are incoherent, less stable, dreamlike, momentary, less vivid or, on the contrary, extremely bright (as in many hallucinations induced by psychotropic drugs). One might retort that it might be true that most hallucinations aren’t perfectly indistinguishable from normal perceptions, but sometimes they are, or they can be. This would be enough for the argument to go through. In fact, by talking of ‘perfect hallucinations’, the argument implicitly assumes that in most cases hallucinations can be distinguished from normal perceptions. However, we can conceive of rich, multimodal hallucinatory experiences in which the scene experienced matches exactly the scene of a possible veridical scenario. Philosophers often call these experiences ‘perfect hallucinations’. For the sake of the argument it doesn’t matter how often this specific type of hallucinations happens, what matters is only that it be possible. Now the question is: is it indeed true that perfect hallucinations are possible, although rare? If by ‘possible’ we mean that these hallucinations sometimes happen, although very rarely, this seems false: the clinical literature hasn’t yet provided any record of hallucinations in which all the different modalities concur to create an hallucinatory scene sufficiently coherent and stable to be fully indistinguishable from a normal perception.6 So, at best, it can be said that perfect hallucinations are possible in the sense that they are conceivable: we can coherently imagine such a phenomenon to occur. Austin would most probably doubt that the mere fact that perfect hallucinations are conceivable can have any bearing on the theory of perception we are committed to. For him, the minimal and mandatory precondition for any philosophical progress is the careful examination of actual examples of the phenomena studied. Those examples must be as varied as possible and they must be described at length, in order to avoid the temptation of opting for reductive, ready-made descriptions which attribute to the phenomena our prejudgments. Austin would have probably thought that the very assumption that perfect hallucinations are possible derives from our prejudices, in particular the assumption that there is only one way in which experience can go wrong: by telling us something false. Perfect hallucinations are considered philosophically relevant by the proponents of the argument for the same reason that led Ayer to treat experiences such as perspectival changes and mirror-images as cases of

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delusive experience. The assumption behind both moves is that illusions and hallucinations have one thing in common: they lie to us. If all hallucinations are experiences that tell us something false, it doesn’t really make any serious difference whether they are hallucinations which are experienced by the subject or are documented, or rather experiences which are only postulated as conceivable. If hallucinations are unreliable witnesses which lie to us, the difference between a hallucination and another misleading experience is never substantial or qualitative: it is only a matter of how far and how convincingly the experience lies to us. Hence, for the sake of the argument, it is useful to consider the cases in which experience lies fully and more convincingly, no matter whether it is a real case or not. Austin strongly rejects this conception of experience: Now first, though the phrase ‘deceived by our senses’ is a common metaphor, it is a metaphor; and this is worth noting, for in what follows the same metaphor is frequently taken up by the expression ‘veridical’ and taken very seriously. In fact, of course, our senses are dumb – though Descartes and others speak of ‘the testimony of the senses’, our senses do not tell us anything, true or false. (1962: 11) Once again, Austin points out that a widespread philosophical presupposition (this time one which is pivotal in the traditional epistemology) stems from a trap set by ordinary language. We commonly use a metaphor such as ‘deceived by the senses’ and then philosophers take this loose way of speaking at face value and start thinking of experiences as divided into two categories: those which tell the truth (veridical) and those which lie to us (illusions and hallucinations). Under this assumption, illusions and hallucinations are fundamentally all the same: they lie to us. But for Austin this is a gross mistake. The distinction between veridical and non-veridical experiences is spurious because experience is not a witness that tells us something either true or false: ‘senses are dumb’ and do not tell us anything.7 If we get rid of this assumption that hallucinations are experiences exactly like veridical ones, except that they tell us something false, the idea that it is perfectly legitimate to philosophize about the nature of perception by using a merely hypothetical case of hallucination, such as perfect hallucinations, already becomes less appealing. Moreover, if we appreciate that experience can go wrong in many ways and that there is a variety of hallucinations, we can explain why

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it happens that we might take a hallucination for a normal perception, although one and the other are not perfectly indistinguishable. We will then realize, case by case, that hallucinations do not threaten NR because either it is possible to account for them within NR, or they aren’t at all the same phenomenon that happens when we perceive, and hence even if a naïve realist explanation isn’t available for certain hallucinations, this doesn’t affect the validity of NR for normal cases of perceptions. Certain hallucinations are easily explained within NR. Take the case of the mirage of an oasis. It is well known that this is a natural phenomenon with a very clear explanation: it is the refraction of light rays by alternate layers of hot and cool air. In this case, we can perfectly apply the naïve realist account, because nothing but the properties of the scene before us determines what we see. In mirages what we see is no less real than what we see in an optical illusion, like the Müller-Lyer illusion.8 Our experience is not illusory or false; it presents precisely what is there to be seen: light rays reflected by layers of air of different temperatures, which have the physical property of looking just like a pond. Certain experiences falling under the common-sense category of hallucination work more like illusions and display an appropriate relation with the external world and its properties. Other cases are more complicated: it might happen that the man lost in the desert doesn’t simply seem to see a pond, but also a few palms around the pond and a camel drinking at the edge. It is harder to find an external correlate of the camel and palms. However, it would be misleading (and totally arbitrary) to characterize someone in this situation as having the same psychological state of someone actually seeing real camels and palms. The perception of the refraction is penetrated by imagination and the desire to find some water. We have a perceptual phenomenon deformed by other mental attitudes, such as desires, beliefs, emotions and so on. The same emotional and imaginative cooperation is present when, after looking at a horror movie, I see an uncanny figure at the window. I’m probably just seeing the shadow of a tree, but I could swear two eyes are staring at me. In other cases we have a simple meta-cognitive error: not a perceptual element deformed by an imagination, but an imagination that I take for a perception because of some temporary or systematic disorder or inability. If we explain hallucinations in this way, as the effect of the interaction of perception with other states, hallucination doesn’t seem any more to be a mysterious phenomenon that proves NR false.

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Perception is a contact with mind-independent objects. This contact sometimes goes astray because experience can cooperate with or can be deviated by other mental attitudes. In any case, the mere existence of these hallucinatory phenomena isn’t enough to prove NR false because what we have here is not simply an experience, but a combination of different mental states. Hence the same account cannot be applied to normal cases of perception. Once again, we tend to forget these facts because we are misled by our language: the word ‘hallucination’ suggests a substantial uniformity among cases which have in fact little in common, but differ as to their phenomenology and their explanation. This doesn’t mean that ordinary language is inadequate or wrong, but only that ‘fact is richer than diction’ (Austin 1979: 195). Austin explains his stance on the matter as follows: I am not denying that cases in which things go wrong could be lumped together under some single name. A single name might in itself be innocent enough, provided its use was not taken to imply either (a) that the cases were all alike, or (b) that they were all in certain ways alike. What matters is that the facts should not be prejudged and (therefore) neglected. (1962: 14, footnote)

9.5 One might insist that, after all, it is legitimate to run an argument in which perfect hallucinations are featured, even if they do go far beyond what we ordinarily call ‘hallucination’. Thus, premiss (2*) can be accepted. Even conceding that (which for Austin would be conceding already too much), Sense and Sensibilia contains a further element to stop the argument from hallucination. We read: One may well wish at least to ask for the credentials of a curious general principle on which both Ayer and Price seem to rely, to the effect that, if two things are not ‘generically the same’, the same ‘in nature’, then they can’t be alike, or even very nearly alike. If it were true, Ayer says, that from time to time we perceived things of two different kinds, then ‘we should expect’ them to be qualitatively different. But why on earth should we? ... If I am told that a lemon is generically different from a piece of soap, do I ‘expect’ that no piece of soap could look just like a lemon? Why should I? (1962: 50)

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Austin suggests that, even if we accept, for the sake of argument, the previous premises, (5*) cannot be accepted: even if certain hallucinations might be indistinguishable from perceptions, nothing forces us to think that both deserve the same account. Here Austin, coherently with the particular debate he is engaged with, says that they might have different objects of awareness, but it is possible to spell out this idea in a more modern way and say that they are of different fundamental kinds.9 This is, after all, a further consequence of the remarks made before about the variety of hallucinations and Austin’s constant efforts to avoid overgeneralizations. If we cannot suppose a unique structure common to all cases of hallucination, a fortiori we cannot assume that they share the same nature with normal perceptions. Even if Austin’s rejection of the argument from hallucination might be improved and completed, we can see that his reflection on perception is far from being merely verbal or local to Ayer’s idiosyncrasies. If Austin always starts from linguistic remarks, those allow us to sharpen our perception of the phenomena studied. Sense and Sensibilia offers hence a clear example of how the method of linguistic phenomenology can fruitfully bring a useful contribution to substantial philosophical debates.

Notes 1. Ayer recalled that he once said to Austin in exasperation: ‘You are like a greyhound that refuses to race but bites the other greyhounds to prevent their racing either’ (Ayer 1977: 160). 2. Cf. Chisholm (1951: 175). In this essay Chisholm’s primary target is Malcolm (1942), where Chisholm located (rightly or not) the most explicit endorsement of the thesis that ‘any philosophical statement which violates ordinary language is false’ and, vice versa, that any statement which is in accord with ordinary language is true. However his criticism was meant to spread to all the so-called ‘ordinary language’ philosophers. 3. Austin himself is responsible for introducing not a few neologisms; think of the famous distinction between locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts. 4. We know in fact that an intense debate about the nature of sense-data animated the debate of the early twentieth century and that the difficulty of finding an adequate metaphysical characterization of these strange entities ultimately led some to abandon the view. 5. See Paul Snowdon’s ‘Austin on the Philosophy of Perception’ (this volume) for a similar, although possibly more severe, take on Austin’s work on perception. 6. Schizophrenic patients sometimes describe their hallucinations as exactly like normal experiences. However, it is controversial whether we have to take

The Significance of Linguistic Phenomenology 157 their report as phenomenologically accurate. Some neuroscientists tend to understand hallucinations in schizophrenia as the result of an alteration in the capacity of self-attribution of cognitive states, which makes one unable to distinguish what one experiences from what one imagines (see Brüne 2005). This meta-cognitive error doesn’t necessarily underlie the phenomenological identity of the hallucinatory case with a normal case. 7. See Travis (2004) for a development of the Austinian idea that senses are dumb. 8. See Travis (2004) and Brewer (2008) for a development of this Austinian intuition of how to account for illusions in naïve realist terms. 9. This view is developed by current disjunctivists such as McDowell, Snowdon, and Martin.

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Part III Language, Perception and Mind

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10 Austin on the Philosophy of Perception Paul F. Snowdon

One way to respond, today, to the work of Austin is to take an idea he had and to build on it, or, perhaps, to take an idea that Austin generated in others and to build on that, or, perhaps, to criticize ideas with these Austinian origins. But I suspect that readers of this collection also share an interest in achieving what one might call an understanding and assessment of Austin himself as a philosopher. Putting it in a rather blunt way, we can ask: what major contributions did Austin make to philosophy? I shall of course only look at one area, as indicated in my title. Now, Austin is a philosopher who never really separated writing philosophy from writing about philosophy itself, and so I shall also say a little about Austin’s attitude to philosophy. The tone of this paper will be historical, general, loose and to some extent speculative. But I hope to assemble some evidence that might influence how you see his work, and through that, Austin himself. What is striking these days is that the philosophy of Wittgenstein still receives immense attention, whereas that of Austin has, at least until very recently, been relatively neglected. But there was a time when Austin was thought of as the almost god-like leader in Oxford, with Wittgenstein his divine equivalent in Cambridge, of a movement converging on a novel conception of philosophy, according to which attention to ordinary language and its use provides the key to doing philosophy successfully. Hence the talk in the 1950s of the ‘Revolution in Philosophy’, understood as a shared Wittgensteinian and Austinian product.1 However, although Wittgenstein’s reputation has remained very high, and interest in his thought has persisted, indeed increased, both the reputation of, and interest in the thought of, Austin has diminished, though this volume and the conference from which it originated are 161

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perhaps evidence of a return of interest in him. Thus, one thing we can say is that Sense and Sensibilia is probably no longer a central text in the philosophy of perception. It is also my impression that Austin’s other writings are not currently very influential. This lack of focus on Austin in contemporary philosophy, I believe, acts as a stimulus to determine what his importance for philosophy really is. Of course, it would be wrong to take a comparative lack of interest in Austin nowadays as conclusive evidence of his real importance since philosophical focus is to a large extent a matter of fashion. One thing to say about Austin immediately is that his life as a philosopher was interrupted by the Second World War, in which Austin, with his exceptional talents, played a major role. Second, his intellectual life was cut short by an early death in his late 40s. This means that there is less work by him to look back to than there might have been. Third, Austin was averse to publication (for whatever reason) and was also not, what one might call, a compulsive note-taker-for-others-to-read in the way that Wittgenstein was; so again there is less material to scrutinize than Wittgenstein has left.2 Wittgenstein’s work also has the great stimulus to attract people’s attention of being very obscure and difficult. Austin’s work is so clear and easy to follow that there is no need to pore intently over the text to discover what it means. These reasons go some way to explaining the contrast between Austin’s and Wittgenstein’s current status. We have then to ask regarding Austin, given the writings that we have, how important as contributions to philosophy are Austin’s ideas and thoughts? Before I start trying to develop an answer to this question, I want to cancel an impression that I might already have generated. Whatever direction the argument takes, I am not intending to imply that Austin might have been a bad or a weak philosopher. The aim is, rather, to form a serious and evidence-based sense of what his philosophical achievements really are. However, by way of warning, I should indicate that my case will be that Sense and Sensibilia both gets nowhere near justifying the general approach that Austin favoured and proposes some highly questionable things. This has in fact always been one response to Sense and Sensibilia. My aim is to defend this attitude as reasonable.

10.1

Austin on perception

The part of Austin’s philosophy that I shall primarily focus on is his writing about perception in Sense and Sensibilia (hereafter S&S). Now, it

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is unlikely that I can say anything new about the arguments and views in S&S.3 I wish, rather, to present a reading of the work as a whole in order to draw some conclusions as to its significance. I want to begin by suggesting that S&S should strike anyone as, in some respects, leaving significant areas unexplored. Let me, by way of attempting to justify this impression, give a brief summary of the whole book. In Chapter 1, all of five pages long, Austin gives the doctrine he is discussing and his overall attitude to it. The doctrine is that of sense-data. As Austin points out this is a very old idea, expressed in all sorts of different vocabularies over time. Austin puts it this way; ‘The general doctrine, generally stated, goes like this; we never see or otherwise perceive (or “sense”), or anyhow we never directly perceive or sense, material objects, (or material things), but only sense-data (or our own ideas, impressions, sensa, sense-perceptions, percepts &c.)’ (Austin 1962: 2). Austin then immediately remarks that it is not clear how strictly this is meant, but that at this stage we ‘had better not worry about that question’ (Austin 1962: 2). And that is the extent to which Austin formulates the view he is scrutinizing. He provides no fuller articulation of the theory, no fuller explanation as to what sense-data are supposed to be, and what properties they are supposed to have. In other words, there really is no proper formulation of the theory to be investigated. Nor does Austin ask whether there are significantly different competing conceptions which have employed the same vocabulary, that is, whether there is a monolithic theory here or a terminology that has been shared by theorists of rather different sorts. I think that it is fair to say that Austin gives every impression of being uninterested in the view he is attacking, its history, its different versions, or the sources of its enduring appeal. As well as being pretty insouciant about what the tradition is that he is criticizing, Austin is also somewhat cagey about the assessment of it he is proposing. He says that his view about this doctrine is that ‘it is a typically scholastic view’ (ibid.: 3). Now, on reading this I want to say; what does calling it ‘scholastic’ actually mean? Should Austin have said that it is false, confused, unintelligible, or unsupported, I would appreciate at least the charge being brought. Accusing it of being ‘scholastic’ does not pin down anything very definite for me. Earlier he says that people supporting this view ‘bite off more than they can chew’. Again I wonder what I am to understand by this remark. But Austin links this comment to the claim that ‘in fact that [i.e, the question whether this doctrine is true] is a question that can’t be decided’ (ibid.: 1). Austin then seems to be committing himself to the view that the doctrine is in such a serious

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condition of disorder that it makes no sense to ask whether it is true. It is a question we should reject as a question. In Chapter 2 Austin discusses in a brilliantly witty way the first two paragraphs of Ayer’s book. Austin focuses on two things. He affirms that Ayer has no right to suggest that the ordinary person’s belief in external objects is somehow problematic. What Austin does not do though is to wonder why Ayer begins his investigation with this issue. The second thing that Austin focuses on is Ayer’s use of the expression ‘direct perception’. What mainly emerges from the discussion is that ordinary language provides no proper interpretation for the central expressions ‘directly sees’ or ‘directly perceives’. Austin does not consider the question; what does that show? In Chapter 3 Austin presents Ayer’s version of the famous argument from illusion, or at least the first part of it. Austin has no trouble showing that some things that Ayer says are odd, but he particularly stresses that not all the cases are cases of illusion, and that we must remember that illusions are different from delusions. One might feel that neither of these points is what is crucially wrong with the initial move in the argument from illusion. At this point, in Chapter 4, Austin diverts into a more positive mode, and provides an account of ‘looks’ ‘appears’ and ‘seems’. My impression, again, is that nothing very much emerges. In Chapters 5 and 6 Austin returns to Ayer: in Chapter 5 he makes some good critical remarks about the argument from illusion, points which are not in any way restricted to Ayer’s particular version of the argument, and in Chapter 6 he expresses some completely justified incredulity at some things that Ayer himself says about the argument. What needs remarking is that Chapter 6 is simply about the odd things Ayer says. In Chapter 7 Austin turns positive again and scrutinizes the use of ‘real’, which I shall consider below. In Chapter 8 Austin again, with relative ease, makes us laugh at Ayer’s views about what is real. In Chapter 9 Austin scrutinizes Ayer’s own positive reasons for saying that we directly perceive only sense-data. Now, as is well known, Ayer’s view is that we should say things like this because it is a useful terminology to adopt, and not because it represents a truth or insight that the argument from illusion has revealed. What particularly attract Austin’s attention are some remarks and arguments that Ayer proposes about the meaning of our ordinary language perceptual words. So, to a large extent, then, Chapter 9 resolves itself into a linguistic discussion. And this is the stage where Austin leaves consideration of arguments about how to characterize perception. In the last two chapters Austin shifts onto epistemology. In Chapter 10 he brings out how counterintuitive and non-obligatory is

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the epistemological stance that Ayer adopts. In Chapter 11 Austin criticizes Warnock’s attempt to generate some limited sympathy for some elements in those epistemological views, in his book on Berkeley. That is where the book stops. What this summary brings out, I hope, is that as a book S&S is centrally a discussion of Ayer’s arguments, and so its significance largely depends on how important we think those arguments are.

10.2

Some specific issues

Now, thinking about S&S as a whole, I want to pick out in a somewhat fuller way two other elements which strike me as problematic. [a] As we have seen a lot of Austin’s discussion is about our perceptionrelated language, for example, such words as ‘looks’, ‘real’, and ‘sees’, etc., I cannot make a proper general case for this here, but my sense is that Austin does not get far with his analysis of this language. In an attempt to illustrate this I want to engage briefly with Austin’s discussion, in Chapter 7, of the word ‘real’. Here are three points that Austin makes. (1) Austin contrasts two things about ‘real’. He says it is quite a normal word, part of ordinary language, but also it is ‘not a normal word at all’, and he says that ‘unlike “yellow”, or “horse” or “walk” it does not have a single specifiable, always-the-same meaning.’ But he adds that it is ‘not ambiguous’ (Austin 1962: 64). It might strike the reader that Austin’s list of words with single meanings is odd. Does ‘yellow’ have a single meaning, when it stands for a colour and when it stands for cowardice? Does ‘walk’ have a single meaning when it stands for a route and when it stands for a style of gait? More important, Austin really offers no evidence at all that ‘real’ is not ambiguous, and unless he is assuming that to have a single meaning requires the meaning to be the same sort of meaning that, for example, ‘horse’ has, Austin does not establish that ‘real’ does not have a single meaning either. But further, when he argues that ‘real’ is not a normal word he does that by taking the expression ‘real colour’ and challenging the reader to say what the ‘real colour’ of someone’s hair is, or of a fish which normally swims in the deep but can be seen outside water when caught, or of the sky, or of a pointilliste painting, or of an afterimage. The problem with this argument is that the same puzzlement would be generated

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by simply asking what the colour is of these things. It is dubious that the word ‘real’ contributes to the difficulty. (2) Slightly later on Austin says that ‘“real” is what we might call a trouser-word’ (ibid.: 70).4 I suspect that this is not really what Austin meant to say. His point is, as he puts it, that ‘with “real” it is the negative use that wears the trousers’ (ibid.: 70). He claims ‘a definite sense attaches to the assertion that something is real ... . only in the light of a specific way in which it might be, or might have been, not real’ (ibid.: 70). Austin seems to be claiming here that the expression ‘real F’ has a definite sense only if it is excluding a specific way of not being a ‘real F’, say by being a G, and the idea seems to be that the sense of ‘real F’ in that context would be ‘not a G’. The only evidence that Austin adduces here is that if someone says ‘that is a real F’ in a context where there is no specific way of not being a real F that is salient then the audience would not know how to take the remark. That is, in fact, far from being the case, since on hearing that remark the audience might well simply wait for the speaker to explain what prompted him to say it, rather than being gripped by complete incomprehension. Further, even if the audience were poleaxed by the remark, that condition is better thought of as failure to grasp the speaker’s point, rather than the remark being totally meaningless. In fact, the puzzling thing for them would be not that the remark strikes them as meaningless but they understand it and wonder what prompted its utterance in these circumstances. Finally, the sense of ‘real F’ cannot be equated with ‘not a G’, since the remark that is it is a real F would be false even if it was in fact not a G, but was not a real F in some other way, not there and then thought of. (3) Austin also says that ‘real’ is what he calls an adjuster word, an expression that adjusts the use of words to fit new circumstances. He claims that ‘like’ is the ‘great adjuster word’. Unfortunately, the notion of an adjuster word is totally vague. Further, it is hard to see how ‘like’ is an adjuster word. When someone remarks that the son is like his father, there is no obvious way in which linguistic use is being adjusted. Rather, a fact of resemblance is being recorded. Austin’s example for ‘real’ is coming across an animal that is like a pig but does not quite behave as pigs do. So, according to Austin we adjust our language by resolving the predicament by saying – it is like a pig but is not a real pig. What this does not explain at all is why we should on the basis of the

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facts as given by Austin decide that it is not a pig, but merely like a pig, and if that is our verdict why that cannot be encoded by simply saying that the animal is not a pig. If it is not a pig then of course it is not a real pig, but there is no convincing example here of ‘real’ being the word that makes an adjustment. I hope these remarks bring out genuine lacunae in this part of Austin’s linguistic analysis.5 [b] The main problem of S&S as I see it, I shall call the Problem of Ayer. Austin says at the beginning of S&S that he will ‘take as chief stalking-horse in the discussion Professor A.J. Ayer’s The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge’ (Austin 1962: 1). Austin adds that he will also look at the works of Price and Warnock. What Austin then says is this; ‘I find in these texts a great deal to criticize, but I choose them for their merits and not their deficiencies; they seem to me to provide the best available expositions of the approved reasons for holding theories which are at least as old as Heraclitus – more full, coherent, and terminologically exact than you find, for example, in Descartes or Berkeley’ (ibid.). One has to wonder whether this remark should be treated as a joke. In the first place, although one might not look to Descartes to convey the real grounds for the sensedatum tradition, there surely is in Berkeley material which is more deeply considered and cogently presented than the arguments that Ayer himself assembles. Further, what of the leading sense-datum exponents of the twentieth century, such as Russell, Moore and Broad? One hardly justifies selecting Ayer by remarking, even if it were true, that he is better than the eighteenth century Berkeley. Why is that the right comparison? The truth is that once Austin gets to work on Ayer’s discussion he has no difficulty in revealing it as incredibly speedy, more or less incoherent, and a mass of terminological confusions. This actually amounts to telling us that Ayer is not in fact better than his predecessors, but is, I would be inclined to say, a whole lot worse. It therefore totally undercuts Austin’s cited reason for selecting him as his stalking-horse. But the more important problem of Ayer (for S&S) is that the approach to the problem of perception that Ayer expounds is incredibly bad. We can say, I want to suggest, that Austin’s project of dissolving the problem of perception, or of ushering the sense-datum theory from the stage of serious thought, is doomed once he decides to concentrate on Ayer. It is impossible to establish anything significant about a long-standing tradition in philosophy by trouncing what is an especially bad exposition of it.

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Ayer’s approach

Is it fair to say that Ayer’s approach is very unsatisfactory? Now, I cannot here provide a close textual analysis of Ayer’s discussion. I shall instead highlight some elements in his argument, the idea being that these highlighted elements should strike anyone as more or less totally incredible. In Chapter 1 of The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge Ayer sketches and evaluates the traditional argument from illusion. According to him the argument runs: [a] We sometimes directly perceive sense-data; for example when, as we say, we see a straight stick in water which looks bent. [b] If [a] is true then we always directly perceive sense-data. This is so because [i] the stick type cases are indistinguishable from other cases, [ii] these different experiences form a series, and [iii] what we perceive always depends on us, the subjects. Given [a] and [b], it follows that [c] we always perceive sense-data. However, Ayer’s official view is that we should not accept this argument, or as he himself tends to put it, we should not accept it if it is understood as purporting to support a factually informative conclusion. Ayer introduces his framework by very early on indicating that it is a serious question whether the debate is about factual matters. That the whole debate might be linguistic is, surely, a rather remarkable idea. However, it should be said at this point that Ayer is in agreement with Austin about the effectiveness of the traditional argument from illusion understood as it normally is, a fact that Austin’s criticisms of Ayer disguise. Ayer himself opposes both premises in the argument above. He first attacks the support for [b]. One point he makes is that reason [i] for supporting [b] is dubious because why should not experiences of different sorts of things be indistinguishable? Austin, in S&S, illustrates this with his marvellous example of the lemon and the bar of soap, but the general point is already there in Ayer. So far so good for Ayer’s evaluation of the argument. However, Ayer devotes more effort to criticizing type [iii] support for [b]. Ayer’s understanding of this bit of support is that we would say that the way material objects are is causally independent of us, but what we perceive is always causally dependent on us, so we never perceive material objects. His reason for rejecting this argument is that the only meaning possessed by the claim that objects are the way they are causally independent of us is one conveyed by a phenomenalist

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reduction, saying roughly that if we had been in a certain position we would have had a certain experience. He says that if this is what it means then it does not support [b]. But it should strike anyone that Ayer here simply assumes that something like phenomenalism is correct, and also completely overlooks a far simpler response to the argument. The obvious point is that the character of experience and appearance can causally depend on the subject, without that implying that it is not an experience of a material (and hence causally independent) thing.6 Put briefly, Ayer already has a dubious framework in place, and his own criticisms of the argument from illusion are beginning to rest on quite eccentric supplementary philosophical convictions, and further he overlooks quite commonsensical responses to the argument. But on Ayer’s view even acceptance of premise [a] is not obligatory. We can develop a sense of Ayer’s attitude by considering the case of the straight stick that looks bent. Very crudely, Ayer’s response is that this is a case requiring sense-data as objects rather than material things only if the material thing, the stick, is straight and not bent. But the judgement that it is straight is a ‘supplementary assumption’ that can be dropped. So Ayer thinks that the ordinary argument can be evaded even as regards point [a] by abandoning these assumptions. Further, as he puts it, these assumptions cannot be supported, and the disagreement between someone who makes them and someone who denies them is not factual, since they agree on the actual sensible appearances. Now, at this point Ayer is endorsing the weird view that whether a stick is actually bent or straight is not a factual matter. Since it obviously is a factual issue it merely follows that Ayer’s understanding of being factual is seriously off track. So, again, Ayer’s reply rests on a quite unbelievable bit of philosophy, and, again, it can be pointed out, he completely fails to consider far simpler and more common sense ways to reject premise [a]. Thus we can wonder why a ‘directly perceived’ straight stick could not look bent. What Ayer famously does at this point is to conclude that there is no disagreement about matters of fact and say that it is about linguistic choice. He then resolves the issue by arguing that the pragmatically best choice is to adopt the language of sense-data, the reason being that ordinary language is ambiguous. Ayer in fact fails to locate any real defects in ordinary language, and moreover fails to notice that if our epistemological concerns make it helpful for us to have ways to record the character of experience in a way that does not entail the existence of physical objects then we can do so by using ordinary appearance language. Moreover, it is one thing to talk about adopting the

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‘sense-datum language’, quite another to know what it is. Ayer’s discussion is going from bad to worse. Of course, Austin effectively highlights plenty of these absurdities, but he does not ask why the argument is going in such an odd direction. He also, of course, does not conclude that he should not be focussing on Ayer. Why does Ayer move in such an odd way? The answer in part is that Ayer was reacting to a line of criticism of the sense-datum theory that had been propounded by G.A. Paul in a famous article (1960). Paul’s central claim was that although philosophers arguing in favour of sensedata think of themselves as showing that a certain type of entity exists this conviction is an illusion. It is according to Paul impossible to maintain that interpretation of the issue because there is no clear empirical way of determining what the truth of the debate is. Paul suggested that all they are doing is insisting on using a new bit of language. Ayer’s approach is an attempt to finesse this criticism. He agrees that it is a linguistic issue, but holds that that does not make it arbitrary or pointless. Rather, philosophers have finally appreciated what the issue is, and, moreover, there are good reasons to adopt the sense-datum language. Ayer seems to have thought that he is following Paul’s point. In fact he is really failing to appreciate that it is intended as a deadly criticism of the whole debate. What is clear, I suggest, is that Ayer is involved in a whole series of confusions, but is also developing a reading of the debate that is highly eccentric. The inevitable conclusion is, I believe, that he should not have been Austin’s stalking-horse.

10.4

Austin’s approach

I have been arguing that there should be no temptation to regard Austin as having properly investigated the traditional philosophical debates about perception. Now, one response to this claim is to remind us that Austin did locate serious weaknesses in the traditional arguments. That is undoubtedly true, and I myself would recommend anyone thinking about the traditional arguments to read Chapter 5 of S&S. Austin was a superb critic. However, Austin’s purpose is to propose and support a general conception of the traditional philosophy of perception, and my point is that we should be sceptical about his satisfactorily achieving that. What is Austin’s approach? This is how Austin puts it: I am not then – and this is a point to be clear about from the beginning – going to maintain that we ought to be ‘realists’, to

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embrace that is the doctrine that we do perceive material things (or objects). This doctrine would be no less scholastic than its antithesis. The question, do we perceive material things or sense-data, no doubt looks very simple – too simple – but is entirely misleading (cp. Thales’ similarly vast and over-simple question, what the world is made of). (Austin 1962: 3–4) It is clearly true that one legitimate response to some questions is to reject the question and not to answer it. Questions can suffer from different defects. Sometimes a question rests on assumptions that are false, sometimes the categories employed in the question are unacceptable ones. Austin’s attitude towards the problem of perception seems to be of the latter kind. One difficulty in assessing Austin’s approach is that he only sketches it. He describes the question as ‘too simple’ and ‘entirely misleading’ but these descriptions are a little bit ‘soft’. They leave it open quite what intellectual obligations Austin is under to support his claim. One thing that is clear is that weaknesses in how philosophers have tried to answer a question are not themselves problems with the question itself. So Austin’s attitude is not supported by the many criticisms he makes of the arguments that Ayer uses. What then has Austin to say about the question itself? He seems to have two main points in the first two chapters. He says this: ‘One of the most important points to grasp is that these two terms, “sense-data” and “material things”, live by taking in each other’s washing – what is spurious is not one term of the pair, but the antithesis itself’ (ibid.: 4). This is a striking remark, characteristic of Austin’s brilliant and witty style, but is it actually true? One would have thought that when philosophers introduce the category ‘material object’ they do not do so by stressing that to qualify as such a thing must not be a sense-datum, but rather stress features that space-occupying things such as tables and chairs and pens etc., should share. This may or may not result in an acceptable highly general notion, but it is surely eccentric to suggest that it might fail because it ‘takes in the washing’ of, that is, in some way depends on, the notion of sense-data. Equally, the technical term ‘sense-data’ stands for a postulated type of mental entity, and its elucidation would hardly centre on the highly general notion of a material object. This is not to say that either category is satisfactory, but it is to express some scepticism that they can be argued to be unsatisfactory because they illicitly depend on each other, as Austin appears to suggest. The question that Austin picks out also contains the term ‘perceives’ which can hardly be regarded as an unsatisfactory term, but in the course

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of discussion that term is usually replaced by the complex expression ‘directly perceives’, and in Chapter 2 Austin scrutinizes that complex expression. Austin’s procedure in that chapter is to make a series of remarks about the ordinary interpretation of ‘directly perceives’, and to conclude that ‘it is quite plain that the philosophers’ use of “directly perceives”, whatever it may be, is not the ordinary, or any familiar, use; for in that use it is not only false but simply absurd to say that such objects as pens or cigarettes are never perceived directly. But we are given no explanation or definition of this new use’ (ibid.: 19). Whether or not Austin’s remarks about the ordinary interpretation of ‘directly perceives’ are correct, his final remark here is true. Philosophers standardly introduce ‘directly perceives’ (or other related expressions) without a definition. But from that fact we cannot really draw any conclusions about the interpretation of the expression. It leaves us having to decide whether it means anything on the basis of scrutinizing how philosophers use it. In this respect it is like many expressions that philosophers employ. We might say that Austin’s contrast between its ordinary use and its use by philosophers establishes that the philosopher’s use is a technical one, if it is a satisfactory one. That it is a technical use does not in itself mean it is a deficient or unintelligible use. Something else that Austin alludes to is the generality of the question. He compares it to Thales’ question as to what the world is made of, which he describes as ‘vast and over simple’. It is not that Austin explicitly draws any conclusion from the fact that is it highly general, but he does mention it. There is, in fact, no obvious reason to describe Thales’ very general question as defectively general, and no obvious reason to think that general questions are problematic. Another point that Austin makes about the question is that ‘there is no one kind of thing that we “perceive” but many different kinds ... : pens are in many ways though not in all ways unlike rainbows, which are in many ways though not in all ways unlike after-images ... ’ (ibid.: 4). In effect here Austin is pointing out that the question as it is posed offers a false choice. The question assumes there are two possible answers but there are, according to Austin, many more answers. I do not want to prolong this discussion by disputing Austin’s current comment, but it raises the following question; by what right does Austin identify the debate he is investigating with the task of answering that particular question? It clearly sheds no light at all on an abiding tradition of philosophical discussion that a certain question is in some way defective, if that question has no right to be regarded as what that tradition is answering. Then its defects are quite irrelevant to the tradition. And prompted by

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this worry the obvious thing to say is that the basic issue raised by the tradition is, surely, whether, as one might put it, we should count sense data as objects of awareness in all perceptual experience. Using Austinian terminology (which is perhaps not now politically correct) that is the issue that wears the trousers. This basic issue should not be regarded as committing itself to there being just one sort of thing, namely material objects, that are the objects of awareness if the sense-datum approach is rejected. It turns out, I am suggesting, that should there be serious defects in the question that Austin cites that would be quite irrelevant to the approach he is really concerned with evaluating. It is no comfort to Austin or his defenders to respond that the people he is criticizing did say that the supposedly objectionable question is their question. That would merely represent a mistake on their part, and not a major defect in their whole intellectual enterprise. I am suggesting that the arguments that I read Austin as providing for his general attitude to the philosophical tradition he is engaging with are lacking in merit. Now, it would be open to someone more sympathetic than I am to Austin to deny that the remarks I am criticizing are arguments. I am, it may be said, reading that into these early Austinian passages. It has to be conceded that the present discussion may overestimate their intended role. However, it is a defect in Austin’s discussion that we cannot decide what are the arguments. Moreover, it leaves the general reading of the debate that Austin offers unsupported. What does Austin really think of the philosophical tradition he is dealing with? I have been assuming, guided by the way that he puts it early in S&S, that he regards the central question as defective. Against that opinion I have proposed that Austin shows no such thing. Maybe, though, this is not the right way to read him. What Austin certainly thought was that the tradition of philosophical argument in favour of sense-data had unearthed no serious or respectable evidence or reasons in support of their view. In Austin’s view the traditional philosophy of perception was no worse in this regard than traditional philosophy as a whole. As Austin says; ‘(I say “scholastic”, but I might as well have said “philosophical”; over-simplification, schematization, and constant obsessive repletion of the same small range of jejune “examples”.)’ (Austin 1962: 3). Putting it very crudely, Austin thought that traditional philosophy consisted of clever people thinking ineffectively. Now, in this view Austin, to some extent, converged with Wittgenstein, and that is one element that give rise to the idea, mentioned earlier, that there was shared between them a new conception of how to do philosophy. The other element was that for both of them good philosophy

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should concern itself with analysing, in some sense, ordinary language. But this agreement disguised considerable differences. In the first place, Austin gives no indication of thinking that it is totally impossible to do traditional philosophy well, whereas Wittgenstein certainly gives the impression of supposing that it is impossible to do old philosophy well; doing it is akin to being ill or trapped. Wittgenstein evidently supposes that he can support this attitude, that is, that he has to hand some good reasons to view old philosophy this way. In the second place, Wittgenstein’s view is that we should attend to ordinary language as part of the task of exorcising traditional philosophy, whereas Austin focuses on it in part because he presumably believed intelligent people can analyse language well, but also partly because he happened to be interested in it. It used to seem to me that Wittgenstein’s conception of good philosophy is superior to Austin’s in that Wittgenstein’s approach springs from a deep critical analysis of traditional philosophy whereas Austin’s does not. That now strikes me as the opposite of the truth; it is a myth to suppose that Wittgenstein has a deep critical analysis of philosophy, whereas Austin’s attitude is built on the very reasonable observation that so much traditional philosophy is methodologically weak – a case in point being the sorts of arguments that he scrutinizes in S&S.7 One might put the contrast this way; Austin thought traditional philosophers were bad, Wittgenstein thought traditional philosophy was bad. Where do these (not fully supported) observations get us in thinking about Austin as a philosopher of perception? I have expressed some sympathy for Austin’s, as opposed to Wittgenstein’s, attitude to traditional philosophy. And we can say that Austin does bring out in S&S that Ayer’s case for sense-data is, not to put too fine a point of it, very bad, thereby confirming, to some extent, his attitude towards philosophers. The problems with S&S that remain, though, and which I have tried to bring out, are, expressed in a very compressed form, these: Austin’s book purports to be an evaluation of a traditional way of thinking about perception, but he devotes hardly any effort to properly articulating the tradition, distinguishing within the tradition different approaches, and he does not try to discern its appeal. He makes no effort to properly scrutinize the arguments which that tradition concerned itself with overall. He basically restricts himself to pulling apart the very idiosyncratic version devised by Ayer. This does not amount to evaluating the tradition. But, further, when he becomes more positive himself, his analysis of the relevant language we do employ is by no means without its own problems.

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Reading S&S is a wonderful experience because in it we encounter Austin’s remarkable critical intelligence. It is not, though, exemplary philosophy. The somewhat ironic lesson, or subtext, of this paper is that Austin himself shared the fallibilities of the philosophers he treated so harshly.

10.5

Conclusion

I think that there is a real difficulty in getting Austin’s philosophical achievements in focus. The difficulty, I suggest, springs from the existence of two opposite pulls. On the one side it is obvious that Austin had a quite extraordinary critical intelligence. Further, he certainly evolved interesting ideas about the uses of language and speech acts. In the other direction it can be said that he wrote little, and that a fair amount of what he wrote is somewhat idiosyncratic, superficial and fairly dubious. This contradictory pull induces real cognitive dissonance, to which it seems to me, one response is to retain the conviction that the criticisms of Austin I have made just have to be unfair. A better response, I believe, is to recognize that for all his critical brilliance Austin was not infallible, and when trying to do constructive philosophy he often went wrong, and when being critical he could fail to get to the heart of the philosophical issue. Our picture of Austin the philosopher needs to encompass these complexities, just as our picture of Austin’s personality needs to encompass the evident complexities of the man himself.8

Notes 1. Amusingly, neither Austin nor Wittgenstein had much time for each other, and the picture of convergence was very much the product of those we might call followers, notably the followers of Austin. 2. Austin’s aversion to publication extended not only to his own publishing but to that of others, and it was shared by others in his group of which he was the centre. In his talk to the conference Searle reported that Austin was very much put out by the publication of Strawson’s book Individuals, as was Grice. Austin seems to have actively discouraged people from publishing. 3. See the papers in Fann (ed.) 1969. 4. Given how Austin uses ‘trouser word’ the brief summary he should have given is that ‘not real’ is a trouser word and ‘real’ is not a trouser-word. 5. In Bennett (1966) many other serious doubts are raised about Austin’s account of ‘real’. 6. The argument against which Ayer brings his phenomenalism is really no better than the following argument; the existence of food does not depend on me; what I eat depends on me; so I do not eat food.

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7. The saddest and most revealing thing to emerge, I think, at the Austin conference is that shortly before his death Austin said to his sister that he felt he had wasted his talents by being a philosopher rather than having had a position of responsibility in which he could have achieved something real. I am inclined to link this judgement on his own life with the view he evidently held that on the whole philosophy, and so the subject to which he committed himself, is so badly done. 8. I wish to thank Brian Garvey for the invitation to attend the original conference, and for guidance during writing this paper. I learnt much from many people there, in particular Dr Ken Turner. I also wish to thank Mark Kalderon for discussions about Ayer, Austin and Paul that I have drawn on here.

11 Austin on Conceptual Polarity and Sensation Deception Metaphors Dale Jacquette

11.1

Austin’s methodology

J. L. Austin, in his 1947–1959 lectures, published as Sense and Sensibilia (1962), is concerned to expose ways in which language use can mislead us into making assumptions and drawing inferences in support of otherwise indefensible philosophical conclusions. Independently of his critique of once-fashionable sense-data theories, especially in H.H. Price’s Perception (1932), A.J. Ayer’s The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge (1940), and G.J. Warnock’s Berkeley (1953), Austin’s treatment of commonly adopted language reflecting attitudes toward the content and epistemic status of immediate sensation offers valuable insights into the exact role of experience in empirical knowledge. It is for this reason worthwhile to critically examine Austin’s characteristic method of linguistic philosophical analysis where it is most powerfully at work. In Sense and Sensibilia, lecture II, section 5, Austin patiently works through a variety of metaphors from ordinary speech that have influenced philosophical thinking about the alleged possibility of being doxastically and epistemically deceived in exercising the senses. If we cannot be literally deceived in acts of perception, then there is no argument from the fact of deceptive perception or perceptual deceivability for an ontic difference between percepts and perceived objects. That counter-argument alone would not prove phenomenalism or sense-data theory false, although it should exert significant pressure on the theory to defend itself against the Cartesian objection that percepts are better or worse representations of mind-independent perceived objects, as the possibility of judgment’s being deceived about them might be thought to show.

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What Austin finds objectionable in the division between the mind’s perceptual representations of an external reality and the projected state of the world itself is not merely the standardly mentioned difficulty that we who would need to make such judgments are never in a position to compare the condition of a mind-independent reality with the mind’s perceptual representations of the external world. The problem Austin highlights is rather the widespread unexamined philosophical reliance on the possibility of perception’s being literally deceived as grounds for attributing justificatory priority, or greater, even incorrigible certainty, of percepts, ideas, sense-data, or sense-perceptions, over the fallible perception of sensible things, on the supposedly maximally secure epistemic foundations of which some theories of perception have proposed to build the strongest possible experiential theory of knowledge. Austin concludes that uses of deception cognates in speaking literally of perception are lexically unwarranted. Such applications of the terminology he argues can only be metaphorical, and philosophy takes a ruinous turn when it shifts, however unknowingly, from metaphorical to literal attributions of deception to the facts of perception. The objection, even supposing it to be adequately supported by Austin’s linguistic philosophical analysis, would not invalidate all types of phenomenalism in the philosophy of mind and epistemology. Austin has other things to say about sense-data theory elsewhere in his lectures, and not every word of Sense and Sensibilia is meant to take aim against every form of phenomenalism. Phenomenalism that denies the non-identity of, or ontic distance between, percept or perceptual content and perceived object seems exempt from the particular criticism offered in the passages singled out from Austin’s lecture II, section 5. Radical reductive phenomenalists like George Berkeley maintain that perceived objects are congeries of ideas. Berkeley in his first philosophical writings revisited later in his career was interested in how the mind perceives distance and three-dimensionality from curved retinal world-representational images. Sense-data theorists who are not also radical phenomenalists are free to consider how the brain constructs its ongoing cinematic representation of the world experienced by a conscious subject over any course of time. They may try to deflect questions about the correctness or otherwise of the mind’s representations of the world by such independent arguments as that we cannot speak of positive correspondences between percepts and perceived objects if our only contact with perceived objects is in and through the medium of our percepts. Austin and radical reductive phenomenalism of Berkeleyan stamp, though not all forms of sense-data theory, are largely

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in agreement on this basic issue, if on little else. We find Austin making luminous use of subtle distinctions in ordinary language expressions in order to avoid what may otherwise seem to be deeply entrenched philosophical confusions. In this part of lecture II, he disparages the natural, but he believes, philosophically disastrous, descent from metaphorical to literal descriptions of deception in or by the senses that threatens to drive a wedge between the greater epistemic sanctity of ideas or sense-data, the percepts, contents or ideas of any moment of immediate perceptual experience, over knowledge of all potentially deceptive representational perceptions of a mind-independent perceptually accessible world of perceivable objects.1

11.2

Phenomenalism and the doctrine of sense-perception

It is a characteristic stratagem in the history of rationalist philosophical movements to cast doubt on the ability of sensation to deliver veridical information concerning the existence and state of a world outside the mind. Beginning with Zeno of Elea’s paradoxes of motion, change, and extension, through Plato’s disavowal of any genuine knowledge supported by sensation in the changing world of becoming, to René Descartes’s Meditations 2 demonstration of the better knowability to the rational mind than to the empirical senses of the same piece of wax, given conflicting experiential percepts, contents of immediate experience, or phenomenal ideas of the wax both before and after and all through the process by which it is melted, rationalists favour what is knowable a priori through unaided reason over less certain, comparatively epistemically disadvantaged, a posteriori empirical knowledge.2 Austin explodes what he considers to be misleading language uses ostensibly concerning the content and nature of perception, leaving any rationalist philosophy pursuing the above-mentioned strategy without support for its disparagement of the role of the senses in epistemic justification. Unlike Wittgenstein, Austin, as his methodology translates into practice, does not regard the enterprise of philosophy as a hopeless intellectual disorder from which relief can only be sought in a therapy afforded by painstaking case-by-case investigations of relevant philosophical grammars. Austin, again like Wittgenstein, also engages in a painstaking case-by-case investigation of linguistic usages in search of fine lexical and grammatical distinctions of philosophical utility. Austin proceeds without the later Wittgenstein’s apparatus of language games, pragmatically grounded forms of life, family resemblance predicates, or the like, and with rather a different purpose in view.3 He appeals time

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and again to commonsense judgment to gain traction for his discussion of the problematic reliability of perception in relation to the challenges of understanding the epistemic implications of the suggestion that there can be literal deception in falsely representative perceptions of objects experienced in exercising the senses, from which the corresponding percepts themselves may be exempt: what is said here [by philosophers, in contrast with ‘the plain man’] about deception. We recognize, it is said, that ‘people are sometimes deceived by their senses’, though we think that, in general, our ‘senseperceptions’ can ‘be trusted’. (Austin 1962: 11) Austin’s methodology begins with and relies heavily throughout on what ‘is said’. This formula, appealing to accepted or familiar, sometimes idealized, colloquial usage concerning the senses, appears twice in the opening paragraph of this section of the lectures. Discourse as we find and collect it in the wild from ordinary language users is a valuable first source of data for philosophical reflection in Austin’s inquiry. Austin does not accept ‘plain man’ talk about such matters as perception uncritically. It is always easy to find ordinary ways of speaking about things that are muddled and conceptually ungrounded in the general population, unless these infractions of meaning are corrected by philosophical reconstruction. Austin nevertheless seems to regard ordinary usages in relation to the expression of putative philosophical problems as freighted with potentially insightful semantic implications and presuppositions that may be indispensible for a rewarding, careful and discerning effort at philosophical discovery through the portal of colloquial language. Austin directs attention toward established usage in everyday discourse about sense-perception, and the associated analogies borrowed from ordinary language. He questions the legitimacy of attributing talk of deception and references to a perceiving subject’s being deceived when there is thought to be disagreement between representational perceptual content and the mind-independent, mind-external perceived objects represented veridically or otherwise in moments of a perceiving subject’s experience. He concludes that doubtful philosophical theories of perception historically and in his own time have been hazardously built on these improperly understood linguistic conventions. He criticizes any type of phenomenalist foundationalism that favours the epistemically irreproachable status of percepts over perceived objects in particular as committing this kind of error.

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Pre-philosophical discourse provides a standard against which Austin measures the need, appropriateness, or otherwise, and advantages or disadvantages of departing from ordinary usages when a resulting philosophical theory stands significantly at odds with everyday conceptions and colloquial descriptions of the same relevant phenomena. Thus, Austin continues: Now first, though the phrase ‘deceived by our senses’ is a common metaphor, it is a metaphor; and this is worth noting, for in what follows the same metaphor is frequently taken up by the expression ‘veridical’ and taken very seriously. (Austin 1962: 11) The plain man as well as the jaded philosopher, despite Austin’s unsupported generalization, might equally speak of being deceived by one’s senses. Austin insists that whenever, wherever, and by whomever the phrase is used, the meaning of sense deception predications is never literal, but always metaphorical. A hint that such metaphorical uses can potentially mislead philosophical thinking is offered when Austin mentions that the same metaphor is contrasted with the philosopher’s technical, non-plain-man talk about veridical ‘sense-perceptions’. If the senses can get things wrong, deceiving us, then logically or conceptually they must also be capable in principle of getting things right. The paired concepts go together as opposed polar possibilities in a kind of conceptual duality, perceptual deception being thinkable only if veridical perception is thinkable. The philosopher’s sense-perceptions (‘ideas’ in the early British empiricist tradition, ‘sense data’ and ‘percepts’ in the early twentieth century tradition’s later development), on such an assumption, must also be capable of getting things right. If we can be deceived by the mind’s representations of an outside world, we can also be told the exact truth. Austin thinks that neither sense deception or veridicality is literally meaningful. Ignoring or passing invalidly from the mere metaphorical meaning of an original statement, philosophers are drawn ineluctably to elide the grounding metaphor and take the expression literally in contrasting perceptual deception involving perceived objects with non-deceptive, non-deceiving veridical sense-perceptions. These are the percepts, perceptual contents, ideas, and the like, themselves. They are the experiential atoms beyond which perception cannot further reach, from which empiricists have sometimes sought to reconstruct a world as mosaic assemblages of immediately perceivable ideas. This, according to Austin’s understanding of the situation, is where philosophical trouble

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leading down the slippery path to an insupportable phenomenalist epistemic foundationalism begins. The limited value of the metaphor of sense deception is first explained: ‘In fact,’ Austin says, ‘of course, our senses are dumb – though Descartes and others speak of “The testimony of the senses”, our senses do not tell us anything, true or false’ (1962: 11). The senses are not even dumb, if Austin is correct, for that would suggest if not presuppose or imply that the senses could talk, communicate, or convey enlanguaged information, under the right circumstances, and this is what Austin emphatically wants to deny. If the senses cannot talk, then of necessity neither can they literally deceive, no more than, by virtue of the deceptive-veridical polarity, they can, contrarily, be truthful, honest, reliable, or veridical. The metaphor is misleading and plunges us into irretrievable philosophical misunderstanding once we take the fatal first misstep. As a communicator, I can deceive another intelligent subject by lying or otherwise misrepresenting the truth in a speech-act. Whereas the senses, according to Austin, are incapable of doing any of these things. They cannot lie, for they cannot speak at all, but are inexorably ‘dumb’. The senses are not even mute in correct practice, for that would entail a debility of their normal ability to speak and literally tell us things about the world, which Austin believes emphatically is equally meaningless. Austin rejects these implications alike as unintelligible, and protests against the philosophical confusions that such loose unsupported metaphorical descriptions engender, culminating in what he finds to be a problematic foundationalism of individual percepts epistemically favoured in status over direct perceptual knowledge of perceived objects.

11.3 Do my eyes deceive me? Literal versus metaphorical deception ascriptions Austin evidently assumes that in order for our senses to ‘deceive’ (as opposed to veridically ‘inform’) us about the state of the external world, they would have to be capable of telling us that the world is in a certain state. Since our senses are not intelligent intending agents capable of speech-acts, they do not literally tell us anything, according to Austin, and hence neither can they literally deceive. What it is to tell someone something is unfortunately not examined in Austin’s lectures. In consequence, we do not know very clearly from the text why (as it appears) Austin believes that to deceive implies to (deliberately?) tell someone something false.

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Why could there not be two kinds or categories of literal deception, one wonders – deliberate or intentional and non-deliberate or non-intentional? Why should it only be the deliberate or intentional kind of deception that deserves to be called literal, while any other mention of deception must be considered metaphorical? Would the telling of a non-truth be sufficient for Austin to consider a person unintentionally spreading false rumours to be engaged in deception? We say that a clock tells the time. Is this kind of statement meant literally or only metaphorically? How are we to know? Is there supposed to be something conceptually iterative or redundant in the expression ‘deliberate deception’? Or are there other ways to tell someone something? The fact that Austin is not especially forthcoming as to how these segments of his analysis are supposed to be connected together does not prevent his readers from questioning the exact meaning of ‘deception’ in the exposition. Crucially, it would be important especially to know whether or not deception implies deliberate intention or merely whatever experientially brings about a false belief about the state of the perceived world. What is it, finally, to ‘tell’ someone something? Is telling an exclusively linguistic action or speech-act? Can we do so with pictures or signs that can be interpreted in a language but do not themselves constitute a specifically linguistic usage? Can we do so in the course of blazing a pathway through a forest by occasionally marking trees, among limitlessly other ways? Any of these practices might communicate meaning within or outside the conventions of language. The activity might always in principle communicate something that could then be interpreted linguistically with minimal distortion of meaning as a true or false proposition. I can literally deceive you, one might intuitively suppose, not by affirming false propositions in the usual fashion and delivering them in speech-acts for your consumption, but by marking objects in the world according to an accepted convention but contrary to expectations. I can blaze the trees on a route other than the one you are expecting to follow toward another destination, thus leading you literally to wander astray in the wrong direction. Did I then also tell you by making the blazes that the route was along the track falsely indicated by the blazes? It would then not literally tell you anything, although it would be as though each one falsely said, ‘This is the right way to go.’ Is the marking of a tree a speech-act? If so, would it be literal or metaphorical? Or do such efforts to deceive belong to another more subtly distinguishable category altogether? These are important questions in evaluating the conclusions of Austin’s investigation,

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for which no straightforward answers seem to be immediately forthcoming. What are the essentials? First, I need not tell you specifically anything in order to deceive you. If I knowingly issue a false and inflammatory news report, then I will be telling all the viewers and listeners within the reach of a general broadcast, and not specifically the persons who may actually turn out to be deceived by my bogus announcements. Similarly in the case of the deliberately misleading blazes on a choice of trees, marking their bark in an obvious or conventionally well-understood way. The markings may mislead someone, but anyone making the blazes need not have in mind any particular subject as a potential victim of the route’s misrepresentation. To tell someone something seems to involve communicating information or misinformation, where to communicate such content in either case appears in one sense to involve transmitting prepropositional content along an information communication channel. The false trail marked by blazing the wrong set of trees does not seem to satisfy these intuitive requirements for telling another subject something false. If we can be non-intentionally or non-deliberately deceived, as when someone tells me something the speaker sincerely believes to be true that turns out in fact to be false, then why should we not say that our senses can also non-intentionally or non-deliberately communicate information or misinformation to the mind’s faculties of judgment, memory, inference, calculation, imagination, emotional response, and the like, in the sense of transmitting prepropositional content along a communication channel, from the eyes, ears, olfactory, auditory and tactile sense organs, along their appropriate nerve networks, for processing of the information or misinformation content they deliver to the brain? What if no one makes identical-appearing ‘blazes’ that I follow faithfully through the woods in the wrong direction, given my purposes, but the marks occur naturally on the trees, perhaps biochemically, or perhaps as a result of Hilary Putnam’s unwitting Winston Churchill image-making ants (Putnam 1982). Can I not say then with many an Austinian plain man that I was deceived by the marks on the trees into thinking that the path I wanted lay in one direction rather than another? No one, no person, in that case, has told me anything. Was I nevertheless not genuinely deceived by the marks on the trees? By analogy, can a physician not also be literally deceived by a misleading natural appearance of clearly perceived visible symptoms as to their cause? Do not plain pre-philosophical men and women talk in just this way, concerning the

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cause of a certain disease deceptively manifesting itself, say, as a particular skin condition, when the cause is actually instead another similarly or even identically presenting disease? The marks on the trees mistakenly interpreted as blazes marking the expected trail in fact contain misinformation that can have the effect of misleading judgment. The very fact that just these trees are naturally coloured, marked or disfigured in this way by fungus or parasite, perhaps, is cognitively informative, even if my faculty of judgment interprets the information in a way that does not finally serve my purposive needs. Could we not also meaningfully conclude that the marks on the trees tell me that the direction their placement suggests might be the route I want, even without supposing that trees can talk? What would make such usage metaphorical rather than literal? To argue that telling is strictly the prerogative of intelligent linguistic communicators is to beg the question in favour of Austin’s exclusionary conclusion. The implication could induce Austin’s sceptics to rethink the question whether it is correct to explain literal deception as a literal speech-act telling of propositional falsehoods, to predetermine the truth of Austin’s conclusions against sense deception metaphors, and to render his ordinary language objections to any phenomenalist foundationalism of epistemically favoured percepts over perceived objects viciously circular. Whether such ‘tellings’ are literal or metaphorical depends on what we mean by the cluster of related terms surrounding the use especially of ‘telling’ and ‘being told’, a matter about which Austin offers no explicit guidance. We do not know, for example, whether we are speaking literally or only metaphorically in Austin’s judgment when we make use of such familiar idioms as saying that a person is self-deceived, that someone has deceived him- or herself, and may go on then to try to deceive others, say, concerning their musical or mathematical ability, popularity, or the like. Would persons have to tell themselves something false out loud or in writing in order to literally deceive themselves? If I can literally deceive myself, especially without actually literally telling myself anything, then why cannot my eyes, which are manifestly a part of myself, be involved in other incidents of literal deception? Might there not be even more kinds and subcategories of deception than Austin seems willing here to countenance? Some types of broadly conceived self-deception could then presuppose a person’s literally being speech-act told something false, even by the person him- or herself, while others would not presuppose a person’s literally being told something false. Why not extend the Austinian

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largesse of kinds and categories of meanings of terms and the range of legitimate linguistic usages to include both telling and non-telling kinds of deception? Austin himself, after all, writes: [O]nce again there is no neat and simple dichotomy between things going right and things going wrong; things may go wrong, as we really all know quite well, in lots of different ways—which don’t have to be, and must not be assumed to be, classifiable in any general fashion. (Austin 1962: 13) Austin seems to impose rigor on chaos selectively in arguing that literal deception is a matter of literally telling falsehoods. Classification into literal and metaphorical usages is supposed to be manageable, so that non-plain talk of extra-speech-act sensory deception and veridicality can be clearly, unequivocally distinguished as merely metaphorical and never literal. Considered in itself, Austin’s position to all appearances is logically coherent if insufficiently motivated. The question is why anyone else should want to agree with his conclusions. How can Austin justify his resolute classification of talk, plain or otherwise, of deceitful perceptions, sensations or the senses, as metaphorical rather than literal? If, as also appears, Austin’s argument depends on plain pre-philosophical talk about perception and deception, his disregard for equally public plain pre-philosophical talk about the senses sometimes literally deceiving their possessors seems to reflect a theoretical or ideological prejudice, rather than the outcome of applying an objective method of inquiry and letting the chips fall where they may.

11.4 From metaphorical deception to literal sense-perception (‘ideas’) The philosophical problem that Austin believes results from speaking of deception where there is no literal telling, and consequently no opportunity for lying or linguistically misrepresenting the truth in what is supposed to be transmission of representationally correct information, occurs when we lose sight of the grounding metaphor in such usages, and start to take further grammatically related applications literally. This step is supposed to be the crucial mistake in the reasoning that Austin criticizes. It is the improper transition from a metaphorical use of ‘deceive’ to a literal sense of experiencing the opposite of veridical sense-perceptions, in philosophical jargon, that must be most closely considered.

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Suppose we grant Austin’s unargued assumption that to be deceived is to be told something false, in the sense of being made the subject recipient of a deliberate speech act transfer of misinformation. Then it is a foregone conclusion that there is no literal deception where there is no literally being deliberately told something false. If only we knew better what this is supposed to mean. We must then ask why deliberate intent is necessary, either for being told something false or for being deceived. Austin does not fill in all of the connections between some of the moments of his critique of phenomenalism. If the unexplained concept of telling someone something untrue is correctly understood as amounting to deliberately transmitting false propositional content along a communication channel, then there must be some justification for excluding non-deliberate transmission of false information along a communication channel. For this is literally what normally functioning sense organs and connecting neurophysiology do in bringing misinformation about the state of the world to the human brain’s faculties of judgment. We should be able to conclude contra Austin, then, and in agreement with at least some plain person thought and talk, that we are sometimes literally though non-deliberately deceived by our senses. All that is needed then is the further assumption that there are different kinds of literal deception, different literal uses of the word, some of which are relevant to the faculty of judgment acting on an environmental information input stream collected by the five senses and channeled to the brain for processing. The results of such processing include actions, reactions, muscle behaviour of every sort, conscious thoughts, awareness of the occurrence and content of perceptions, memories, calculations, stirrings of emotion, and the gamut of psychological events, and exercise of information processing faculties related to perceptual experiences. Are there then occasions when we are not just metaphorically but literally deceived by our eyes, ears, or senses of taste, touch and smell? When we are not so deceived, rather than describing our senses as sometimes deceptive, we can speak literally again of our senses delivering correct information about the world, of being veridical, or representing the world in truthful or accurate positive representational correspondence with independently correlated properties of a putatively stable perceived mind-independent, mind-external object. If we fill in the gaps in Austin’s account as proposed, questioning whether being literally deceived implies being literally told something false by a thinking communicating subject in a speech act, presumably, generally, another person, as a deliberate deceiver, then we may reach conclusions that are radically opposed to Austin’s. We can do so, moreover, if we proceed in

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the most obvious way, by an extension of the same methods that Austin applies to discover and defend his diametrically opposed findings. Austin says that the senses cannot be deceived and therefore cannot be veridical. That percepts cannot be epistemically privileged over the perception of objects. He leaves the objection there as a gauntlet thrown down to phenomenalist epistemic foundationalism. We may want to go further, and add that it is judgment that sometimes misinterprets, misconstrues, and in a word misjudges and misapplies the epistemically neutral data delivered by the senses as prepropositional sensory information. This would solve a number of problems and place Austin in a respectable line of British Empiricist philosophers. Indeed, he would thereby make himself part of a noble lineage going back at least to Descartes, among philosophers of mind and knowledge who make sense input blameless of the false judgments and beliefs that arise entirely as a matter of inadequately overseen acts of will. Austin, however, nowhere encourages such a two-part reading of his remarks on perception deception metaphors. It is not clear from Austin’s lectures that the well-intentioned suggestion would be even remotely Austinian. If Austin is correct to categorize as merely metaphorical rather than literal uses of the ‘deceit’, ‘deceive’, ‘deception’ and ‘deceptive’ family of expressions in describing the relation between sense information input and empirical judgment, could we not make the same philosophical point merely by shifting to another choice of vocabulary? What if we said, not exactly with Austin’s ‘plain man’, but possibly with a theoretically more sophisticated but still ‘relatively plain philosopher’: ‘My eyes provide such information as to easily contribute to my mistaken judgment concerning the real state of conditions in the world, as determined by other more credible channels of information, including the communicated experiences of other reliable perceiving subjects’? Would this not be literally to produce the required conceptually respectable opposition of deceptive and veridical perception? Would it not constitute as sound or flimsy a support for the more sophisticated philosophical proposition that I am otherwise visited with literally veridical senseperceptions? The worm that gnaws at Austin’s sense of proper linguistic fit seems rather to be the phenomenalist epistemic foundationalist philosophical concept of phenomenologically introspectable sense-perceptions. References to such a sense-perception are roughly equivalent to – and in informal usage here we shall continue to consider them interchangeable in meaning with – references to a percept, Berkeleyan-Humean ‘idea’, Husserlian Noema, Brentanian-Twardowskian Inhalt der Vorstellung or

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thought ‘content’, and even ‘qualia’ in a broader than usual sense.4 Austin clarifies his conclusion that it is these concepts that are philosophical inventions not germane to the plain person’s thought and discourse: These entities [sense-perceptions], which of course don’t really figure at all in the plain man’s language or among his beliefs, are brought in with the implication that whenever we ‘perceive’ there is an intermediate entity always present and informing us about something else – the question is, can we or can’t we trust what it says? Is it ‘veridical’? But of course to state the case in this way is simply to soften up the plain man’s alleged views for the subsequent treatment; it is preparing the way for, by practically attributing to him, the so-called philosophers’ view. (Austin 1962: 11) We do not know whether or not Austin’s plain man also has figuring as background to his language use or as among his beliefs other theoretical terminology or concepts, such as those found in the higher reaches of well-established mathematics and natural science, not to mention philosophy. The mere absence of concepts and beliefs from the mythical plain man’s thinking should not be enough to justify eliminating references to sense-perceptions from philosophy, just as it presumably would not in the case of unpopularized concepts of higher mathematics and the natural sciences. We do not consider eliminating relativity physics from the research and teaching curriculum because the plain man does not think or express thoughts linguistically in those advanced scientific terms. Why then propose on the same grounds to eliminate sense-perceptions from philosophy? A plain and a technically proficient, articulate person can profit alike from linguistic and conceptual adjustments gained through practical interactions in another’s province. There is a linguistic cultural overlap at least of newly coined scientific words and phrases that increasingly proceeds in the wake of many communication channels, especially with the availability and speed of modern internet connection between technical and plain person linguistic communities. The plain thinker today has many more different concepts to think about than in Austin’s day, and what counts as plain thinking and speaking, as an evolving kind of living thing in the bio-socio linguistic sphere with a natural history of its own, therefore seems a weak reed to lean on in establishing such momentous technical philosophical conclusions as the refutation of phenomenalist epistemic foundationalism.

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We should not imagine that the cultural evolution of plain thinking and speaking in Austin’s sense in an active linguistic community would necessarily support the same judgments as to proper usage today as in the past. As illustration, we need look no further than the meaning of the word ‘machine’ from the nineteenth century to the present day. If the proper usage of ‘deceive’ and its cognates, for ‘tell’ and perhaps also ‘deliberate’ and ‘deliberately’ should change, then the question as to whether some form of phenomenalism might ultimately succeed as an explanation of sensation, perception, judgment, belief and the like, would need to be subjected to an updated Austinian analysis, in which one hopes Austin might reverse his previous criticisms in light of the new, more technically informed, plain man’s thought and vocabulary. We may find ourselves profoundly dissatisfied in case of either outcome, if we expect a philosophical consideration of the merits and prospects of phenomenalist foundationalism to be somehow more constant than the vicissitudes of ways in which Austin’s plain thinkers and speakers may come to find it natural to speak of literal non-deliberate deception.

11.5

Austin’s polarity predication principle

Austin now turns to what might be called a ‘polarity principle’. The idea is that if two concepts are related as polar opposites in meaning, then to attribute one of the concepts to an object makes sense if and only if it makes sense in principle or as a logical possibility to attribute the opposite duality-paired concept to the object. He explains: Next, it is important to remember that talk of deception only makes sense against a background of general non-deception. (You can’t fool all of the people all of the time.) It must be possible to recognize a case of deception by checking the odd case against more normal ones. If I say, ‘Our petrol-gauge sometimes deceives us’, I am understood: though usually what it indicates squares with what we have in the tank, sometimes it doesn’t – it sometimes points to two gallons when the tank turns out to be nearly empty. But suppose I say, ‘Our crystal ball sometimes deceives us’: this is puzzling, because really we haven’t the least idea what the ‘normal’ case – not being deceived by our crystal ball – would actually be. (Austin 1962: 11–12) Austin’s point is clear but not clearly correct. It reflects his commitment to the aforementioned polarity principle, whereby it makes sense to

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attribute occasional deceit to a presumed information source if and only if it makes sense to attribute veridical or non-deceitful or non-deceiving information deliverances. Wittgenstein deploys a version of the polarity principle in similar ways when he argues in Philosophical Investigations, as a point of philosophical grammar, that we cannot know that we are in pain because we cannot doubt that we are in pain, on the assumption that we can know something if and only if we can also doubt its truth (Wittgenstein 1953: §§ 246, 288, 303). The principle requires some finesse in application, because there are also counterinstances. Wittgenstein acknowledges in Zettel §395 that it makes sense to say we are pretending to be unconscious, despite not being able meaningfully to pretend being conscious if we are actually unconscious.5 What, however, if the crystal ball Austin mentions is sometimes (> 51% of the times it is consulted) interpreted as having truly predicted what is to happen in the future, and sometimes not (< 49%)? To say that one cannot fool all of the people all of the time does not exclude the possibility that we in particular have always been fooled, if, for example, we had been imprisoned from birth in an illusion-producing room, or like the prisoners in Plato’s allegory of the cave, described in Book VII of The Republic. Austin’s plain man begins to appear increasingly like the spokesperson for whatever views Austin wants to espouse, toward whatever final philosophical conclusions he is aiming. Is he right, given that he offers no supporting argument or evidence, to allege that the plain man, whom we have yet to meet outside of voicing Austin’s opinions, would not speak of being literally deceived by the senses? Is it not a colloquial catchphrase to utter such things as, ‘Do my senses deceive me, or is that my brother after all these years?’ If such uses are meant in a literal though non-deliberate sense of deception, then they can be denied of the plain thinker and speaker only by brute exclusion on the grounds that they seem to support a version of phenomenalist epistemic foundationalism that Austin wants to refute. Austin continues immediately following the previous quotation: The cases, again, in which a plain man might say he was ‘deceived by his senses’ are not at all common. In particular, he would not say this when confronted with ordinary cases of perspective, with ordinary mirror-images, or with dreams; in fact, when he dreams, looks down the long straight road, or at his face in the mirror, he is not, or at least is hardly ever, deceived at all. (Austin 1962: 12)

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Phenomenalist epistemic foundationalism depends for part of its philosophical motivation on assuming that Austin’s plain man can arrive at false judgments in acts of perception. It assumes the possibility of being deceived in some cases of perspective, mirror-images, dreams, and other perceptual falsely representational impressions. It seems reasonable to suppose on the contrary that a plain thinking and speaking person ‘would say’ that he or she is literally albeit nondeliberately deceived, non-deliberately deceived by the senses or in a perceptual episode. To the extent that sense-perception is judged non-deliberately deceptive, to that extent a plausible phenomenalism must imply the possibility of the perceiving subject being deceived by the senses. Austin holds as support for his criticism that the phenomenalists philosophical concept of a ‘sense-perception’ intervenes between the perceiving subject and object. The possibility of deceptive perception then threatens radical phenomenalism and phenomenalist epistemic foundationalism alike, because it argues for the possibility of a representational difference between perceived object and the content of corresponding sense-perceptions. To the very same extent phenomenalist epistemic foundationalism must then unmistakably lack adequate intuitive grounding in Austin’s plain man’s thoughts and speech acts. Is it true, however, that phenomenalism depends for its postulation of sense-perceptions on what the plain man would or would not say about the experience of perspective, mirror-images and dreams? What does the neo-Austinian plain thinking and speaking person think or say that would either decisively support or undermine the theoretical integrity and explanatory prospects of a radical phenomenalist epistemic foundationalism? The vital connection on which Austin relies here is finally undemonstrated, when he further adds, again without corroborating sociolinguistic evidence: This is worth remembering in view of another strong suggestio falsi – namely, that when the philosopher cites as cases of ‘illusion’ all these and many other very common phenomena, he is either simply mentioning cases which the plain man already concedes as cases of ‘deception by the senses’, or at any rate is only extending a bit what he would readily concede. In fact this is very far indeed from being the case. (Austin 1962: 12) Austin evidently has in mind the so-called ‘argument from illusion’ for phenomenalism. It is an effort at justification for the view originally

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developed by John Locke, Robert Boyle, Berkeley, and much later by Ernst Mach, C.D. Broad, Ayer, Warnock, and other so-called sense-data theorists in the philosophically more sophisticated continuation of this tradition.6 However, exploitation of the possibility of illusion, of nondeliberate deception by the senses, in the cause of a phenomenalist epistemic foundationalism, in no way assumes that most or even many sense experiences are illusory. Phenomenalist epistemic foundationalism seeks to explain the possibility of admitted illusions, for which any adequate philosophy of mind and knowledge must account, by positing sense-perceptions interposed between perceiving subject and perceived object. Sense-perceptions serve as a kind of intermediary mental picture or image of the object containing putative (true or false, veridical or the opposite) information or misinformation about the perceived object in causal contact with the body’s sense organs and transmitted for processing to the brain’s cognitive faculties. As Austin maintains: And even so – even though the plain man certainly does not accept anything like so many cases as cases of being ‘deceived by his senses’ as philosophers seem to – it would certainly be quite wrong to suggest that he regards all the cases he does accept as being of just the same kind. The battle is, in fact, half lost already if this suggestion is tolerated. Sometimes the plain man would prefer to say that his senses were deceived rather than that he was deceived by his senses – the quickness of the hand deceives the eye, &c. But there is actually a great multitude of cases here, at least at the edges of which it is no doubt uncertain (and it would be typically scholastic to try to decide) just which are and which are not cases where the metaphor of being ‘deceived by the senses’ would naturally be employed. (Austin 1962: 12–13) Austin rightly calls attention to the multiplicity of ways in which the plain thinker and speaker attributes deception to or by the senses. The number of such meanings, and the categories to which they might belong, is nevertheless irrelevant to the question of whether or not phenomenalist epistemic foundationalism is justified in positing epistemically favoured intermediary sense-perceptions between perceivers and perceived objects – the perceiver’s presumably representational ‘percepts’, ‘ideas’, ‘images’, or in more contemporary terminology, ‘qualia-laden contents of momentary acts of perceptual consciousness’.

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11.6 Austin’s plain man’s philosophically decisive non-philosophical talk about perception The two issues that preoccupy Austin in lecture II, section 5, of Sense and Sensibilia appear in fact to be mutually disjoint. Phenomenalist epistemic foundationalism does not depend for its motivation on either: (1) perceivers being sometimes literally deceived by their senses or (2) the number or percentage as opposed to the possibility of instances in which perceiving subjects are literally or metaphorically deceived by their senses. We may grant that Austin’s plain man’s talk about perception does not support the development of a phenomenalist epistemic foundationalism, in which self-justifying or extra-justificatory representational percepts, sense-perceptions, or ‘ideas’ are posited in order to explain the possibility of the senses sometimes being deceived or in turn deceiving judgment. The assumption marks not only a conceptual but ontic separation between a perceiver in a moment of perceiving and the correlated perceived object. Whether we choose to call it deception, literal, metaphorical, deliberate, non-deliberate, or prefer to withhold such terminology altogether, it is precisely the potential distance between the presumed representational content of a perceiver’s perceptions and what on other grounds is believed to be true of the perceived object that implies the possibility of the perceiver experiencing a misleading mental picture of an outside world. All that is needed then for the phenomenalist epistemic foundationalism that Austin is wont to refute is to add that, given the possibility of representational distance between percept and external object of perception, philosophy is advised to regard only percepts as perceived or immediately perceived, and to infer that the mind must therefore construct its concepts of sensible objects from the component ideas immediately encountered in moments of perception. The vagaries of ordinary ‘plain man’ linguistic usage in these circumstances can then be better explained by the fact that the purpose of plain man talk is very different from the purpose of technical, especially philosophical, and in particular phenomenalist, talk about perception. Nor should any of this come as a surprise. Almost every passage chosen for discussion from Austin’s lectures is comparably insightful with respect to understanding his unique, signature, virtually inimitable method of critically considering samplings and idealizations of colloquial language to determine the scope and limits of their permissible philosophical applications. Austin thereby seeks to reveal previously unappreciated networks of meanings underlying ordinary thought and

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its expression, as a basis for appropriate use extended as an afterthought to philosophical reasoning, and beyond which philosophy cannot meaningfully depart. Austin, as a sign of his extraordinary sensitivity to nuances of meaning and the subtle linguistic distinctions whereby they are expressed, brings to light elusive lexical and grammatical differences governing the proper usage of the same words on which philosophers must also in some sense rely in order to advance their reflections, concepts, technical distinctions, definitions and analyses, problems and solutions, arguments and counter-arguments. It is in the course of this impressive performance that Austin argues against the literal meaningfulness of deceptive perceptions, whereby he thinks he has unhorsed phenomenalist epistemic foundationalism. If he succeeds, then he seems further to believe that he will have thereby deprived non-radical non-reductive phenomenalism, especially of the sense-data type, at least of its presumed epistemic motivation. For Austin, unlike other great thinkers in the analytic tradition, philosophical claims, and the arguments or evidence on which philosophical proposals are supposed to depend, are ideally formulated in a common language grounded in the experience of ordinary language users. To be so grounded, however, can mean many different things. Are legitimate philosophical usages like airplanes, built on the ground from materials available below the heavens, but not remaining nor intended to remain in that demesne? Or are they analogically speaking more like cars and boats? Philosophers transgress the bounds of what the Austinian plain man is in any position conceptually to think or say in many instances about such things as objects and their properties, time and space, persons and their social interrelations, goodness or the good, beauty, justice, virtue, and all the other perennial philosophical conundrums. The model itself is methodologically fascinating, a beautiful thing to witness in action at the hands of a master like Austin. The details of how Austin proceeds in his investigations can only be collected from his practice as we find it primarily in the lectures and remarks edited after his death. It remains open to dispute in any instance whether the considerations Austin raises concerning pre-philosophical ‘plain’ thought and talk in relation to things of interest to philosophers receive their proper philosophical emphasis in these passages attacking phenomenalist epistemic foundationalism. Where the focus is on an idealized composite plain person’s thought and discourse concerning sensation, perception, and the logical requirements of literal deception in sense experience, and, therefore, by Austin’s invoking the polarity principle, of literal veridicality, the question is decisive in gauging the strength of

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Austin’s linguistic philosophical objections to phenomenalist epistemic foundationalism.7

Notes 1. For recent critical discussions of Austin’s philosophical method also in relation to the topic of perception, see Gustafsson and Sørli, 2011. Another useful previous collection is Fann 1969. See also Berlin and Warnock 1973; Warnock 1989. 2. See, among other statements of the classic epistemic distrust of perception on the part of rationalists, Kenny 1986. 3. The cross-fertilization of Austin and Wittgenstein case-by-case studies of ordinary language usage is often said to be best exemplified by Stanley Cavell (1999). See Hilary Putnam on Austin’s methodology, ‘The Importance of Being Austin: The Need of a “Second Naïveté”’, lecture II in Putnam 1999. The classic criticism of Austin appears in Ayer 1967. 4. Berkeley 1710/1998: 115–116; Berkeley 1734/2013: 60–63; Hume 1739– 1740/1978: 1, 106; Brentano 1874/1973; Twardowski 1894/1977; Husserl 1913/1962: 238. 5. Wittgenstein, Zettel. Edited by G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright. Translated by Anscombe. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. §395: ‘A man can pretend to be unconscious; but conscious?’ 6. Versions of early phenomenalism are to be found in Locke 1690/1979. See also references to Berkeley’s and Hume’s ‘ideas’ in this period in note 7 supra. 7. A version of this essay was first presented at the J.L. Austin Centenary Conference, Lancaster University, England, 5–7 April 2011. I am grateful to audience participants for useful comments and criticisms.

12 The Importance of Intentions in Introspection Kevin Reuter

12.1

Introduction

When it comes to the introspection of sensory states, two dominant views have emerged within the last few decades – process-based accounts and conceptual accounts. Whereas contemporary process-based theorists (e.g Gertler 2001; Goldman 2006; Lycan 1997) believe that some sort of introspective attention is necessary to have introspective access to one’s sensory states, conceptualists (e.g Dretske 1994; Rosenthal 2000; Tye 2000) believe that introspection of sensory states is primarily the entertaining of higher-order thoughts about these states. The latter usually add that these higher-order thoughts are formed not by conceiving of the way things are, but by conceiving of the way things appear. Tye claims that ‘if you are attending to how things look to you, as opposed to how they are independently of how they look, you are bringing to bear your faculty of introspection’ (2000: 46). Rosenthal states that introspection ‘tells us only how things appear, not how they actually are’ (2000: 237), and Dretske argues that in introspection ‘we are conceiving of how things seem’ (1994: 266–267). What it means to conceive of how things appear remains mostly unclear. More specifically, although appearance statements are probably the most common way for people to express their introspective awareness of sensory states, it is hardly ever discussed which appearance statements count as introspective and which do not. Hence, conceptualists (but also process-based theorists) should be interested in drawing the correct boundary between appearance statements that are introspective and those that are not. In what follows, I argue that the right criterion for drawing the right boundary needs to take into account a person’s intention about the status of the appearance. A study of Austin’s seminal work Sense and Sensibilia helps 197

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to get clearer on why this criterion is important and how it might be worked out in detail.1

12.2

Distinguishing illusions from abnormal conditions

In Sense and Sensibilia Austin heavily argues against lumping things together that do not belong together. In chapter II, he raises the question of deception, and considers the way philosophers often fail to pay attention to important distinctions among the situations in which people entertain false perceptual beliefs about the world. Austin states: But surely the plainest of men would want to distinguish a. cases where the sense-organ is deranged or abnormal or in some way or other not functioning properly; b. cases where the medium – or more generally, the conditions – of perception are in some way abnormal or off-colour; and c. cases where a wrong inference is made or a wrong construction is put on things. (1962: 13) Cases that belong to the first category include illusions (e.g MüllerLyer lines) and hallucinations (e.g afterimages, a ringing in the ears); examples like taking a white wall to be green because it is illuminated with green light, and believing a stick to be bent because the refraction index of water is different to that of air, belong to the second group. Mistaking a sponge for a rock – a typical example used in appearancereality tasks2 – would be a case of the third type.3 One way people seem to distinguish the latter two categories from the first one is to ‘say that his senses were deceived rather than that he was deceived by his senses’ (1962: 13). However, Austin is not only correct in claiming that people distinguish these cases from each other, he is also right in focusing our attention on the functional differences of these categories. It is simply wrong to argue that a person is deceived by his senses or even that his senses do not work normally in the latter two categories. Quite the opposite is the case: it would be a case of malfunctioning senses if the wall appeared to be white, or the sponge looked like a sponge. Austin points out the various different ways in which people make false statements about how things are in the world. However, we often know or suspect that we are in a situation in which it would be wrong to take what we seem to perceive at face value. In those situations, we often express this state of affairs by making appearance statements. For example we state that ‘the Müller-Lyer lines only appear to be of different

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lengths’ (illusion), ‘my phone only appears to be ringing’ (hallucination), ‘the wall looks green to me but it is white’ (unusual lighting conditions), ‘the sponge looks like a rock’ (unusual surface conditions). Although the first two of these statements fall into category (a), and the latter two into categories (b) and (c) respectively, we seem to express ourselves in very similar ways, namely, making a distinction between how things appear to us and how they really are. It should therefore not be surprising that many philosophers have considered these statements to be introspective in nature (Schwitzgebel 2012; Nichols and Stich 2003). The question I will investigate in the next few paragraphs is whether Austin’s analysis is important for the classification of judgements as introspective or not, and whether philosophers should pay more attention to the reasons why people make appearance statements.

12.3

Are appearance statements open to public challenge?

Let me start with two important points about the relationship between appearance statements and introspective judgements: First, no philosopher seriously believes that every appearance statement is an introspective judgement. Probably the most common way appearance words are put to work is in the epistemic sense. When appearance words are used in the epistemic sense, ‘then “x appears so-and-so to S” may be taken to imply that the subject S believes, or is inclined to believe, that x is so-and-so. And I think that, in this same use, they may be also taken to imply that the subject S has adequate evidence for believing that x is so-and-so’ (Chisholm 1957: 44). In all cases in which the evidence is not directly given in sensory experiences but is inferred from one’s experiences, the question of whether the resulting appearance statement is introspective does not even arise, for example ‘he seems to be sick, from what I heard’. Second, for some appearance statements it simply doesn’t make sense to make an appearance-reality distinction, for example ‘she looks great’. There is a sense of this expression which does not allow for someone to respond, ‘well, she looks great but she isn’t’. The original claim was not at all meant to describe the woman as great, but ‘great’ was supposed to refer solely to her looks. Austin rhetorically asks: ‘what more must she do to be chic than to look chic?’ (1962: 38, italics in original). Thus, these examples are clearly not cases in which a person introspects his experience. In the course of analysing various appearance statements in chapter IV, Austin touches on different senses of appearance words that have been argued for by philosophers such as Chisholm (1957), Jackson (1977),

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and Quinton (1956). Among these are the epistemic sense, which I have mentioned above; the comparative sense (e.g ‘he looks like a pig’); and the phenomenal sense (‘the wall looks green’). However, none of those philosophers seem to think that the functional differences between Austin’s three categories (a), (b), and (c), have any bearing on the proper classification of appearance statements. In contrast, Austin makes an observation that deserves our attention. He states: It is perhaps even clearer that the way things look is, in general, just as much a fact about the world, just as open to public confirmation and challenge, as the way things are. I am not disclosing a fact about myself, but about petrol, when I say that petrol looks like water. (1962: 43) If we consider examples of category (b) and (c), Austin indeed makes an important point. The case of a white wall looking green because it is illuminated by green light, and the example of a sponge looking like a rock, seem to support Austin’s claim that the way things look is as much a fact about the world, just as open to public confirmation and challenge as the way things are. When it comes to visual examples, the photo test can be often used to track whether the way an object appears is largely a fact about the world or not: The illuminated wall ‘can be photographed, seen by any number of people’ (1962: 31), and will yield a greenish tone on the photo picture, and there is nothing in the picture of the sponge that suggests the object to really be a sponge. Hence, the statements ‘the wall appears green’, and ‘the sponge looks like a rock’ seem to be open to public confirmation and challenge. Is Austin correct, however, in claiming that in general appearance statements manifest an openness to public confirmation? Let us consider examples of category (a). The way the Müller-Lyer lines look to a person does not seem to be subject to public confirmation and challenge. Making a photograph of the lines will not yield lines of differing length on the photograph (assuming of course a head-on photo). More obvious examples are hallucinations, dreams and afterimages which are not subject to public confirmation, and of course cannot be photographed either. We can conclude, therefore, that Austin’s claim does not hold if we are deceived by our senses, as is the case in illusions and hallucinations. However, Austin also states in chapter VII: What is the real color of an afterimage? The trouble with this one is that we have no idea what an alternative to its ‘real colour’ might be.

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Its apparent colour, the colour that it looks, the colour that it appears to be? – but these phrases have no application here. (1962: 66) And perhaps we should also mention here another point – that the question ‘Real or not?’ does not always come up, can’t always be raised. We do raise this question only when, to speak rather roughly, suspicion assails us – in some way or other things may be not what they seem; and we can raise this question only if there is a way, or ways, in which things may be not what they seem. What alternative is there to being a ‘real’ afterimage? (1962: 69) If the question of ‘real or not?’ does not apply to afterimages and hallucinations, then afterimages and hallucinations are of course not open to public confirmation and challenge. If objects or properties are open to public challenge, then the question of whether something is real or not, must find an application.4 Thus, we can interpret Austin’s remark on the openness of appearance statements to public confirmation more charitably to be only applying to some appearance statements, like those that are usually uttered when the perception conditions are bad (b) or when we put a wrong construction onto things (c). What is more important for our discussion, is that we have established a feature of appearance statements used in cases of categories (b) and (c) which does not seem to hold for cases of category (a), namely that the appearance of things is usually open to public confirmation and challenge. The question remains, however, whether this difference suggests that appearance statements that are made when a person hallucinates or is subject to an illusion are properly classified as introspective, and as non-introspective for cases of categories (b) and (c). Intuitively, this seems to be the case. If an appearance statement is about a worldly fact and hence open to public confirmation and challenge, then it cannot be about the experience the person entertains. In contrast, it seems that if a person hallucinates, or has an afterimage, her appearance statement needs to refer to her experience. However, that conclusion would be far too quick. It is of course possible for a person to introspect her sensory state even though the reason for why something appears to be different from the way it really is, is dependent on external conditions of perception; and surely, people can mistake the content of a hallucinatory experience for veridical content. Hence, a simple classification of appearance statements that are made when someone is hallucinating as introspective, and appearance statements that are made when the conditions of perception are abnormal as nonintrospective, seems false.

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What really seem to matter and what I will argue for in the next section, are the intentions of the person making an appearance statement – whether she makes a statement she believes to be a fact about the world (non-introspective) or a statement which she believes not to be open to public confirmation (introspective).

12.4

The importance of intentions in introspection

People are often aware or at least suspect that the world appears different from the way it really is. However, they also often lack an understanding of the reasons why they make an appearance-reality distinction. Two examples might help to illustrate why many situations are not clear-cut cases, and that people are often ignorant about the correct reasons for a suspected appearance-reality difference. First, mirages are most commonly associated with a person travelling through the desert, suddenly seeming to see an oasis. Austin writes that ‘there seem to be different doctrines in the field as to what mirages are. Some seem to take a mirage to be a vision conjured up by the crazed brain of the thirsty and exhausted traveller (delusion), while in other accounts it is a case of atmospheric refraction, whereby something below the horizon is made to appear above it’ (1962: 25). In fact, mirages are usually explained (and most frequently happen) by the bending of light rays from distant objects and can be captured on camera – and are thus to be classified as optical phenomena. Second, the moon illusion is a phenomenon that occurs when people look at the moon which is just above the horizon. The moon appears to be larger on the horizon than it is high up in the sky. It was originally thought that due to light refraction in the atmosphere, the moon on the horizon occupies more space in the visual field than it would normally do. However, the moon illusion is not an optical phenomenon but is explained by the workings of our perceptual apparatus, and thus cannot be captured on a photograph. We can see from these two examples that people can be justifiably uncertain about whether the appearance of an object is different from its reality due to external physical conditions or internal psychological conditions. Sometimes it is simply very difficult to ascertain the reasons for a difference in appearance and reality. Misattributions of this difference go both ways: mirages are often misattributed to deranged sensory perception; the moon illusion is often misattributed to the physical properties of the atmosphere. But the possibility of misattributions also has the consequence that what an appearance statement expresses depends on which state – physical or psychological – is blamed for the conceived

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difference between appearance and reality. Although the appearance statement ‘the moon appears larger on the horizon’ is usually not taken to be subject to public confirmation or challenge, a person can say the same words but express a different appearance statement, one that he thinks expresses openness to public confirmation. Similarly, although the appearance statement ‘there seems to be an oasis’ is usually taken to be subject to public confirmation, a person can utter the same sentence, but use the sentence in a different sense which precludes public confirmation. We can see that there seem be two different appearance statements at play, by considering two sets of dialogues, one for the mirage example, the other for the case of the moon illusion. In the first conversation, the conversing people both know that mirages are optical phenomena. They believe the appearance to be subject to public confirmation and thus do not take the appearance statement to be an introspective judgement. Mirage talk 1: non-introspective appearance talk S1: There appears to be an oasis over there. S2: Yes, indeed, but how distant do you believe it really to be? S1: Hard to tell, but the air at the surface is very hot, so light rays could come from far away. The following conversation, in contrast, is introspective in nature. Both people refer to the experience of subject S1. Mirage talk 2: introspective appearance talk S1: There appears to be an oasis over there. S2: You are starting to hallucinate. Take a sip of water, and rest for a while. S1: Yes, my brain is starting to play tricks on me. In the third dialogue, only one of the people knows the correct reason for why mirages happen. As he blames his experiences for what appears to him, we should, so I claim, classify his appearance statement as introspective. However, the other person understands the same statement as non-introspective. Mirage talk 3: introspective vs. non-introspective appearance talk S1: There appears to be an oasis over there. S2: Yes, indeed, but how distant do you believe it really to be?

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S1: What? It appears to you too? I thought I was having an hallucination. S2: What are you talking about! The oasis is out there, but maybe not where we think it is. The same difference in the meaning of appearance statements can be shown to occur when it comes to the moon illusion. Moon talk 1: non-introspective appearance talk S1: The moon appears to be larger on the horizon. S2: Yes, it’s amazing how the atmosphere bends the light rays. Moon talk 2: introspective appearance talk S1: The moon appears to be larger on the horizon. S2: Yes, the illusion is astonishing. Moon talk 3: non-introspective vs. introspective appearance talk S1: S2: S1: S2:

The moon appears to be larger on the horizon. Not to me. It looks as large as if it were high in the sky. You cannot see it? But it is a physical phenomenon! No, it is a psychological illusion that some people don’t get.

These conversations highlight the differing intentions which people can have when making appearance statements. If they consider the appearance statement to be open to public confirmation, they do not conceive of their mental states as representing the world in a certain way, but rather talk about how the world is independent of their experiences. In contrast, they might use an appearance statement to talk about their experiences themselves – a statement which then of course should be classified as introspective. Making a distinction between appearance and reality does not mean that people need to focus on both the appearance and the reality of objects or properties: people who think of the way an object appears necessarily distinguish this appearance from the reality even if they believe the appearance to match reality. By drawing on Austin’s insights in the last section, I claimed that people can either consider the appearance of an object to be out there in the world and thus open to public confirmation, or consider the appearance to be private, and thus closed to public confirmation. We are now in a position to determine the conditions for entertaining the concept of experience: subject S entertains the concept of experience if,

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(C1) S distinguishes the appearance from the reality of what is experienced. (C2) S considers the appearance to be closed to public confirmation. As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, it is of interest to both conceptual accounts and process-based accounts to clarify how people think about their own or other people’s experience. Merely thinking about experiences differs in two respects from the introspection of an experience: First, for the former it is not required that S attends to what it is that is experienced. Second, for the former there is no restriction on when the experience takes place. It also seems plausible to suggest that people can think about their experiences without having a very sophisticated idea of what experiences are. Statements of the form ‘it appears to be p’ are found in everyday conversations but are not used as introspective statements in many situations. Thus, there is a need to specify the minimal but also sufficient conditions for the possession of the concept of experience. (C1) and (C2) state that a person entertains the concept of experience if that person makes an appearance-reality distinction (C1) and intends the appearance to be closed to public confirmation (C2). These two conditions have the advantage of specifying the conditions for entertaining the concept of experience in a non-circular way. By analysing the literature on appearance statements, I have argued that Austin’s claims about the nature of appearances proved helpful and underlined an intuitive appeal to the privacy of experiences. This has led me to conclude that the manifestation of an appearance-reality condition is insufficient to characterize introspective judgements, and that a further condition is needed. The development of the second condition (being closed to public confirmation) for introspection has important consequences. Not only are appearance statements often non-introspective, but more importantly: no appearance statement can be classified as introspective without knowing whether the speaker intends the appearance to be open to public confirmation or not.

12.5

Objections

In the last section I explored a way to differentiate non-introspective from introspective appearance statements. I argued that merely drawing an appearance-reality distinction does not suffice for specifying how people introspect.5 The account I presented is heavily influenced by Austinian insights into the possibility of challenging and confirming the truth of appearance statements. Before I consider three putative

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objections, let me state the condition of introspection for appearance statements explicitly: (Introspection) An appearance statement is introspective if and only if the person who makes an appearance statement intends the statement not to be open to public confirmation. Objections against (Introspection) fall into two groups. The first objection asks whether knowing the intentions of a person regarding openness to public confirmation is really sufficient for classifying an appearance statement as introspective. I then discuss two further objections which consider the necessity of this criterion. Objection 1: confirming and challenging another person’s experience? The first objection to (Introspection) questions the proposed difficulty of confirming and challenging what other people experience. If it turns out that statements about experiences are often open to public confirmation, then it would make little sense to argue that introspective and non-introspective appearance statements can be differentiated by people’s intentions about the proposed openness or closedness to public confirmation. In order to see why this objection has some superficial plausibility, let me restate the ‘moon talk 2’ conversation: Moon talk 2: introspective appearance talk S1: The moon appears to be larger on the horizon. S2: Yes, the illusion is astonishing. In the ‘moon talk 2’ conversation, S2 agrees with what S1 experiences. Hence, it seems that S2 confirms S1’s experience, in contrast to my claim that introspective appearance statements are not intended to be open to challenge or confirmation. However, this objection rests on a confusion of what it means to be open to public confirmation with what it means to talk about each other’s experiences. When two people are subject to the same illusion (e.g. the moon illusion) and their visual apparatus work in roughly the same way, then it should not surprise us that people can agree with each other on what it is like to have a certain visual experience. However, we can only share experiences in the sense of having different tokens of the same type. Having the same type of experience allows us to explain why two people can agree with each other on what they experience. This is very different

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from confirming another person’s token experience, and can be most clearly appreciated, when one person’s illusory experience is in disagreement with another person’s experience. Segall, Campbell and Herskovitz (1963) conducted cross-cultural studies on the effect of origin and culture on the strength of the Müller-Lyer illusion. It turned out that people who live in urban areas perceive the lines to be of greater difference in length than people from rural areas. People who are subject to a strong Müller-Lyer illusory experience would in no way be able to challenge or confirm other people’s lack of perceiving the illusion. Whereas they can still talk about their experiences and agree that what they report is in line with what other people report, they cannot confirm or challenge another person’s experience.6 There is, however, a more threatening form of this objection which cannot be so easily refuted. Chances are that future brain scientists will find at least the neural correlates of conscious states. If this future becomes reality, then experiences would be no longer immune to public confirmation and challenge. We can imagine a person being connected to a machine that successfully confirms or challenges his introspective reports (see e.g Armstrong 1963). Many of course reject the idea that a person could not be the ultimate authority on his own mental states, but this position requires regarding the person in these circumstances as infallible, and I agree with Austin when he states that ‘There is certainly nothing in principle final, conclusive, irrefutable about anyone’s statement that so-and-so looks such-and-such’ (1962, 42, italics in original). Whether or not this is true is not important in this context. It is certainly not necessarily true that a person is the ultimate authority on his own mental states. Thus, in a world in which brain scientists indeed have access to a person’s experiences, this person can still think about his experiences without considering the experience to be private. It seems therefore that the privacy of experiences is only a contingent property of experiences but not essential. There are two answers that I would suggest to counter this objection. First, it may well be the case that if such a future indeed becomes reality, our conception of experiences changes, that is people who are constantly connected to ‘read-out’ machines cease to consider their experiences (or other mental states like propositional attitudes) to be private mental states but accept that states of the mind are just as open to public confirmation as fruits and vegetables. This change in our conception of experiences does nothing to undermine the view that our current conception of experiences takes experiences to be private mental states. Second, it is quite plausible to hold that if future research shows that experiences cannot be considered

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to be essentially private, people nevertheless think of their experiences as private states in standard circumstances, that is when they are not connected to such a ‘read-out’ machine. It is hard to imagine that people would accept having their mental lives under constant observation, and thus the scientific conception of experiences might change without the folk conception of experiences following suit. Objection 2: classifying appearance statements by other means In this chapter I have argued that appearance statements are themselves indeterminate as to whether they are introspective or not, and that we need to respect the importance of intentions regarding openness to public confirmation for introspection. An objection against the necessity of this criterion points out that instead of considering the reasons why something might appear different from the way it really is, people have found a much easier way to introspectively express their mental states, namely by specifying to whom something appears. People not only often state that something appears a certain way, but that something appears to them a certain way, for example ‘It appears to me that the lines are the same in length’, ‘It appears to me that the wall is green.’ Whereas other appearance statements do not specify to whom something appears, it seems that this type of appearance statement relates the appearance to a certain person. This way of expressing sensory experiences seems to fulfil the requirement of privacy and at the same time seems to be less demanding than thinking about public confirmation and challenge. But this conclusion would be too quick. Although it is true that people often use phrases such as ‘it appears to me’ when they communicate appearances that are closed to public confirmation, in many circumstances people can say that something appears to them without taking those appearances to be privately owned. As an example, we can consider a slight modification of an appearance-reality task in which a white car is placed behind a red filter.7 Imagine that you sit opposite to another person, and both of you look at the white car. A red filter is then positioned between you and the white car. We can now ask what the car looks to you and what it looks to the person who sits in opposition to you and whose view of the car is not distorted by the red filter. You will probably answer that the car looks red to you and that it looks white to the other person. However, you use the phrase ‘it looks to me’ without necessarily reflecting on your experiences. The reason why the car appears red to you and white to the other person is found in the outside world

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itself and does not depend on your sensory system. Thus, although the car looks red to you, and white to another person, the respective claims are nonetheless open to public confirmation. The other person could even go around the filter and check whether what you communicate about the outside world is correct. Objection 3: (introspection) requires people to be rational In developing a condition for classifying appearance statements as introspective or non-introspective, I argued that we need to know whether a person who makes an appearance statement intends the statement to be open to public confirmation or not. Furthermore, I claimed that a person will intend the appearance statement to be open to public confirmation if he believes that the way things appear to him is a fact about the world. This claim, so one might object, rests on a certain demand on a person’s rationality. We can easily imagine a stubborn person, let’s call him Stub, who, although making an appearance statement about the world, does not intend the statement to be open to public confirmation. For example despite being presented with good arguments in favour of the view that the white wall looks green (it is illuminated with green light), Stub claims and insists that the white wall appears to be blue, and that no evidence can convince him of the opposite. Thus, although the person does not refer to his experience but to the colour of the light that is reflected from the white wall, it seems that he intends his statement not to be open to public confirmation. This objection raises the possibility that an irrational person can make an appearance statement and intend this statement not to be open to public confirmation, but still does not refer to his experience. Stub might indeed be irrational in rejecting another person’s claim that green light is reflected from the white wall despite good evidence for this position. However, as soon as Stub rejects another person’s appearance statement that is equally supposed to be about a worldly matter, then Stub’s appearance statement is open to public challenge too. This is so, because Stub can only argue against the truth of another person’s appearance statement by giving a reason why it is false which then would count as an argument in favour of his own position, and thus makes his appearance statement open to public confirmation. This contrasts with introspective appearance statements. It is simply not possible to present a reason to support the claim that one has a green experience. In Austin’s terms, we can say that the question of ‘real or not’ does not apply.

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12.6

Conclusion

Austin was right to point out that people distinguish between hallucinations and illusions on the one hand, and cases where the external conditions of perception are abnormal on the other hand. He was also correct to argue that appearance statements are usually open to public confirmation. I have argued in this chapter that we can use these insights by Austin to draw an interesting conclusion for the status of appearance statements: although we use the same appearance words for both categories, if an appearance statement is intended by the speaker to be open to public confirmation, it cannot be introspective. Only if a speaker thinks that what appears to him is closed to public confirmation, is an appearance statement truly introspective.

Notes 1. In no way is it the task of this essay to evaluate the success of Austin’s arguments against sense-datum theories. Instead, I will pick out several statements from chapter II, III, IV, and VII of Sense and Sensibilia, and show how they can help to shed light on the problem I have laid out above. 2. Flavell et al. (1983) systematically investigated children’s ability to distinguish the appearance of an object from its real nature. In one such scenario, children are presented with a sponge which does appear to be a piece of rock. 3. Austin’s wording in the above quote is quite problematic. First, it is not so much the sensory organ but the information processing in the sensory and cognitive cortices that is responsible for the occurrence of illusory and hallucinatory experiences. Second, classifying illusions as cases of malfunctioning senses is controversial. Arguably, the sensory system works fine, and only different to how one might expect the system to work. Third, labelling conditions as abnormal only makes sense if there are normal conditions. However, specifying the normal or standard conditions of perception is very difficult. Fourth, distinguishing category (a) from category (b) is presumably based on a distinction between the external (sensory-independent) and the internal (sensory-dependent) realm. Drawing this boundary is also complicated, e.g do the eyes belong to the external or the internal realm? As we will see in this section, whether (a) and (b) can be clearly distinguished or are merely vague categories, does not matter in the end for the conclusions I would like to make. Thus, despite these difficulties, I assume that we can make a sufficiently clear distinction between misleading perceptual conditions that are external to the sensory apparatus and cases in which the senses themselves deceive. Note, however, that hereafter I use the term illusions only for cases in which the senses themselves deceive; the Müller-Lyer example is an illusionary case, whereas the bent stick phenomenon is not. 4. Austin rightly holds that although it might be unusual, optical phenomena are open to public confirmation, because we can ‘raise the question “Is that a real rainbow?”’ (1962: 80).

The Importance of Intentions in Introspection 211 5. Reuter (2011) shows that the sole condition of an appearance-reality distinction creates a problem not only for theories of introspection but also for theories of imagination. 6. Thus, I disagree with Austin when he states: ‘But when I see an optical illusion, however well it comes off, there is nothing wrong with me personally, the illusion is not a little (or a large) peculiarity or idiosyncrasy of my own; it is quite public, anyone can see it, and in many cases standard procedures can be laid down for producing it’ (1962: 24). Austin is right in pointing out that if a person is subject to an optical illusion then there is nothing wrong with that person (rare cases aside), but Segall et al.’s research clearly demonstrates that illusions are not public in the same sense as optical phenomena, like seeing a stick in water or a white wall being illuminated by green light. 7. These tasks are known in the psychological literature as perspective-taking tasks; see for example Taylor and Flavell (1984).

13 Ordinary Language and the Nature of Emotions and Motives Harry Lesser

13.1

Austin’s philosophical programme

My aim in this paper is to show how Austin’s theory of the philosophical importance of ordinary language has been applied and can be further applied to the philosophical study of emotion and motive. Austin was always reluctant to state his philosophical programme explicitly, but in ‘A Plea for Excuses’, he does both define the philosophical study of ordinary language and explain its use. He defines the study as ‘examining what we should say when’ (Austin 1979: 181), that is examining under what conditions, as we ordinarily talk, certain statements will be true. Austin does not in this passage give examples, but the implication for the present paper is that, if we are interested in the nature of emotion, we should begin by studying when, as we normally talk, it would be true to say that someone is, for example, angry or afraid or in love. Austin makes it clear that this is one philosophical method, not the only one. On the next page he expands this: ‘When we examine ... what words we should use in what situations, we are looking ... at the realities we use the words to talk about; we are using a sharpened perception of words to sharpen our perception of, though not as the final arbiter of, the phenomena’ (ibid.: 182). The reason for using ordinary language to do this is given earlier on the same page. It is that ‘our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men [sic] have found worth drawing, and the connexions they have found worth marking, in the lifetimes of many generations’ (ibid.). Again, let us explain this further by giving examples from the way we ascribe emotions. We may note first that the words we use sometimes make very subtle distinctions: what exactly is the difference between indignation and anger? Secondly, in contrast they often group together apparently very disparate phenomena – we 212

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can say with truth that a person who is pale, trembling and faint is afraid, and with equal truth that a person very calmly taking effective evasive action is afraid. We are in no way committed to preserving these distinctions and connections, but Austin was right to point out that we need to understand them. This, though, needs qualifying in three ways. First, it is notorious that in different languages and cultures the lines are drawn differently, even when the languages are close: for example, it is very difficult to render the French verb ‘vouloir’ exactly in English, because it has connotations of both ‘want’ and ‘intend’. Hence the study of ‘what we would say’ in any one language needs to be accompanied by a readiness to consider whether we have discovered something generally true or merely a peculiarity of a particular language or even of a subgroup within the speakers of a particular language. (It is surprising that Austin, whose French, Latin and Greek were all excellent, did not make this point.) Secondly – and this is a point Austin does make – ordinary language is largely governed by practical considerations. It is ‘rich and subtle’, (and therefore worth philosophical study), ‘in the pressingly practical matter of Excuses, but certainly is not in the matter, say, of Time’ (ibid.). Thirdly – again, a point, or set of points, made by Austin – besides being limited in this way to the practical interests of ordinary people, ordinary language lacks the systematic investigation made by the sciences and can incorporate ‘superstition and error and fantasy of all kinds’ (ibid.: 185). It would be absurd (my example) to conclude from ‘ordinary language’ that the sun really rises and sets. Hence ‘ordinary language is not the last word: in principle it can everywhere be supplemented and improved upon and superseded. Only remember, it is the first word’ (ibid.). We should also note that, although ordinary language is in this way pre-scientific, its study should be as scientific as we can make it. We should also bear in mind the important differences between Austin and Wittgenstein, even though they have been sometimes bracketed together as ‘ordinary language’ philosophers. Austin regards philosophical problems as genuine problems: the aim of the study of language is not to ‘dissolve’ problems, but to enable us to see their full complexity (Austin regarded oversimplification as a besetting sin of philosophers) and to obtain information that will help towards their solution. Moreover, though sometimes Austin and Wittgenstein make the same points, and though Wittgenstein was deeply interested in the various uses to which language could be put, and at times uses linguistic usage to make a specific point, he was not interested in the systematic study of linguistic usage.

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Ordinary language and the feeling theory of emotion

With this preliminary, we may now ask what happens when we apply the investigation of ordinary language to the question ‘What is it to have an emotion?’ To begin with, we can note that our ordinary vocabulary is already very rich, and we have a great many words for emotions, some marking very subtle distinctions, such as the one already mentioned between ‘anger’ and ‘indignation’, where indignation denotes, roughly, anger at a perceived injustice. We may also note that this is not a peculiarity of English. Spinoza wrote about the emotions in Latin, and his list of the emotions and their definitions, (at the end of book 3 of the Ethics), which, however philosophical in its approach, is clearly based on the general language of the educated rather than on technical philosophy, lists 48 emotions. Descartes’ Passions of the Soul, written in French, has 36. Aristotle’s account of emotions in book 2 of the Rhetoric, which is much shorter and is not meant to be exhaustive, nevertheless makes some very subtle distinctions based on ordinary Greek, such as that between phthonos and zelos, or envy and emulation. This last example brings out the important point that a great many of these words (perhaps not all) are value-laden: emulation, the wish to rise to someone else’s level, is a good emotion; envy, the wish to drag them down to one’s own (‘I cannot read, and would all books were burned’ says Envy in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Scene VI). Moreover, the values are usually agreed on. People argue a great deal about what someone’s emotions, or motives, really are – for example whether they are motivated by, or are displaying in their actions, firmness or obstinacy, prudence or pusillanimity, carefulness or meanness in spending money; but it is not in dispute that it is, for example, good to be firm and bad to be obstinate, a point to which I will return. And finally, the study of these examples and others brings out a very crucial point, that the vocabulary of emotions and of motives overlaps to a great extent, and that this in its turn reflects the fact that it is a very important feature of emotions that they act as motives for action. To see the point of all this for philosophy, we need to consider the consequences of thinking philosophically about emotions and motives without examining what is implied by the way we talk about them. One result, widespread in the past, was the adoption of a ‘feeling’ theory of emotion. So, we need to set out this theory, and to see how different it is from what is, whether or not we are aware of it, implied or presupposed by the way we actually talk. The feeling theory regards emotions as always constituted by feelings or experiences of one sort or another,

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some intense and producing very strong physical effects, such as rage and panic, and sexual arousal, some mild, and predominantly or entirely mental. When these feelings motivate, they act, according to this theory, as mental causes, ‘pushing’ us towards, or away from, actions or courses of action. The various emotions differ by being experienced as different feelings with a different phenomenological ‘taste’, or by the intensity of the taste, as with anger and rage. But feeling theorists do note that what actually motivates us is not necessarily what we feel most intensely: even rage or near-panic may be controlled. This theory is still often adopted, sometimes unconsciously, by prephilosophical ‘common sense’. Ronald de Sousa wrote, in The Rationality of Emotion, ‘If one were to choose a theory of emotion to represent common sense, the feeling theory would probably be the best candidate ... On this view emotions are simply assimilated to certain kinds of felt experience’ (de Sousa 1987: 37). This was written nearly a generation ago but is probably still true. Among philosophers, at least in the analytic tradition, it is now rare, thanks partly to the work of ordinary language philosophers, but by no means extinct. Demian Whiting has defended the theory in a number of articles, in one of which he says ‘emotions are just types of feelings, and ... differences in emotions simply correspond to differences in how emotions feel’ (Whiting 2006). Less obviously, the feeling theory, although its origins are in a dualist theory of mind (or soul) and body, in which emotions, though triggered by physical events and causing further physical events, are in themselves ways in which the mind is affected, is sometimes assumed by physicalist writers on the emotions, such as Griffiths (1997). Their approach starts by assuming that emotions are datable mental events, that is feelings, and then goes on to identify these feelings with physical events in the brain and nervous system and to investigate their causes and consequences. It thus makes, from the point of view of ordinary language, the same mistake as the pure feeling theory. For the way we actually talk turns out, on even casual examination, to be quite different from what this theory would require: it is a theory which people ‘think they believe ... , but do not in fact talk, perceive or behave as if they did’ (de Sousa 1987). Thus, both those who defend ‘Folk Psychology’ and those who attack it often wrongly suppose that our pre-scientific ways of explaining by motive really are in accordance with the feeling theory. One way of showing this to be incorrect is to demonstrate the importance of interaction, as Matthew Ratcliffe does (Ratcliffe 2006). A parallel to this is to consider ‘what we would say when’.

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For example, consider when it is true, as we normally talk, to say someone fears, or is afraid of, something, or is acting out of fear of something. As we normally talk, it is perfectly true to say that someone is bolting his door at night because of fear of burglars, even though he may not have any feelings of fear, and indeed probably does not. It would be a sufficient condition that a person was motivated by fear of flying that they always chose other methods of transport because they considered flying dangerous. Even if they did this while experiencing no feelings of fear, and even if later on they went on a flight without experiencing fear (perhaps to their own surprise), it would be correct to say that this had been their motivation. Indeed, a person can truthfully say that they fear something, and mean only that they think it would be undesirable. In Julius Caesar (Act 1, scene 2) Brutus says ‘What means this shouting? I do fear the people / choose Caesar for their king’, and Cassius replies ‘Aye, do you fear it? / Then must I think you would not have it so.’ (There is in conversation a use of ‘I fear’ or ‘I am afraid’ which does not have this connotation, and is more like a very mild apology for what one is about to say, but this is not the way the expression is used here: Brutus is already uneasy, and ripe for being won over to the conspiracy by Cassius). Hence, as we talk, what seems essential to fear is, roughly, considering a situation, actual, future or hypothetical, as being dangerous, as leading to some evil, as Aristotle put it (Rhetoric II: 5). The feeling of fear may often be present, but need not be present for it to be true that a person is afraid. One cannot even say that it must be present unconsciously, whatever exactly this means. The person bolting his door knows perfectly well that his motive is fear: what makes this true is the fact that he is knowingly taking precautions against a possible danger, and the total absence of any feeling of fear would not alter the fact that, as we ordinarily talk, this is what would be true. The crucial feature is the judgement that there is a possible evil at hand; and this is what the person who feels fear, the person who calmly takes precautions, and the person who expresses this as an opinion, like Brutus, all have in common. It is, admittedly, also true that we can distinguish between fear as emotion and fear as motive, and recognize that one can be present while the other is not: a person could even agree that he was acting out of fear of burglars but in an important way was not afraid of them, that is had his feelings under control. But the crucial point is that the way we use the word ‘fear’ is not in accordance with the feeling theory. That would require us to confine its use to those occasions when the characteristic

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feeling was present and to find another word to describe the calm taking of precautions. In two other important ways the way we talk is not in line with the feeling theory. First, feelings are distinguished, as we actually talk, not by their phenomenological nature but by their context. Thus a feeling of awe might be phenomenologically the same as a feeling of fear, and might even be accompanied by the same kinds of physical changes – sweating, trembling, pallor, increased pulse rate, etc. What would make it a feeling of awe would be its being directed towards something or someone judged to be impressive rather than dangerous. Secondly, the same is true of motives – we distinguish motives not by identifying some particular kind of mental ‘push’ which precedes and causes the action, but by identifying what is aimed at in the action, for example, in the case of fear, to try to avert a possible evil. To see this, one may consider how often a person’s motive can be defined by what they want to achieve or avoid by performing the action in question – exercising for health, working to make a living, etc. Now, we could perhaps revise the way we talk in order to bring it in line with the feeling theory, although it would be very difficult in practice, since we would be constantly ascribing to other people things we cannot observe, that is feelings acting as motives, instead of doing what we actually do, which is to interpret the way their behaviour is directed. There is an important problem here: some people would say that the revision is possible but difficult, some that in fact it would be impossible. (On one interpretation, Wittgenstein’s ‘Private Language’ argument in Philosophical Investigations shows its impossibility, but to discuss this would require another paper.) But let us assume that it would be possible. The crucial point is that it would provide less, rather than more, insight into the workings of emotions and motives. To see this, consider four ways in which the way we talk differs from the ‘feeling’ theory. First, the same feeling may be called by different names in different contexts or when directed towards different objects. Anger and indignation, remorse and regret, fear and awe may be indistinguishable as feelings. What distinguishes them is, with the first pair, that one is simple annoyance and the other annoyance at an injustice; with the second pair, that one is simply sorrow at having brought about a bad situation and the other sorrow at having done this by acting wrongly; with the third pair, that one is a response to danger and the other a response to a quality considered to call for respect. The existence of these distinctions brings out another point, that if emotions are held to be feelings and

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nothing more, that is to be purely mental sensations, (whether or not these are identical with brain or other physical processes) one cannot explain the relation between an emotion and its object. So the study of ordinary language enables us to see two features of emotion which a philosophical theory of emotion must deal with and explain, but which the feeling theory cannot – that typically emotions have objects, and that it is illuminating to classify them according to their objects, that is the things, actual or imagined, towards which they are directed: what we are afraid of, what we are angry about, what we want, etc. For the same reason, we find ordinary language making connections which the feeling theory does not. The same emotion may involve different sensations in different people: some people ‘burn’ with remorse, some people experience it as nausea. The same word, such as ‘fear’, may be applied to a sensation, strong or mild, to evasive behaviour and to a judgement or assessment, if these are all responses to danger. Indeed, some emotions, such as most desires, have no particular characteristic feeling at all. The desire for promotion, for example, might be manifested in any or all of: feeling unhappy with one’s present position, fearing it will not improve, hoping it will, being very happy when it does: it is possible to feel only the last of these and yet say, truthfully, that one now realizes how much one wanted it all along. Even the basic physical desires, which are accompanied by characteristic sensations, are not identical with those sensations, but involve something more: for example, ‘hunger’, as we use the word, involves both the sensation of emptiness and the wish for food. Thus, as Thomas Reid put it (Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man II: 16), ‘The appetite of hunger includes an uneasy sensation and desire of food ... [desire] from its nature must have an object; [sensation] has no object. These two ingredients may be separated in thought; perhaps they sometimes are in reality; but hunger includes both’. If hunger were only a sensation, we could explain its cause – not having eaten for some hours – but not how it relates to an object not yet present. Similarly, if fear were only a sensation, we could explain how it arose, in many cases, but not how it relates to the thing feared, which may or may not exist. (That the cause and object of an emotion are often different can easily be shown – an easy example is being angry at someone’s behaviour when one did not witness it – the cause is being told about their behaviour, which is the event producing the emotion; the object of the emotion, that at which it is directed, is the behaviour itself (see, e.g, Anscombe 1963: 16). These connections in ordinary speech emphasize the same points as do the distinctions: emotions have objects, it is illuminating to classify

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them according to their objects, and if we identify emotions simply with feelings or sensations we cannot deal with these two features of emotion. They also bring out another very important point: that the connection between emotions and characteristic ways of behaving is not a contingent one. That fear disposes people to take evasive action, and anger disposes them to be aggressive (though these ‘dispositions’ can be and are often resisted) are not simply scientific facts that could without self-contradiction be different: the way we talk makes this part of the definition of anger or fear that our speech presupposes. Were we to talk in the way the feeling theory requires, supposing this to be possible, we would lose this illuminating connection between emotions and characteristic types of behaviour, which any adequate theory of emotion has to explain. Thirdly, to repeat an earlier point, the feeling theory requires us to hold that to ascribe a motive is to assess what kind of mental event preceded a person’s action; as we actually talk it is to assess what is aimed at by the action. It is true that in either case certainty about a person’s motives, even one’s own, is hard to come by, and maybe impossible. But the way we talk has two advantages. First, it does not require us to posit unobservable mental events, but only to interpret observable behaviour. Secondly, a very small amount of introspection will show that many of our actions are not preceded by such events (locking the door through fear of burglars is the example I have been using), and also that many of the words we use to ascribe motives do not refer at all to characteristic feelings but to what is aimed at by the action or by a pattern of behaviour over time. A paradigm example, first used by Ryle (1949), is ambition: as we talk, it is often correct to say that a person has been motivated by ambition, for example for success, or for promotion, or for approval from others, but there is no characteristic feeling of ambition preceding their various actions, since no such feeling exists. It would thus seem that if we were strict feeling theorists we would be very restricted in the amount of human behaviour we could even try to explain, let alone succeed in explaining, compared with what we can at least attempt to explain by using our ‘ordinary’ way of talking. Finally, ordinary language often puts a value judgement on emotions and motives. This is perhaps less obviously an advantage than the features I have been dealing with since it makes it harder to be unbiased and also gives a strong motivation to misdescribe, consciously or unconsciously, either our own emotions or those of others. Nevertheless, our vocabulary, if carefully examined, does not in fact simply give us words that describe an identical phenomenon with a different evaluation, as is

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suggested by jokes of the ‘I am firm; you are obstinate’ variety. For firmness and obstinacy are different – firmness is strength used in a good cause, obstinacy strength used in a bad one: the problem is that people can radically disagree as to whether a cause is good or bad, particularly when, as is often the case, the cause has both merits and demerits, and it is a question of which predominate. The question as to whether a person is being firm or obstinate may be impossible to settle; but it is not a matter of how they feel: arguments supporting one view or the other are not about their state of mind, but about whether what they are determined to do is right, whether refusing to budge is likely or unlikely to succeed, whether partially giving way would be a better tactic, etc. This is even clearer with the example of carefulness and meanness. Everyone would agree that there is a difference between being careful with money and being mean: the dispute is over where the line should be drawn, given a person’s financial situation. Clearer still is the example of envy and emulation, since, as has been said, one is the desire to rise to another person’s level and the other is the desire to drag them down to one’s own. We should, I think, conclude that this feature of ordinary speech, that it makes distinctions that are seen as morally important, is a valuable and even necessary one, since without it we would find it very hard to assess and change our own behaviour or (when required) assess that of others. It has its dangers, and makes misdescription that much easier. But to be able to make these distinctions at all is an advance over a system that does not allow them to be made.

13.3

Ordinary language and behaviourism

The feeling theory, even if possible to operate, can thus be shown by a study of ordinary language to provide less insight and less explanatory power than the way we normally talk and also to be unable to explain the relation between emotions and their objects. These are two good reasons for rejecting it as a theory of emotion and motive. But it might now be claimed that the reasons for rejecting this account of emotion are also reasons for adopting a behaviourist one. So we need to ask how behaviourism matches up against our ordinary way of talking. Before we can do this, we need to define what kind of behaviourist theory is involved. At least three kinds of behaviourism have been distinguished. There is metaphysical behaviourism, the theory that there are no mental events, which need not be taken seriously. There is methodological behaviourism, the claim that psychology should be the study of human behaviour and nothing more, which is not our concern

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here. The theory we need to examine is analytical behaviourism. This may be identified as the theory that particular combinations of physical changes and actions, or even of just one of these, whether over a short or long period of time, are not simply good evidence for the existence of particular emotions, but are the emotions – to sweat, tremble and retreat is not evidence of fear, but is being afraid; to shout and threaten is being angry; to work consistently hard for promotion is being ambitious; and so on. Some analytical behaviourists, such as Ryle himself, admit that emotions do also manifest themselves as feelings, but regard the manifestations as behaviour as much more important. They support this with an appeal to ordinary language, to such claims as ‘If you were really sorry, you wouldn’t do it again’; ‘If you really loved me, you’d be good to me’, which may imply or presuppose ‘You may feel remorse (or love), but without the behaviour it isn’t true remorse (or love)’. A contemporary behaviourist, Damasio, also does not deny the existence of feelings, but maintains that emotions are separable from feelings and can be studied independently: ‘In the context of this book, emotions are actions or movements, many of them public, visible to others as they occur in the face, in the voice, in specific behaviours’ (Damasio 2003: 28). Among contemporary philosophers behaviourists are probably even less common than feeling theorists; but they do still exist, and it is important to show that the problems raised for the feeling theory by the study of ordinary language cannot be dealt with, as Ryle may have thought, by adopting a form of analytical behaviourism, even though some of Ryle’s points are still valid. For in two ways analytical behaviourism agrees with ordinary language. It does not require the presence of a feeling as necessary for it to be true that a person is experiencing a particular emotion; and it regards the feeling without the behaviour as a weak version of the emotion. We should note, though, that in ordinary language this second point is applied only to ‘good’ emotions, emotions that it is considered should be acted on. Thus remorse without reformation, love without kindness, are often seen as sentimental substitutes for the real thing. But if a person feels fear or anger and does not act on them, we do not assume that the emotion was weak, but recognize that the person’s power of self-control may be strong. Even as regards good emotions, we may recognize inhibiting factors, and sympathize with Mr Dale, in Trollope’s The Small House at Allington, who declared sadly ‘My heart was ever kinder than my words.’ In any case, these agreements with ordinary language are only part of the story. Ordinary language does not treat the presence of a feeling as

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necessary for the presence of an emotion, but it does treat it as sufficient, as one important way in which emotions are manifested, and hence treats the presence of behaviour as not necessary. Moreover, for ordinary language behaviour is good evidence for the presence of an emotion, but it is never in itself sufficient. To ascribe an emotion or a motive is to go beyond describing the behaviour, not by positing some additional mental event (this is the mistake made by the feeling theory), but by including in the description an interpretation of what the behaviour is directed towards or responding to. A crucial point here is that ordinary language (and ordinary common sense) distinguishes between having an emotion and pretending to have it. But if the behaviour simply is the emotion, no such distinction can be made; and this is surely absurd. (Incidentally – a point made to me by a student many years ago – a feeling theorist can explain the difference between pretending to have an emotion and really having it, but has a problem explaining how we know what our behaviour should be in order to pretend, if emotions are simply feelings, and only contingently connected with the behaviour they are held to produce). Four answers to this by behaviourists can be found, three of which can be found at least in embryo form in an old article by Errol Bedford (Bedford 1967). The first is that if a sufficient amount of behaviour is examined we will eventually find a behavioural difference between the actual emotion and the pretence, as is shown by the fact that it is only through further behavioural evidence (including ‘verbal behaviour’) that we know it is a pretence. An example would be a scene in Klute, a film of the early 1970s, in which a call-girl is shown with a client, happily panting and saying ‘you angel’, and then looking at her watch, to tell the audience that her behaviour is a pretence. But this argument misses a crucial point: a revealed pretence will indeed be different from the behaviour that genuinely expresses the emotion, but a pretence, to be a pretence, does not have to be revealed – the argument applies only to unsuccessful pretences or pretences that are at some point deliberately revealed as such, and not to those which only the pretender knows to be pretence. Secondly, Bedford suggests that beyond a certain point the behaviour cannot be classed as pretence: if a person ‘goes so far as to smash the furniture or commit an assault ... he is not pretending’ (ibid.: 82). This argument was well dealt with by Austin himself in ‘Pretending’ (in Austin 1979). In effect, Austin points out that Bedford is confusing two kinds of pretence – if a person, while pretending to be angry, breaks a chair, the chair really is broken, and that is not a pretence, but this does not mean

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the person is really angry. He may after all have very strong reasons for convincing people that he really is angry, and feel that anything less would be unconvincing. Genuine violence is consistent with pretended anger; genuine kisses with pretended affection; genuine smiles with pretended cheerfulness. It is true that very often the pretended and genuine behaviour do in fact differ, and people reveal their real feelings, but there is no reason to think that this must be, or always is, the case, or that the difference will always lie in the intensity of the behaviour. Thirdly, there is a hint in Bedford of a modified version of this: that though behaviour, considered in isolation, could be interpreted in various ways, if one looks at the behaviour in its social context, one will find that it will be clear which emotion is being expressed. It is certainly true that the context often provides very good evidence, in a number of ways, of the nature of the emotion, for example by explaining the significance of words and gestures, and by telling us what emotion it would be appropriate or natural for the person to have. But this is still evidence, not something that entitles us to identify the emotion and the behaviour. A person may be in a situation where one would expect them to be angry and display angry behaviour: as we use the word ‘angry’ it is still possible that, precisely because they are expected to be angry and don’t feel anger, they are putting on an act. A person might run away from a dangerous enemy as part of a plan to lure them to a place where it would be possible to turn on them. As we talk, the behaviour and the context are never more than evidence, and this limitation is needed: every so often the unlikely interpretation is the correct one, so that we should avoid ways of talking that rule it out even as a possibility. Finally, the behaviourist may argue that, though actions can be a pretence, bodily changes are not: such things as turning pale, having a raised pulse, trembling uncontrollably, etc., are proof of an emotional state, and, more than this, may be said to amount to being in an emotional state. This is true, but these changes alone only establish that a person is in a state of heightened emotion, and not what that emotion is. There is a neat example in a G.K. Chesterton story, ‘The Mistake of the Machine’, in which a man is given a lie detector test, and shows a marked emotional response to the word ‘Falconbury’. The police suppose, not unreasonably, since Falconbury has disappeared, that this is because he murdered Falconbury; in fact, it is because he is Falconbury, though in disguise. As we actually speak, to ascribe a particular emotion is, with bodily changes as with actions, always to go beyond what is observed, and to interpret. (Similarly, if we apply

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the feeling theory to this case, we can establish that he responded to ‘Falconbury’ with a feeling of fear; but this does not tell us whether he was afraid of being charged with murdering Falconbury or afraid of being unmasked as being Falconbury.) This is the real point. It is not just that in ordinary language we distinguish pretence and reality, with regard to emotional behaviour. It is that, as was pointed out with regard to feelings, we distinguish emotions by their objects, so that to have an emotion is essentially to see something, whether actual or hypothetical, whether a particular person or thing or a situation, in a particular way, as being attractive, dangerous, offensive, etc. So the same feeling can express different emotions, and the same emotion can be expressed in many different ways, by feelings, by behaviour or purely by a thought or judgement, whether or not it is expressed in words, spoken or written. Similarly, we may say that ordinary language differs from behaviourism for the same reason: since it defines emotions by their objects, the same emotion can be expressed in many different kinds of behaviour, or in a purely mental way, and the same behaviour may express different emotions or a mere pretence of emotion. So, whether we are dealing with behaviour or feelings, to ascribe an emotion, or a motive, is never simply to name the feeling or behaviour-pattern, as feeling theorists maintain in the first case and behaviourists in the second. It is rather to interpret, to give the kind of object the emotion has and, if one is ascribing a motive, what the behaviour is directed towards or aims at. One may then say that ordinary language has the same advantages over behaviourism that it does over the feeling theory. Both the distinctions and the connections are more illuminating; the connection with values on balance is more useful than harmful, and there is a better theory of what motives are – feeling theorists have to regard motives as unobservable mental events, and behaviourists cannot, it would seem, have a theory of motive, that is of how behaviour is directed or what it aims at, but only of what people do in different circumstances. Ordinary language does not show that either theory is false, but it does show that adopting either would weaken rather than advance our understanding, so that a philosophical theory of emotion, the function of which is precisely to improve our understanding, must avoid them both. Hence the value, in this area, of the study of ‘what we would say when’. It did not give us a theory, but it cleared the ground. Indeed, it did more than this, by showing that a theory of emotion must give an account of how emotions relate to their objects, which the feeling theory and behaviourism both fail to do.

Ordinary Language and the Nature of Emotions and Motives

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The contemporary relevance of Austin’s programme

This work of ground-clearing was done quite a long time ago: so has the study of ordinary language, with regard to emotion and motive, relevance for us now? I suggest it has, for three reasons. First, as we have seen, there are those who have not realized that the work has been done and try to rescue these inadequate theories or to build research programmes which assume them: against these positions the arguments from ordinary language need to be repeated. Among contemporary analytic philosophers this is rare, but as we have seen, not extinct: Whiting is an avowed feeling theorist; Damasio is, like Ryle, an analytical behaviourist with regard to the interesting and important assertions about emotion; Griffiths, though a physicalist, still assumes the feeling theory as a start. Moreover, the feeling theory is probably, as has been said, still the theory of pre-philosophical commonsense. This in itself makes it a matter of philosophical concern, not only because philosophers should never limit their interests and attention only to what is said by other philosophers, but also because it has the consequence that the theory is still at times assumed by philosophers themselves, sometimes, as has been seen, even by those whose main work is on motive and emotion and, perhaps rather less rarely, by those concerned with ethics or politics, who may need the more subtle and more correct contemporary theories but do not in fact always realize this. Secondly, it is of interest and relevance to note that, even if contemporary theorists are not themselves particularly concerned with ordinary language, their work both owes something to this earlier work and is very much in line with it. I have discussed at length the way in which the ground was cleared by the study of ordinary language; one may add to this the fact that the main contemporary theories are very much in line with the ‘insights’ of the way we talk, in at least two or three ways. Thus, the dominant theories place a great emphasis on the cognitive element in emotion: this began in the sixties with Kenny’s Action, Emotion and Will (Kenny 1963) and can be seen in many places, such as Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought: the Intelligence of Emotions (Nussbaum 2001). And, as we have seen, the way we talk precisely identifies this as the common factor: what is common to fear, for example, is the perception or judgement of something as a potential evil or danger, whether this is expressed in feeling, behaviour, speech or thought. Also, the study of ordinary language revealed that talk of emotions and motives is very often talk about patterns of feeling and behaving, rather than single events, mental or physical. This began already with

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Ryle himself and his analysis of dispositions and was developed in particular by Wollheim (1999; see also Goldie 2006). Failure to recognize this has caused problems in analysing the unconscious, which has too often been treated as the undergoing of unconscious mental processes rather than the inability to see the full significance of conscious ones. Its recognition is not only important in itself, but connects with the emphasis on narrative and on the recognition that both emotions themselves and talking about them are part of human reaction and interaction, and not simply the experiences and actions of individuals in isolation. This brings us to the final point. The study of ordinary language helped to bring about the present situation and shows why contemporary theory is a real advance. But this may not be all. For it may now be the case that a return to the study of the language in which narratives are constructed and with which people express their interactions can give the philosophical account of emotion and motive an increased detail and precision. Such a study would involve not only the examination of language but also speech act theory, the study of what a person is doing by saying certain words – whether they are making a statement, an exhortation, a performative utterance, etc.: this would once again involve resuming a study begun by Austin. Both the study of language and the study of speech acts will need to be more scientific and more systematic than in Austin’s day, and to make proper use of the discipline of linguistics. But this is exactly what Austin wanted: as mentioned already, he was himself quite clear that the study of pre-scientific language should not be done in a pre-scientific spirit. In short, we may find – this remains to be seen – that in this area the study of ordinary language in the Austinian spirit is not merely of historical interest but can be usefully revived. It will need to be not only revived but also made scientific, or more nearly so. Nothing would please Austin more!

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Index

accordion effect, 17–18, 20 Adorno, Theodor, 85n.7 affordances, 32, 35–6 affordances, social, 36–8, 41–7 Anscombe, Elizabeth, 18, 62, 95, 218 argument from illusion, 8, 125–9, 133, 138, 143, 145–56, 164, 168–9, 192–3 Aristotle, xii, 5, 91, 214, 216 Armstrong, David, 207 Austin, John Langshaw, works by How to Do Things With Words, ix–x, xiii, 3, 7, 13–18, 22, 25, 28–9, 33–4, 47, 50–56, 57, 71, 72, 78, 99, 102, 106 “How to Talk: Some Simple Ways”, x “Ifs and Cans”, 20–1, 91 Invade Mecum, xxiii “The Meaning of a Word”, 101, 115, 119, 144 “Other Minds”, 53 “Performatif-Constatif”, 5, 93, 97–9, 100, 103 “Performative Utterances”, 50, 64, 65–6 “A Plea for Excuses”, xiii, 8–9, 13, 18–20, 91, 94, 96, 97, 102, 113, 142, 143, 212 “Pretending”, 61, 62 Sense and Sensibilia, xi–xii, xvii–xix, 3, 7, 23, 89, 103, 104, 124, 125, 133, 141–7, 150–3, 155, 162–75, 177–96, 197–202 “Three Ways of Spilling Ink”, 13, 21, 45 Ayer, Alfred Jules, xv, xviii, 89, 92, 104–5, 106, 108, 156n.1, 164–5, 167–71, 177, 193

Baz, Avner, 105 Beardsley, Monroe, 64 Bedford, Errol, 222–3 behaviourism, 220–4 Berkeley, George, xviii, 165, 167, 178, 188, 193 Berlin, Isaiah, xxii Black, Max, 116–17 Borges, Jorge Luis, 58–9 Boyle, Robert, 193 Brentano, Franz, 188 Broad, Charlie Dunbar, 136, 167, 193 Butler, Judith, 85 Carnap, Rudolf, 109–10 Cavell, Stanley, xvi Chesterton, Gilbert Keith, 223–4 Chisholm, Roderick, 199 Chomsky, Noam, 121–2 constative speech act, 74, 75, 77 conversation analysis, xv, 70–4, 78, 80–2 corpus linguistics, 120–2 Culler, Jonathan, 64, 65 Damasio, Antonio, 221, 225 Davidson, Donald, 18, 24, 28, 57–8, 77 Derrida, Jacques, 59 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 72–3 Descartes, René, 98, 167, 179, 182, 188, 214 descriptive fallacy, 115 de Sousa, Ronald, 215 Doctor Faustus (Marlowe), 214 Duncan-Jones, Austin, 92 dynamic speech-act theory, 27 Eagleton, Terry, 65 ecological psychology, 32–3, 35–6

239

240

Index

etiolated speech-acts, xiv–xv, 50–69, 72 Evans, Gareth, 58 experimental philosophy, xvii, 124–5, 130–3 Fairclough, Norman, 121 Feinberg, Joel, 18, folk psychology, 215 Fowler, Roger, 62 free will, 18, 20–1 Garfinkel, Harold, 70, 71, 79, 80 Geis, Michael, 27 Gellner, Ernest, xvi, 95 Gibson, James Jerome, xiv, 32, 35–6 Graham, Keith, 95, 100–1 Grice, Herbert Paul, 4, 125, 129, 134, 137 Griffiths, Paul, 215 Hart, Herbert Lionel Adolphus, 13 Hume, David, 188 Husserl, Edmund, xv, 91–2, 188 illocutionary act, 14–15, 16, 23–5, 29, 54–6, 61, 74, 84, 115, 116, 120 Jackson, Frank, 199 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 216 Kant, Immanuel, 8 Kenny, Anthony, 225 Labov, William, 121 Langton, Rae, 85n.7 Lewin, Kurt, 89, 105, 106, 107 Lewis, David, 58, 63 Locke, John, 193 locutionary act, 14–15, 16, 23–6, 55–6, 61, 115, 117, 119 Mach, Ernst, 193 Manser, Anthony, 106 Marcel, Gabriel, 4 Martin, Mike, 147

Moore, George Edward, 6, 92, 167 Mounce, Howard, 60 Naess, Arne, xvi, xvii, 108–12, 117–23 naïve realism, 143, 148–50, 154–5 New, Christopher, 59, 96 Nussbaum, Martha, 225 Paul, G.A., 170 performative, 14, 24, 28, 29, 50–4, 57, 64, 74, 78, 226 perlocutionary act, xiii–xiv, 14–15, 16, 25–8, 32–49, 56, 74, 115–16 social-ecological model of, 36–42, 44–6 received model of, 42–4, 47 phatic versus rhetic act, 16–17, 55 phenomenal principle, 147 Plato, 179, 191 Popper, Karl Raimund, 4 Price, Henry Habberley, xviii, 147, 167, 177 problem of perception, 124, 125–6, 138, 147, 167, 171 see also argument from illusion, sense-data psycholinguistics, 130–3 Putnam, Hilary, 184 Quine, Willard Van Orman, 5, 114–15 Quinton, Anthony, 200 Ratcliffe, Matthew, 215 Reid, Thomas, 218 rhetic act, see phatic versus rhetic act Russell, Bertrand, xi, xv, 92, 103–66, 116, 167 Ryle, Gilbert, x, xi, 23, 219, 225 Sacks, Harvey, xv, 70–4, 79–82 Searle, John Rogers, x, ix, 23–5, 63, 67nn.8/10, 69n.20, 72 sense-data, 8, 22–3, 104, 115, 125–6, 143, 145–50, 156, 163–4, 168–71, 173, 174, 177, 178–81, 188, 193, 195, 210n.1

Index Spinoza, Baruch, 214 Steward, Helen, 75–6

241

Vienna Circle, 109–10

Warnock, Geoffrey, xviii, 4, 74, 92–3, 98, 119, 141, 165, 167, 177, 193 Whiting, Demian, 215 Williams, Bernard, 5 Wilson, John Cook, 94, 96 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, ix, 6, 64, 73, 76, 95, 161, 162, 173–4, 179, 191, 213, 217

Wahl, Jean, 5

Zeno, 179

Thales, 171, 172 Twardowski, Kazimierz, 188 Urmson, James Opie, 90–1, 113–14, 118