J. L. Austin on Language

B. Garvey

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137329981
• eBook ISBN: 9781137329998
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Linguistics

Looking at the work of J.L. Austin, who subjected language to a close and intense analysis, this book deals with his examination of the various things we do with words, and with the philosophical insights he believed could be gained by closely examining the uses of words by non-philosophers.

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.

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 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,’ 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 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 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 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 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 applicatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Recollections of J.L. Austin
• Part I  Speech-Act Theory
• Part II  Ordinary Language and Philosophical Method
• Part III  Language, Perception and Mind
• References
• Index