32 J. L. Austin Quotes

J. L. Austin quotes

1. The Nicomachean Ethics is only intended as a guide for politicians, and they are only concerned to know what is good, not what goodness means...and in any case one can know what things are good without knowing the analysis of 'good' --J.L. Austin, Philosophical Papers, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford, 1979) 22.

2. Why should it not be the whole function of a word to denote many things? --Austin, Papers 38.

3. In one sense 'there are' both universals and material objects, in another sense there is no such thing as either: statements about each can usually be analysed, but not always, nor always without remainder. -- Austin, Papers 43n.

4. But surely, speaking carefully, we do not sense 'red' and 'blue' any more than 'resemblance' (or 'qualities' any more than 'relations'): we sense something of which we might say, if we wished to talk about it, that 'this is red.' --Austin, Papers 49.

5. It may justly be urged that, properly speaking, what alone has meaning is a sentence. --Austin, Papers 56.

6. Faced with the nonsense question 'What is the meaning of a word?' and perhaps dimly recognizing it to be nonsense, we are nevertheless not inclined to give it up. --Austin, Papers 58.

7. Ordinary language blinkers the already feeble imagination. --Austin, Papers 68.

8. [I]f we say that I only get at the symptoms of his anger, that carries an important implication. But is this the way we do talk? --Austin, Papers 107.

9. But suppose we take the noun 'truth': here is a case where the disagreements between different theorists have largely turned on whether they interpreted this as a name of a substance, of a quality, or of a relation. --Austin, Papers 73.

10. We become obsessed with 'truth' when discussing statements, just as we become obsessed with 'freedom' when discussing conduct...Like freedom, truth is a bare minimum or an illusory ideal. --Austin, Papers 130.

11. Like 'real', 'free' is only used to rule out the suggestion of some or all of its recognized antitheses. As 'truth' is not a name of a characteristic of assertions, so 'freedom' is not a name for a characteristic of actions, but the name of a dimension in which actions are assessed. --Austin, Papers 180.

12. [W]ords are not (except in their own little corner) facts or things: we need therefore to prise them off the world, to hold them apart from and against it, so that we can realize their inadequacies and arbitrariness, and can relook at the world without blinkers. --Austin, Papers 182.

13. [H]owever well equipped our language, it can never be forearmed against all possible cases that may arise and call for description: fact is richer than diction. --Austin, Papers 195.

14. [O]rdinary 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, Papers 185.

15. Infelicity is an ill to which all acts are heir which have the general character of ritual or ceremonial, all conventional acts.

16. Let us distinguish between acting intentionally and acting deliberately or on purpose, as far as this can be done by attending to what language can teach us.

17. There are more ways of outraging speech than contradiction merely.

18. When may we hope to see your Harvard lectures published sir?' an undergraduate asked the late Professor Austin. 'You may hope to see them published any time' was the characteristic reply.

1. The theory of truth is a series of truisms.

2. In the one defense, briefly, we accept responsibility but deny that it was bad: in the other, we admit that it was bad but don't accept full, or even any, responsibility.

3. Are cans constitutionally iffy? Whenever, that is, we say that we can do something, or could do something, or could have done something, is there an if in the offing--suppressed, it may be, but due nevertheless to appear when we set out our sentence in full or when we give an explanation of its meaning?

4. The trouble is that the expression 'material thing' is functioning already, from the very beginning, simply as a foil for 'sense-datum'; it is not here given, and is never given, any other role to play, and apart from this consideration it would surely never have occurred to anybody to try to represent as some single kind of things the things which the ordinary man says that he 'perceives.

5. The beginning of sense, not to say wisdom, is to realize that 'doing an action,' as used in philosophy, is a highly abstract expression--it is a stand-in used in the place of any (or almost any?) verb with a personal subject, in the same sort of way that 'thing' is a stand-in for anynoun substantive, and 'quality' a stand-in for the adjective.

6. Is it true or false that Belfast is north of London? That the galaxy is the shape of a fried egg? That Beethoven was a drunkard? That Wellington won the battle of Waterloo? There are various degrees and dimensions of success in making statements: the statements fit the facts always more or less loosely, in different ways on different occasions for different intents and purposes.

7. Certainly ordinary language has no claim to be the last word, if there is such a thing. It embodies, indeed, something better than the metaphysics of the Stone Age,namely, as was said, the inherited experience and acumen of many generations of men.

8. Our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connexions they have found worth marketing, in the lifetimes of many generation; these surely are likely to be more numerous, more sound, since they have stood up to the long test of thee 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.

9. It should be quite clear, then, that there are no criteria to be laid down in general for distinguishing the real from the not real.

10. Certainly ordinary language has no claim to be the last word, if there is such a thing.

11. I begin, then, with some remarks about 'the meaning of a word.' I think many persons now see all or part of what I shall say: but not all do, and there is a tendency to forget, or to get it slightly wrong. In so far as I am merely flogging the converted, I apologize to them.

12. Fact is richer than diction.

13. Next, 'real' is what we may call a trouser-word. It is usually thought, and I dare say usually rightly thought, that what one might call the affirmative use of a term is basic--that, to understand 'x,' we need to know what it is to be x, or to be an x, and that knowing this apprises us of what it is not to be x, not to be an x. But with 'real' (as we briefly noted earlier) it is the negative use that wears the trousers.

14. There is no one kind of thing that we 'perceive' but many different kinds, the number being reducible if at all by scientific investigation and not by philosophy: 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, which in turn are in many ways but not in all ways unlike pictures on the cinema-screen--and so on.