In my talk, I want to develop further a proposal made by James Conant, in his ‘Three Ways of Inheriting Austin’, in C. Al-Saleh and S. Laugier, eds., J. L. Austin et la philosophie du langage ordinaire (Hildesheim, 2011), 394–415, that in passages such as the two below, Austin is not offering us philosophical theses but rather ‘rules of thumb’. I will consider a few cases to illustrate further what such a proposal comes to, in order then both to turn to the question of whether Austin is a realist, and to suggest that (by Austin’s own lights) ‘it will not do’ to say either that he is a realist, or that he is not a realist.
No modification without aberration.—When it is stated that X did A, there is a temptation to suppose that given some, indeed perhaps any, expression modifying the verb we shall be entitled to insert either it or its opposite or negation in our statement: that is, we shall be entitled to ask, typically, ‘Did X do A Mly or not Mly?’ (e.g. ‘Did X murder Y voluntarily or involuntarily?’), and to answer one or the other. Or as a minimum it is supposed that if X did A there must be at least one modifying expression that we could, justifiably and informatively, insert with the verb. In the great majority of cases of the use of the great majority of verbs (‘murder’ perhaps is not one of the majority) such suppositions are quite unjustified. The natural economy of language dictates that for the standard case covered by any normal verb,—not, perhaps, a verb of omen such as ‘murder,’ but a verb like ‘eat’ or ‘kick’ or ‘croquet’—no modifying expression is required or even permissible. Only if we do the action named in some special way or circumstances, different from those in which such an act is naturally done (and of course both the normal and the abnormal differ according to what verb in particular is in question) is a modifying expression called for, or even in order. I sit in my chair, in the usual way—I am not in a daze or influenced by threats or the like: here, it will not do to say either that I sat in it intentionally or that I did not sit in it intentionally, nor yet that I sat in it automatically or from habit or what you will. (J. L. Austin, ‘A Plea for Excuses’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 57 (1956–57), 15–16.)
[. . .] the question of truth and falsehood does not turn only on what a sentence is, nor yet on what it means, but on, speaking very broadly, the circumstances in which it is uttered. Sentences are not as such either true or false. But it is really equally clear, when one comes to think of it, that for much the same reasons there could be no question of picking out from one’s bunch of sentences those that are evidence for others, those that are ‘testable’, or those that are ‘incorrigible’. What kind of sentence is uttered as providing evidence for what depends, again, on the circumstances of particular cases; there is no kind of sentence which as such is evidence- providing, just as there is no kind of sentence which as such is surprising, or doubtful, or certain, or incorrigible, or true. (J. L. Austin, Sense & Sensibilia (1962), 111)
Wolfgang Man is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. His research interests include: theories of argumentation (i.e. logic and rhetoric, broadly construed), beginning with Socrates and Plato; the history of central metaphysical contrasts—e.g. corporeal/incorporeal, composite/simple, whole/part, matter/form, object/property, potentiality /actuality—throughout antiquity and the middle ages; and within ethics, treatments of the relation between rational and non-rational motivation, and accounts of freedom (e.g. those of Epictetus and Plotinus) which do not require that an agent be able to act differently (from how s/he actually does act) in order to count as free. He has also worked on English and German Romanticism (especially, Wordsworth and Hölderlin); the reception of classical antiquity in 19th century Britain and Germany; and the historiography of philosophy.