The Importance of Being Austin

I just got through the famous book by the eminent British philosopher J.L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia. It is a very interesting book: Funny, witty and wise (and a little ugly on the side, as Frank Zappa would say)… This is remarkable display of all the tricks of the trade of one of the foremost representatives of the Oxonian ordinary language philosophy, The main target of Austin’s criticism in this book is the so called ‘argument from illusion’, from which we are lead to believe, by such philosophers as Austin and Price, that we are never perceiving any real material objects but only ‘sense data’. Austin dismantles and literally crushes all the purported arguments and turns of phrase of these philosophers by showing how they are not sensitive to the sophistication, the richness and the power of discrimination which is embedded in ordinary language and how they tend to neglect, distort or veil the meanings of such central terms as ‘real’, ‘perception’, ‘truth’, ‘illusion’, ‘delusion’ etc. Austin makes a powerful case that the problematics which are made central to these philosophers arise from what he calls ‘the scholastic view’, which trades on oversimplification, schematization and constant obsessive repetition of some bad and unreflective examples, which then leads up to a series of problems of which the ‘plain man’ would never even consider worth analysing.

So far, so good, but Austin never really gets off the ground and away from his favourite everyday examples. Language is much richer than what advocates of ordinary language philosophy want to have it, and in particular the intricate and very complex forms of mediate perception and conception which is involved in science is never seriously addressed. Austin’s philosophy never leaves the cosy armchairs of Oxford more than an occasional round at the local pub, and on the way there he is careful not to pass through any of the other faculties and departments. Ordinary language philosophy, in the end, is a seriously a-scientific activity. I wouldn’t say anti-scientific, it simply isn’t able to address the complexities of science, as if the complexities of everyday life were too demanding to leave any powers left for the analysis of anything else...

That’s a great shame, because the power of Austin’s prose and the skill of his reasoning could have been of great importance to the advancement of philosophy had he directed his wit to more profound questions and had he opened his eyes to more than just the scholastic exercises of Ayer and Price or to ‘the plain man’ and his vernacular..