Mind, Matter, and Meaning

Austin

J. L. Austin (1911–1960) was an Oxford philosopher who died at forty-eight, leaving behind two short posthumous books and a permanent change to the philosophy of language and perception. He treated conceptual confusion the way a surgeon treats infection: precisely, without sentiment, and without mercy. His Sense and Sensibilia (1962), reconstructed from lecture notes, applies that method to the argument from illusion, the engine of indirect realism. The argument doesn’t survive the operation.

Major Works

  • Sense and Sensibilia (1962, posthumous) — dismantling the argument from illusion and the sense-datum theory
  • How to Do Things with Words (1962, posthumous) — the performative/constative distinction and speech act theory
  • “Other Minds” (1946) — knowledge, evidence, and the problem of other minds
  • “A Plea for Excuses” (1956) — the method of ordinary language philosophy demonstrated on moral psychology
  • “Ifs and Cans” (1956) — freedom and determinism through attention to ordinary usage

Key Positions

Dismantling the argument from illusion. Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia takes the argument from illusion apart with characteristic care. The argument runs: sometimes things appear other than they are (a straight stick looks bent in water); in such cases we cannot be directly perceiving the physical object (what we see is bent, and the stick is not); so in all cases, even veridical perception, what we directly perceive must be something other than the physical object — a sense datum, an appearance, an inner item. Austin’s response: the argument is riddled with equivocations and relies on a tendentious use of “appears,” “real,” and “directly.” The phrase “directly perceive” does no work except to introduce the conclusion as a premise. The claim that illusion cases show we are never perceiving the physical world confuses cases of misperception with genuine perceptions.

Ordinary language as a philosophical tool. Austin’s methodology: philosophical puzzles frequently arise from philosophers mishandling ordinary language — using terms in unfamiliar ways while relying on the ordinary ways to generate intuitions. The remedy is systematic attention to how words actually work in the contexts where they work well. This is not conservatism about language; it is an empirical method. The way ordinary speakers distinguish appearing from being, real from unreal, direct from indirect, carries information about the actual structure of perception that philosophical theorizing tends to destroy.

“Real” as a trouser word. Austin analyzes “real” not as a descriptive predicate but as what he calls a trouser word: it gets its sense by ruling out specific contrasts in context. A “real” duck rules out a toy, a stuffed exhibit, a decoy. A “real” pain rules out a fake, a hypochondriac’s complaint. “Real” wears the trousers: the negative, what is being contrasted, does the semantic work. This analysis dissolves many puzzles about perception: asking whether we really perceive the external world requires specifying what the alleged not-real perception would be.

Speech act theory. Austin’s other major contribution: the distinction between constative utterances (which describe states of affairs and can be true or false) and performative utterances (which do something — “I promise,” “I hereby declare,” “I name this ship”). The constative/performative distinction opened into the full taxonomy of speech acts (locutionary, illocutionary, perlocutionary) developed further by Searle.

My View

Austin supplies one indispensable cut in the book’s dismantling of the argument from illusion. He exposes the quick slide from the stick looks bent to there is something bent of which I am aware, and his distinction between illusion and delusion keeps a public object in view in the familiar stick case. That blocks the automatic inference to a private replacement.

It does not finish the argument by itself. A careful sense-datum theorist can grant that the straight stick remains present and still demand something that bears the presented bentness. At that point the Phenomenal Principle, not ordinary grammar alone, carries the burden. The book answers that slower argument through representational content and the vehicle/object distinction: a state can present bentness without anything bent existing as a second object.

Austin therefore remains an important interlocutor rather than the authority whose diagnosis settles perception. His analysis clears the verbal undergrowth; the positive account must still explain sensory presence, hallucination, content, and direct perceptual contact. See Direct Realism and Indirect Realism and Sense-Data.