Abstract

Forthcoming in a planned volume of essays on Austin with Oxford University Press. J. L. Austin’s attitude towards traditional epistemological problems was largely negative. They arise and are maintained, he charged, by “sleight of hand, ” “wile,” “concealed motives, ” “seductive fallacies, ” fixation on a handful of “jejune examples” and a host of small errors, misinterpretations, and mistakes about matters of fact (1962: 3-6, 1979: 87). As these charges indicate, he did not offer a general critical theory of traditional epistemological theorizing or of the intellectual motivations that lead to it. Instead, he subjected individual arguments to piecemeal criticism, patiently showing how things go awry in conception, motivation, argumentation, and plain fact. The work was incremental, but the goal was radical: to reduce large edifices to rubble. As he put it regarding certain sense datum theories, “the right policy is to go back to a much earlier stage, and to dismantle the whole doctrine before it gets off the ground ” (1962: 142). It is often said that Austin’s criticisms were linguistic, but this is only partly right. While he occasionally charges traditional epistemologists with misusing crucial words and relying on unregulated and inadequately motivated technical terms, he also charges

Citations