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.

J. L. Austin

Categorized in : Philosophy Expression Quality

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.

J. L. Austin

drawing men thinking

A sentence is made up of words, a statement is made in words.... Statements are made, words or sentences are used.

J. L. Austin

used language made

However 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.

J. L. Austin

diction may facts

After all we speak of people 'taking refuge' in vagueness -the more precise you are, in general the more likely you are to be wrong, whereas you stand a good chance of not being wrong if you make it vague enough.

J. L. Austin

vagueness chance people

Fact is richer than diction.

J. L. Austin

diction facts

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

J. L. Austin

lasts language ordinary

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

J. L. Austin

heirs austin character

The theory of truth is a series of truisms.

J. L. Austin

truism theory truth

Going back into the history of a word, very often into Latin, we come back pretty commonly to pictures or models of how things happen or are done.

J. L. Austin

austin done latin

Going back into the history of a word, very often into Latin, we come back pretty commonly to pictures or models of how things happen or are done. These models may be fairly sophisticated and recent, as is perhaps the case with 'motive' or 'impulse', but one of the commonest and most primitive types of model is one which is apt to baffle us through its very naturalness and simplicity.

J. L. Austin

simplicity done latin

Usually it is uses of words, not words in themselves, that are properly called vague.

J. L. Austin

vague fake-people use

Why should it not be the whole function of a word to denote many things?

J. L. Austin

function whole should

"What is truth?" said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. Pilate was in advance of his time. For "truth" itself is an abstract noun, a camel, that is, of a logical construction, which cannot get past the eye even of a grammarian. We approach it cap and categories in hand: we ask ourselves whether Truth is a substance (the Truth, the Body of Knowledge), or a quality (something like the colour red, inhering in truths), or a relation ("correspondence"). But philosophers should take something more nearly their own size to strain at. What needs discussing rather is the use, or certain uses, of the word "true." In vino, possibly, "veritas," but in a sober symposium "verum."

J. L. Austin

eye truth past

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.

J. L. Austin

austin acting purpose

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.'

J. L. Austin

quality blue might

You are more than entitled not to know what the word 'performative' means. It is a new word and an ugly word, and perhaps it doesnot mean anything very much. But at any rate there is one thing in its favor, it is not a profound word.

J. L. Austin

ugly profound mean

Sentences are not as such either true or false.

J. L. Austin

austin true-or-false fake-people

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.

J. L. Austin

defense responsibility reality

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.

J. L. Austin

data expression men

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.

J. L. Austin

rainbow numbers philosophy