J. L. Austin Quotes

31 Sourced Quotes

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
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
But I owe it to the subject to say, that it has long afforded me what philosophy is so often thought, and made, barren of - the fun of discovery, the pleasures of co-operation, and the satisfaction of reaching agreement.

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

J. L. Austin
There are more ways of killing a cat than drowning it in butter; but this is the sort of thing (as the proverb indicates) we overlook: there are more ways of outraging speech than contradiction merely.

J. L. Austin
Next, 'real' is what we may call a trouser-word. It is usually thought, and I dare say usually rightly thought, that what one might call the affirmative use of a term is basic--that, to understand 'x,' we need to know what it is to be x, or to be an x, and that knowing this apprises us of what it is not to be x, not to be an x. But with 'real' (as we briefly noted earlier) it is the negative use that wears the trousers.

J. L. Austin
Like 'real', 'free' is only used to rule out the suggestion of some or all of its recognized antitheses. As 'truth' is not a name of a characteristic of assertions, so 'freedom' is not a name for a characteristic of actions, but the name of a dimension in which actions are assessed.

J. L. Austin
Ordinary language is not the last word: in principle it can everywhere be supplemented and improved upon and superseded. Only remember, it is the first word.

J. L. Austin
If we say that I only get at the symptoms of his anger, that carries an important implication. But is this the way we do talk?

J. L. Austin
We become obsessed with 'truth' when discussing statements, just as we become obsessed with 'freedom' when discussing conduct... Like freedom, truth is a bare minimum or an illusory ideal.

J. L. Austin
Faced with the nonsense question 'What is the meaning of a word?' and perhaps dimly recognizing it to be nonsense, we are nevertheless not inclined to give it up.

J. L. Austin
Are cans constitutionally iffy? Whenever, that is, we say that we can do something, or could do something, or could have done something, is there an if in the offing--suppressed, it may be, but due nevertheless to appear when we set out our sentence in full or when we give an explanation of its meaning?

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

J. L. Austin
It should be quite clear, then, that there are no criteria to be laid down in general for distinguishing the real from the not real.

J. L. Austin
Is it true or false that Belfast is north of London? That the galaxy is the shape of a fried egg? That Beethoven was a drunkard? That Wellington won the battle of Waterloo? There are various degrees and dimensions of success in making statements: the statements fit the facts always more or less loosely, in different ways on different occasions for different intents and purposes.

J. L. Austin
I feel ruefully sure, also, that one must be at least one sort of fool to rush in over ground so well trodden by the angels.

J. L. Austin
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
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
The Nicomachean Ethics is only intended as a guide for politicians, and they are only concerned to know what is good, not what goodness means... and in any case one can know what things are good without knowing the analysis of 'good'

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

J. L. Austin
In one sense 'there are' both universals and material objects, in another sense there is no such thing as either: statements about each can usually be analysed, but not always, nor always without remainder.

J. L. Austin
It may justly be urged that, properly speaking, what alone has meaning is a sentence.

J. L. Austin
But suppose we take the noun 'truth': here is a case where the disagreements between different theorists have largely turned on whether they interpreted this as a name of a substance, of a quality, or of a relation.

J. L. Austin
I am not sure importance is important: truth is.

J. L. Austin
Ordinary language blinkers the already feeble imagination.

J. L. Austin
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
When asked to state his 'criterion' of philosophical correctness, [he] replied that, well, if you could get a collection of 'more or less cantankerous colleagues' all to accept something after argument, that, he thought, would be 'a bit of a criterion'.

J. L. Austin
Words are not (except in their own little corner) facts or things: we need therefore to prise them off the world, to hold them apart from and against it, so that we can realize their inadequacies and arbitrariness, and can relook at the world without blinkers.

J. L. Austin
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