J. L. Austin and H. P. Grice

It’s fair to say that Austin’s work has been caught up in the stampede away from broadly ordinary language-based approaches to philosophical questions. The work of Paul Grice, collected in his Studies in the Way of Words (1989), has played an important role in the negative assessment of such approaches, including aspects of Austin’s work. One central idea in Grice’s work is that the ways in which we use language—crudely, the pairings of situations and sentences that we find appropriate or inappropriate, or what we would or wouldn’t say in those situations—is not a simple function of the nature of the respective situations and the correctness conditions with which the sentences are associated. Rather, judgments about appropriateness are driven also by, for example, our sensitivities to the demands of rational co-operation with our conversational partners. And it has been thought that, in one or another way, ordinary language philosophers, including Austin, have been insensitive to the additional parameters to which judgments of appropriateness are beholden (for early attacks of this sort, see Ayer 1967 and Searle 1966). It is beyond the scope of this entry to attempt to assess either the extent to which Austin should really be seen as a target of such objections or, if he should, whether they demonstrate weaknesses in his work. However, in pursuing any such assessment, it is important to note that Austin’s exploitation of ordinary language is never driven by simple appeal to whether, in a situation considered as a whole, we would take it to be simply appropriate or inappropriate to use some sentence or other. Rather, Austin is—as we are—sensitive to more fine-grained appraisals of uses of bits of language and, when he judges that an utterance on an occasion would be false or nonsensical, he intends that judgment to contrast with less damaging negative appraisals—for example, about what it would be merely inappropriate or impolite to say. Moreover, Austin is sensitive to the specific features of situations upon which we base one or another more fine-grained appraisal of uses of sentences. As he stresses, “It takes two to make a truth” (1950a: 124 fn.1). And Austin is sensitive to the details of both participants in that and other forms of transaction between word and world.[2]

(For discussion of Austin’s approach to philosophical questions, with reference to his classification as an ordinary language philosopher, see Berlin 1973b; Cavell 1965; Garvey 2014; Grice 1989: 3–21; Gustafsson 2011; Hampshire 1960, 1965; Marion 2009; Martin ms (Other Internet Resources); Pears 1962; Pitcher 1973; Putnam 1994; Quine 1965; Searle 1966; Soames 2003: 171–219; Travis 1991; Urmson 1965, 1967; Urmson and Warnock 1961; Warnock 1973a, 1989: 2–10; White 1967.)