Taking a plunge: a Cavellian reappraisal of Austin’s unhappy analogy

ABSTRACT

This paper presents and defends a reappraisal of J.L. Austin’s infamous analogy between saying ‘I know’ and ‘I promise’ in ‘Other Minds.’ The paper has four sections. In §1, I contend that the standard reading of Austin’s analogy is a strawman that distorts the terms of the analogy and superimposes philosophical commitments that Austin was precisely trying to combat. In §§2 and 3, I argue that to understand the point of the analogy we must contextualize ‘Other Minds’ as a response to logical positivism. I recap A.J. Ayer’s influential account of positivism, before arguing that ‘Other Minds’ and its centrepiece analogy should be read as an attack on Austin’s colleague’s organizing positivist assumptions – specifically, descriptivism and the fact/value dichotomy that it props up. My main thesis is that Austin sought to show that epistemic discourse is imbricated with ethical commitments. This reading is anticipated by Cavell, to whom I turn in §4. I bring together insights from across Cavell’s oeuvre to develop this reading of Austin’s analogy and finally to critique certain aspects of it. This paper adds to the recent resurgence in Austin scholarship and aims to get clear the philosophical and historical stakes of his historically maligned analogy.

KEYWORDS:

• J.L. Austin
• Stanley Cavell
• ordinary language philosophy
• logical positivism
• responsibility

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Michael Beaney and the anonymous referees for their incisive and helpful comments on drafts of this paper. A version of this paper was presented at the Ordinary Language Philosophy Workshop at the Institute of Philosophy in Zurich, and I would like to thank the workshop participants – in particular, Avner Baz and Nicole Rathgeb – for feedback on that occasion, and Alex Altonji for insightful comments on the paper in advance of that workshop. Lastly, Alice Crary deserves special thanks for her thoughtful and constructive feedback on multiple versions of this paper, as does Emily Gillcrist – above all for her patience.

ORCID

Joel de Lara http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3227-6725

Notes

1 This becomes clearer in Sense and Sensibilia, written and revised between 1947 and 1958, which is a sustained critique of Ayer’s views on sense data and their relation to knowledge (see Sense and Sensibilia, 1).

2 The following section benefited significantly from comments from Michael Beaney and from an anonymous referee. I would like to thank both of them for encouraging me to elaborate and refine Cavell’s reading of Austin’s analogy.