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How To Talk About Pigs
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Extract
It has been about 20 years since Austin offered to teach us some simple ways of talking. In view of the attention paid the balance of the Austin corpus, this offer has been greeted with a surprising silence. There are, perhaps, some reasons for this lack of response. First, of course, the article is a difficult one, tortuous and opaque. Second, I suspect that there is a general, though tacit, consensus that any insights of value in “How To Talk” have been absorbed or transcended (aufgehoben) by the later theorizing on speech acts incorporated in How To Do Things With Words. Nevertheless, I am convinced that it is worth working through “How To Talk” if only to reveal the major internal inconsistency which it contains. Mistakes made by important philosophers are likely to be important mistakes. In addition, sorting through the ontology and epistemologies of Austin's analyses of asserting will equip us with some worthwhile distinctions which, while not Austin's, may help us unravel the multiplicity of linguistic performances with which he confronts us.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © The Authors 1974
References
1 “How To Talk-Some Simple Ways,” PAS, 1952-3, reprinted as Chapter 8, pp. 181-200, of Philosophical Papers, Oxford, 1961. Henceforth ‘HTSW’. Page references will be to the latter appearance. Later, I will need Sense & Sensibilia, Oxford, 1962. We'll call it ‘SS’.
2 Tradition is curiously divided on the question of the applicability of a predicate for which pattern-matching is criterial to the pattern itself. The most common position seems to be that the matching relation (typically resemblance) is irreflexive. In that case, one can hold that the predicate applies to the pattern-particular only at the cost of introducing a second, supervening, pattern. Pursuing this line leads to the Third Man regress of Plato's Parmenides. The contemporary line seems to be to disallow application of the predicate to the pattern particular. See, for example, Wittgenstein's Investigations, No. 50: “There is one thing of which one can say neither that it is one metre long, nor that it is not one metre long, and that is the standard metre in Paris.” The option of granting reflexivity to the matching relation, by contrast, generates a different argument which, curiously, has also been attributed to Wittgenstein: the Paradigm Case Argument.
3 This is once again the point that, on Austin's view of predication, the match of item and pattern is criterial for the applicability to the item of the name whose sense the pattern is. Nor have we yet exhausted the significance of this point.
4 A quite special use of the utterance ‘That's a pig’, by the way, not comfortably captured by our considerations thus far.