J.L. Austin
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Recent papers in J.L. Austin
Published in September, 2020, as part of OUP's Fundamentals of Philosophy Series.
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This paper follows on from Austin’s search for a definition of performatives, both from a linguistic as well as a pragmatic point of view. In the first chapter we attempt to describe and examine performative verbs, or performative... more
This essay establishes a distinction between two different modalities of criticism, which it calls "conclusive" and "implicative." The former reports on conclusions previously reached and invites verification or refutation from the... more
A reconstruction of Aquinas' thought on self-defence, and a comparison of his point of view with other philosophers
Here I bewail the slapdash and confusing way in which philosophers bandy about the word ‘incoherent’ (and ‘incoherence’ and ‘incoherently’). To some it appears to mean: inconsistent; to others: pragmatically self-defeating; and to yet... more
An ideological critique of speech act theory may help us to understand some of the differences that exist between American and Japanese communicative contexts. Cross-cultural studies of particular speech acts suggest an ongoing conflict... more
Speech acts are acts that can, but need not, be carried out by saying and meaning that one is doing so. Many view speech acts as the central units of communication, with phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties... more
Update of SEP entry for 2020
The final shot of German director F. W. Murnau’s 1931 masterpiece, Tabu: A Story of the South Seas, is an especially suitable coda to this silent-era filmmaker’s career – one that, despite its epic heights and lasting influence, was often... more
Abstract: What a speaker says and thereby means, and how her words are best interpreted, can be influenced in complex ways by the conventional meanings of those words, the intentions with which she speaks, and by the conversation in which... more
'Institutional critique' is a term that refers to a range of diverse artistic practices and discourses that emerged at the end of the 1960s and that continue in the present. In spite of their differences, they all share a concern with the... more
What if all works of art were better understood as functioning apparatuses, entangling their human audiences in experiences of becoming? What if certain works of art were even able to throw the brakes on becoming altogether, making... more
Assertion is here approached as a social practice developed through cultural evolution. This perspective will facilitate inquiry into the questions what role assertion plays in communicative life, what norms it is subject to, and whether... more
A draft of the nearly-eponymous chapter of my completed book on Jane Austen, Stanley Cavell, and Ordinary Language Philosophy, "Austen and Other Minds." "I should like to say: 'If I am wrong about this, I have no guarantee that... more
There is a widespread assumption that ordinary language philosophy was killed off sometime in the 1960s or 70s by a combination of Gricean pragmatics and the rapid development of systematic semantic theory. Contrary to that widespread... more
Ongoing discussion of this paper here: https://www.academia.edu/s/cf13d33860?source=link Philosophy – whether traditional or contemporary – has nothing to say about the human metaphysical predicament, and cannot even offer a basic... more
In spite of an evolving contemporary debate over the concept of “epistemic possibility,” nearly every philosopher assumes that the concept is equivalent to a mere absence of epistemic impossibility, that a proposition is epistemically... more
The construction and analysis of arguments supposedly are a philosopher’s main business, the demonstration of truth or refutation of falsehood his principal aim. In Sense and Sensibilia, J.L. Austin does something entirely different: He... more
I suggest that, although the nonsensicalist challenge (obviously) matters, it has, at least in its Wittgensteinian form, been widely ignored. On the other hand, those who still adhere to nonsensicalism (mainly Wittgensteinians) have been... more
David Hume was an early exponent of attending to the language we use to speak about objects of aesthetic and artistic interest. His remarks on this topic were largely negative and designed to warn us against being misled by such... more
I am planning a history of the notion of philosophical nonsense and naturally difficult historical and exegetical questions have come up. Charles Pigden has argued that the notion goes back at least as far as Hobbes and that Locke,... more
This essay argues that, despite the potential for an encounter between Stanley Cavell’s thought and found-footage experimental filmmaking, this has not yet taken place because the early Cavell’s picture of films as autonomous “wholes,”... more
Illocutionary force is an aspect of how a speaker means what she says. This would seem to imply that speech acts require complex communicative intentions or mastery of often-sophisticated communicative conventions. We may doubt, however,... more
A group-written essay by Emily Thibodeau, Catherine Leary, Kelly Gray, Owen Charron, Meghan O’Day, Anika Gillwald, Jesse Keel, Liam O’Connor-Genereaux, and Eric Lindstrom (University of Vermont). Jane Austen's readers know that sometimes... more
In this first of two essays written on the topic of ancient Greek inscriptions, I will briefly explore and discuss the role of the written word and of visual language within the cult of Asclepius at Epidauros, by both looking at the... more
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... more
This paper excavates a debate concerning the claims of ordinary language philosophers that took place during the middle of the last century. The debate centers on the status of statements about "what we say". On one side of the debate,... more
This paper sets out the felicity conditions for metalinguistic proposals, a type of directive illocutionary act. It discusses the relevance of metalinguistic proposals and other metalinguistic directives for understanding both small-and... more
We investigate claims about the frequency of "know" made by philosophers. Our investigation has several overlapping aims. First, we aim to show what is required to confirm or disconfirm philosophers' claims about the comparative frequency... more
In this paper, I deconstruct the uncanny articulation, within political theory, between the notion of legitimation and that of success. I focus mainly on two examples. In Max Weber's sociology of legitimacy, the State is defined as the... more
It is commonly asserted that the core teaching of Machiavelli’s political philosophy is that “the ends justify the means.” While numerous scholars of Machiavelli have disputed this interpretation and pointed out that Machiavelli never... more
.This 2011 European Romantic Review essay (a smaller portion of which was delivered at Austen's Chawton House in 2009), introduces an important subject of my research for the next ten years: the affinities between ordinary language... more
J.L. Austin is regarded as having an especially acute ear for fine distinctions of meaning overlooked by other philosophers. Austin employed an informal experimental approach to gathering evidence in support of these fine distinctions... more
At the end of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Wittgenstein realises that the purification of the natural language of all linguistic contradictions undoubtedly eliminates the inadequacies of the semantic structure of a sentence, which with... more
Contents: John Collins: Genericity as a Unitary Psychological Phenomenon: An Argument from Linguistic Diversity Kristen Syrett: QR Out of a Tensed Clause: Evidence from Antecedent-Contained Deletion Nat Hansen and Emmanuel Chemla:... more
To what extent was ordinary language philosophy a precursor to experimental philosophy? Since the conditions on pursuit of either project are at best unclear, and at worst protean, the general question is hard to address. I focus instead... more
Words and deeds are a topic in Pericles' Funeral Oration and Speech-Acts dominate Lincoln's Gettysburg Address which is patterned off Pericles' work.
In this paper, I argue against the thesis presented by Jeremy Waldron (2009) that the Hartian rule of recognition is reducible to the rule of change, and as such superfluous. To this purpose, I re-interpret Hart's concept of secondary... more