J. L. Austin Quotes on Truth
J. L. Austin's How to Do Things with Words (William James lectures 1955, published posthumously 1962) inaugurated speech-act theory through the analysis of the performative utterance — utterances that do not describe a state of affairs but perform an action within an institutional context (I promise, I name this ship, I bequeath). The lectures progressively dissolve the original constative-performative distinction into the threefold analysis of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts that has structured subsequent philosophy of language. The earlier Sense and Sensibilia and the essays in Philosophical Papers — including Other Minds, A Plea for Excuses, Truth — supply the broader Austinian program of attentive ordinary-language analysis that took the philosophical use of plain English seriously as a source of distinctions philosophy ignores at its peril.
Quotes
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“To say something is to do something.”
P. 49 -
Attributed to J. L. Austin:
“There is more to the surface of the world than meets the philosopher's eye.”
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“Ordinary language is not the last word, but it is the first.”
p. 185 -
Attributed to J. L. Austin:
“We can do things with words.”
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Attributed to J. L. Austin:
“It seems to be too readily assumed that if we can show how a thing is done, we are debunking it.”
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“What is truth?' said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.”
Truth", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , Volume 24, Issue 1, 9 July 1950 -
“Sentences are not as such either true or false.”
Sense and Sensibilia (1962), p. 111 -
“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.”
Philosophical Papers(1979) | p. 130 -
“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.”
Philosophical Papers(1979) | p. 73