Top 29 J.L. Austin Quotes
#1. However well equipped our language, it can never be forearmed against all possible cases that may arise and call for description: fact is richer than diction.
J.L. Austin
#2. Faced with the nonsense question 'What is the meaning of a word?' and perhaps dimly recognizing it to be nonsense, we are nevertheless not inclined to give it up.
J.L. Austin
#3. But I owe it to the subject to say, that it has long afforded me what philosophy is so often thought, and made, barren of - the fun of discovery, the pleasures of co-operation, and the satisfaction of reaching agreement.
J.L. Austin
#5. It should be quite clear, then, that there are no criteria to be laid down in general for distinguishing the real from the not real.
J.L. Austin
#6. ...the philosopher's professional addiction to furniture...
J.L. Austin
#7. A sentence is made up of words, a statement is made in words ... Statements are made, words or sentences are used.
J.L. Austin
#8. I begin, then, with some remarks about 'the meaning of a word.' I think many persons now see all or part of what I shall say: but not all do, and there is a tendency to forget, or to get it slightly wrong. In so far as I am merely flogging the converted, I apologize to them.
J.L. Austin
#9. Let us distinguish between acting intentionally and acting deliberately or on purpose, as far as this can be done by attending to what language can teach us.
J.L. Austin
#10. In the one defence, briefly, we accept responsibility but deny that it was bad: in the other, we admit that it was bad but don't accept full, or even any, responsibility.
J.L. Austin
#11. Certainly ordinary language has no claim to be the last word, if there is such a thing.
J.L. Austin
#12. It is not enough to show how clever we are by showing how obscure everything is".
J.L. Austin
#13. I feel ruefully sure, also, that one must be at least one sort of fool to rush in over ground so well trodden by the angels.
J.L. Austin
#14. But surely, speaking carefully, we do not sense 'red' and 'blue' any more than 'resemblance' (or 'qualities' any more than 'relations'): we sense something of which we might say, if we wished to talk about it, that 'this is red.
J.L. Austin
#15. You are more than entitled not to know what the word 'performative' means. It is a new word and an ugly word, and perhaps it doesnot mean anything very much. But at any rate there is one thing in its favor, it is not a profound word.
J.L. Austin
#16. Like 'real', 'free' is only used to rule out the suggestion of some or all of its recognized antitheses. As 'truth' is not a name of a characteristic of assertions, so 'freedom' is not a name for a characteristic of actions, but the name of a dimension in which actions are assessed.
J.L. Austin
#17. After all we speak of people 'taking refuge' in vagueness -the more precise you are, in general the more likely you are to be wrong, whereas you stand a good chance of not being wrong if you make it vague enough.
J.L. Austin
#18. The theory of truth is a series of truisms.
J.L. Austin
#19. There are more ways of outraging speech than contradiction merely.
J.L. Austin
#20. Ordinary language embodies the metaphysics of the Stone Age.
J.L. Austin
#21. 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.
J.L. Austin
#22. Sentences are not as such either true or false.
J.L. Austin
#23. Why should it not be the whole function of a word to denote many things?
J.L. Austin
#24. Words are not (except in their own little corner) facts or things: we need therefore to prise them off the world, to hold them apart from and against it, so that we can realize their inadequacies and arbitrariness, and can relook at the world without blinkers.
J.L. Austin
#25. Infelicity is an ill to which all acts are heir which have the general character of ritual or ceremonial, all conventional acts.
J.L. Austin
#26. 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.
J.L. Austin
#27. Going back into the history of a word, very often into Latin, we come back pretty commonly to pictures or models of how things happen or are done.
J.L. Austin
#28. In one sense 'there are' both universals and material objects, in another sense there is no such thing as either: statements about each can usually be analysed, but not always, nor always without remainder.
J.L. Austin
#29. Usually it is uses of words, not words in themselves, that are properly called vague.
J.L. Austin
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