Austinian Themes: Illocution, Action, Knowledge, Truth, and Philosophy

Austinian Themes offers a reconstruction of philosophical views on several themes developed by J. L. Austin. Exploring Austin’s work in detail through a series of thematically organized chapters, Marina Sbisà draws on both published work as well as unpublished manuscript notes to offer a defence of Austin’s speech act theory, characterized by a specific notion of illocution, against some important criticisms. Sbisà offers a reconstruction of Austin’s responsibility-based conception of action drawing on his remarks on acts and actions in How to Do Things with Words and in later papers. Exploring Austin’s contributions to epistemology and the philosophy of perception (including his realist stance, anti-scepticism, and presentational view of perception), Sbisà analyses the roles that he assigns to knowledge in the dynamics of assertion. On the theme of truth, Austin’s claims are expounded and explained as worthy of reassessment. Other chapters explore the ways in which Austin deals with sense, reference, ’family resemblances’, truth-falsity assessments, and context-dependence. Austin’s most famous statement of method, as outlining a ’linguistic phenomenology’, is cast as analogous to Husserl’s phenomenology in adopting an epoché which isolates language (rather than consciousness), a reading which helps to clarify several characteristic positions adopted by Austin. On metaphilosophical themes, Sbisà analyses the notion of ordinariness, distinguishing it from common sense and the endorsement of the ’Linguistic Turn’, approaching it instead in terms of the by-default nature of the social bond and conversational cooperation. Various recurrent aspects of Austin’s philosophy are illuminated: the opposition to dichotomies, the attention paid to intersubjectivity, the commitment to a ’sober’ philosophy, and a strong sense of human situatedness.

Marina Sbisà, University of Trieste

Marina Sbisá is Senior Scholar at the University of Trieste. She was awarded her Laurea in Philosophy at the University of Trieste in 1971, and was previously Researcher in Philosophy and Professor in Philosophy of Language at the same university, until retiring in 2018. She has held visiting positions Fuji Women’s University, the University of Amiens and CURAPP-CNRS, Sczeczin, and Magdalen College and New College, Oxford. She is a member of the Consultation Board of the International Pragmatics Association and President of the Society for Women in Philosophy Italy. She is the author of Essays on Speech Acts and Other Topics in Pragmatics (OUP, 2023).