John Searle on Austin and Wittgenstein. Sadly, Austin didn’t like Wittgenstein and Wittgenstein didn’t appear to care either way.
(Source: youtube.com)
"And we must always be particularly wary of the philosophical habit of dismissing some of (if not all) the ordinary uses of a word as ‘unimportant’, a habit which makes distortion practically unavoidable. For instance if we are going to talk about ‘real’, we must not dismiss as beneath contempt such humble but familiar expressions as ‘not real cream’; this may save us from saying, for example, or seeming to say that what is not real cream must be a fleeting product of our cerebral processes."
— J.L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia p63-4
Saying “I think…” is not just describing an inner state
Even if we take as half-way houses, say, ‘I hold that…’ as said by a non-juryman, or ‘I expect that…’, it seems absurd to suppose that all they describe or state is something about the speaker’s beliefs or expectations. To suppose this is rather the sort of Alice-in-Wonderland over-sharpness of taking ‘I think that p’ as a statement about yourself which could be answered: ‘That is just a fact about you.’ (‘I don’t think…’ began Alice: ‘then you should not talk’ said the Caterpillar, or whoever it was).
- J.L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words, p89-90
