ABSTRACT
J.L. Austin’s lecture series Sense and Sensibilia is not only the most thorough response to the subject of our last case-study, A.J. Ayer’s Foundations of Empirical Knowledge. It is also one of the most forceful attacks on the sense-datum doctrine of perception in the history of our subject. At the same time, it is a deeply perplexing text. In many respects it is a model of clarity. The points made are individually straightforward, the structure of argument is neither convoluted nor elaborate; the language is plain and devoid of technicalities. But, even so, the text notoriously puzzles its readers and gives rise to two questions that appear to have perplexed even the editor who reconstructed the text from Austin’s lecture notes: ‘Though not an obscure text, it is certainly a rather strange one: what is it for? What does it do?’1 That is: What are Austin’s aims? What is his approach? In his later, primarily ‘positive’ or constructive papers, Austin is often thought to have proceeded to establish philosophical claims by addressing the question, what we should ordinarily say when. Indeed, this approach became associated with his name. We shall see, however, that, at least in these early, primarily ‘negative’ or critical lectures, his aims are therapeutic, and his methods are geared towards acquisition of meta-cognitive insight that allows us to attain those therapeutic aims. In other words, we will see that, in Sense and Sensibilia (henceforward: S&S), Austin took the two turns we have outlined in the previous chapter: the therapeutic turn which had him adopt new aims, and the meta-philosophical turn which led him to a novel approach.
