ABSTRACT
The little book Sense and Sensibilia, which was published in 1962, stands apart from Austin’s other writings in certain respects, and I had better begin by saying something about that.
First, it is almost throughout undeviatingly negative, critical, even polemically critical. Austin usually, in the writings he published or intended to publish, took up a question because there was something that he wished to say about it; he seldom wrote with the primary purpose of showing that what somebody else had written about it was wrong. Sense and Sensibilia is something of an exception to that (on the whole, no doubt, admirable) policy. It is, at least primarily, simply against some things that Ayer had said in his book The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge,1 and does not undertake much of the positive task of handling better what he claims to be badly mishandled in that book. It is not, as I shall argue later, that Austin believed that whole battery of issues to be simply bogus or unreal; but he does not say much in the book either of how the issues should be treated, or even of what he thought the issues really were.
