ABSTRACT
The interpretation of Austin’s view of language to which I want to refer in talking about ethics is unorthodox in the following respect. Austin, as I read him, is centrally concerned to attack a philosophical conception of correspondence between language and the world that continues, more than forty years after his death, to control most philosophical investigations of language. In his 1955 lectures How to Do Things with Words,2 Austin characterizes the conception he repudiates as one on which correspondence to the facts is the exclusive business of propositions that are “bi-polar” in that they describe states of affairs or convey information about the world either truly or falsely.3 However, here and elsewhere, Austin makes it clear that his particular target is not the logic of bipolarity per se,4 but a deeply engrained view of meaning that he thinks feeds philosophical insistence on it – viz., the view that sentences possess what philosophers often call “literal meanings” (i.e. meanings that are given by the meanings of words and the rules of the language, and that accordingly accompany sentences into different contexts of their use).5 In what follows, I am going to argue that one of Austin’s overarching philosophical ambitions is criticizing both this view and also the influential philosophical conception of correspondence between language and the world that it underwrites. My larger aim in doing so is to suggest that Austin’s critique has fruitful implications for ethics – implications connected to the fact that the conception of language-world correspondence that it brings into question determines the problem-space within which theories of moral judgment are for the most part developed and debated.
