ABSTRACT
The paper ‘A plea for excuses’ has long been regarded, I think rightly, as one of Austin’s best, most fertile, and most characteristic contributions to philosophy. Perhaps nothing that he wrote is more closely packed with food for thought. (It goes along with, and should be read in conjunction with, the posthumous paper ‘Three ways of spilling ink’,1 which deals with the opposite side of the same coin: if I have done some more or less objectionable thing, an ‘excuse’ may be offered by way of getting me out of trouble-yes, I did it, but, say, inadvertently; the other paper deals with expressions that may keep me firmly in trouble, may even make matters worse-I not only did it, but I did it, say, on purpose.) However, closely packed though these papers are with food for thought, they present a considerable difficulty for critical assessment-for a reason of which Austin himself was clearly well aware. As he says in the very first sentence, ‘the subject of this paper, Excuses, is one not to be treated, but only to be introduced, within such limits’.2 The fact is that in the early 1950s Austin gave several times a whole series of classes on this subject, in the course of which he went over the whole field, point by point in successive weeks, in what he himself calls ‘congenial’ detail; ‘much of the amusement’, he goes on to say, ‘and of the instruction, comes in drawing the coverts of the microglot, in hounding down the minutiae’, but ‘to this I can do no more here’—that is, in ‘A plea for excuses’—‘than incite you’. He is reducing a long series of seminars into a single paper. The result of this is that the thirteen numbered paragraphs which succeed the ‘programmatic’ introductory pages (fairly briefly discussed in the first chapter of this book) successively compress into single-paragraph dimensions topics each of which, in his classes, had been allotted at least a couple of hours of discussion; and quite often there is scarcely space enough for him to do more than to indicate what the topic is and to commend it for consideration. We get the questions, so to speak, but not the answers-or sometimes the answers too, but not many of the reasons for the answers. This seems to me to make the paper as a whole, while remarkably stimulating to thought, somewhat recalcitrant to commentary. I am not in the least sure that, in the pages that follow, I have picked out for discussion what Austin would have thought most worthy of attention; and I have certainly left out much that might have been discussed. The truth no doubt is, as Austin said of his own paper, that the subject ‘is one not to be treated…within such limits’. But we must do our best.
