ABSTRACT
Austin’s earliest published paper was ‘Are there a priori concepts?’, a contribution to a three-paper symposium held at the Joint Session of the Mind Association and Aristotelian Society in 1939. That paper-except for its unusually determined insistence on distinguishing one question from another, and its marked scepticism as to the merits of most philosophical answers-is not particularly characteristic of Austin’s work; in it he showed more readiness than he usually did to join in the debate more or less within the terms, and terminology, conventionally adopted, and he referred rather freely, as later he seldom did, to the subject’s history. He began, however, with a remark that really is revealingly characteristic: ‘frankly, I still do not understand what the question before us means: and since I hold, nevertheless, no strong views as to how it should be answered,…’.1 His paper ‘Other minds’, a contribution in 1946 to another symposium, begins rather similarly; his policy will be, he says, that ‘of splitting hairs to save starting them’.2 The ‘problem’ of ‘other minds’ consists, no doubt, in perplexity as to how one knows-how one possibly could know-what is in someone else’s mind, what he is thinking, what his feelings are, for example whether he is angry. Austin begins, not with this perhaps obviously somewhat problematic sort of case, but with more general consideration of the question ‘How do you know?’
