ABSTRACT
The question mark in the title of this chapter is meant to suggest that Austin’s way of philosophizing is not one in which language is simply “approached” as an object of study. A thought that runs through my reading of Austin, as an undercurrent, is that many of the now-common ways of “approaching language” in philosophy are really questions of reproach—ways of pushing language away from us so that it can be transformed into an object of study. Austin, I argue, is not a philosopher of language in that sense. He does not think that there is such a thing as “meaning” out there, detached from human practices, which we can approach by asking “what is meaning?” Remarkably, in contention with many of the flourishing images described in Chapter 1, Austin brings the concept of the ordinary into philosophy as a problem, as a difficult field that philosophers do not think enough about and leave behind prematurely. Thus, Austin’s linguistic philosophy comes out as a struggle to make visible, understand, and debunk this bootstrap move, where one aims to lift oneself out of the complexities of one’s own (linguistic) habitat.
