ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Austin’s critical engagement with the problem of “other minds.” Austin is here effectively turning our attention to the fact that we are always doing something with words even when we claim that we are “merely” describing it and thus the problem of “other minds” is something that is broader than the “epistemological issue” it is normally considered to be. It has been argued that Austin, by marking out similarities between statements like “I know that such and such” and “I promise I will such and such,” holds a “testimonial theory of knowledge.” That, I argue, is the wrong conclusion. One should rather say that this is the discovery of a moral undercurrent in language and that the apparent neutrality of “mere descriptions” often is a misleading illusion. Thus, the central point of Austin’s treatment of the “other minds problem” is not an epistemological position aiming to refute skepticism, but a prelude to the performative/constative distinction, aiming to debunk faulty varieties of the fact/value dichotomy and “the true/false fetish”—the two central aims that guide his reflections on “speech acts.”
