Getting the philosopher out of the armchair

J.L. Austin's response to logical positivism in comparison to that of Arne Naess

Siobhan Chapman

pp. 108-123

in: Brian Garvey (ed), J.l. Austin on language, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014

Abstract

The story of the development of Austin's views on language begins with his growing disquiet over logical positivism, or at least over a version of logical positivism filtered through his personal discussions with A.J. Ayer and subsequently through his reading of Ayer's 1936 polemic Language, Truth and Logic. Ayer explained that, for the logical positivists, the fact that a statement could be expressed in everyday language was no guarantee that it was meaningful. Meaningful statements, those which could play a legitimate part in scientific discussion, were restricted to analytic statements that were necessarily true by virtue of the meanings of the words they contained, to the statements of mathematics and logic, and to that subset of synthetic sentences which could be subject to empirical verification (Ayer 1971: 7ff.). Austin considered such claims to be unempirical, a priori and, crucially, at odds with everyday experience of language use.

Cited authors

Austin John

Naess Arne