Abstract
This article argues that political theory could gain from a revival of the form of ordinary language analysis advocated by J. L. Austin. It distinguishes three objectionable forms of scholasticism widespread in contemporary political theory, and shows how Austinian methods might help to combat them. To illustrate the potential of Austinian analysis in political theory, the final third of the article considers, in the light of pertinent ordinary language, the widely canvassed claim that coercion can involve “disrespect for persons”; these considerations suggest that this claim is more complicated, less obviously sound, and more interesting, than political theorists often assume.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Isaiah Berlin, “Austin and the Early Beginnings of Oxford Philosophy,” in Essays on J. L. Austin, ed. G.J. Warnock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 14.
For example, Phillip Pettit, “The Contribution of Analytic Political Philosophy,” in A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, ed. Robert Goodin and Phillip Pettit (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 9–10.
Ernest Gellner, Words and Things (London: Gollancz, 1959), 217; Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (New York: Beacon, 1964), 172–73.
Alan Wertheimer, “Is Ordinary Language Analysis Conservative?,” Political Theory 4 (1976): 405–22.
These longstanding misconceptions about ordinary language philosophy have been further reinforced in recent years by the influential contemporary campaign for “experimental” or “empirical” forms of philosophical inquiry. See Kwame Anthony Appiah, Experiments in Ethics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004) and Jesse Prinz, “Empirical Philosophy and Experimental Philosophy,” in Experimental Philosophy, ed. Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 189–209. This campaign often trades on naïve oppositions between empirical and “armchair” conceptual analysis in a way that unfairly reads Austin out of the picture. We should remember that we owe to Austin one of the earliest uses of the pejorative metaphor of the “armchair philosopher” who analyzes concepts a priori. See J. L. Austin, “A Plea for Excuses,” in his Philosophical Papers, ed. G.J. Warnock and J.O. Urmson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 182. Philosophical experimentation to determine the tolerances of concepts used in ordinary language under the pressure of different empirical circumstances was central to Austin's approach. Experimental philosophers ought to be sympathetic to, rather than dismissive of, this Austinian technique.
J. L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 3. Compare political theorists’ fascination with largely meaningless terms like “liberalism,” “contestability,” “alterity,” “intuition,” “foundationalism”; our tendency to trade in abstractions like “metaphysics,” “modernity,” “ontology,” “identity,” “subject,” or the “separateness of persons”; and our predilection for highly stylized philosophical examples (trolley problems, eye lotteries, babies drowning in ponds, etc.).
Austin, “A Plea,” 182–83.
See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980).
Austin, “A Plea,” 185.
Austin, “A Plea,” 195.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1962), 119.
Austin, “A Plea,” 186.
J. L. Austin, “Three Ways of Spilling Ink,” in Philosophical Papers, ed. Warnock and Urmson, 275–76.
Norwood Hanson, “Causal Chains,” Mind 64 (1955): 194–96.
Austin, “A Plea,” 182.
Building on Hart and Honore's famous work, Richard Tuck has recently shown how the ordinary language of causation can help dissipate some of the paradoxes of collective action, especially in the context of claims about the rationality of voting. This suggests that the resource of ordinary language need not be useful only to political theorists, but across political science more broadly. Richard Tuck, Free Riding (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 40–43. To some degree, this is increasingly recognized in the empirical subfields: see, for example, James Fearon and David Laitin, “Ordinary Language and External Validity: Specifying Concepts in the Study of Ethnicity,” presented at LiCEP meetings October 20–22, 2000, at the University of Pennsylvania; Lisa Wedeen, “Reflections on Ethnographic Work in Political Science,” Annual Review of Political Science 13 (January 2010, online): 255–72; Frederic Schaffer, Democracy in Translation: Understanding Politics in an Unfamiliar Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).
Austin, Sense, 3.
Is it moral realism? The “correspondence theory of truth”? “Strong ontology”? The possibility of “objectivity” (meaning what?)? The aspiration to technological mastery? The privileging of a certain sort of reason (“instrumental”? “enlightenment”?)? The methodological presuppositions of modern scientific research? Certain conceptions of the “knowing/controlling subject”? Trying to discuss these en bloc is a surefire recipe for groupthink, innuendo, and pointless disputation.
Richard Rorty, “A Pragmatist View of Contemporary Analytic Philosophy,” in Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Collected Papers, Vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 136–37.
Rorty, “Pragmatist View,” 134.
Austin, “A Plea,” 184.
Of course I don’t mean to imply that “liberal” or “feminist,”etc. arguments are never valid; but if we find them powerful, important, revelatory, etc., it should be because they are good arguments, not because we have any independent allegiance to the ideological traditions that happened to have hit upon them.
As in the widespread tendency among journalists to use the word “refute” when they mean “deny,” for example, “President Bush refuted allegations that he lied about the war with Iraq … .”
This is why Austinian fieldwork cannot be pigeonholed as purely “empirical” or purely “normative” (a distinction that anyway exemplifies just the sort of scholasticism Austin abhorred). When the analyst of ordinary language claims that speakers “would not say … X,” she is not making a simple empirical prediction, but rather a judgment about what it would be appropriate/intelligible for a speaker in certain empirically specifiable circumstances to say/do in response. Here, empirical and normative considerations are woven inextricably together.
George Orwell, A Collection of Essays (London: Mariner, 1970), 166–67.
Austin, “A Plea,” 182.
Marcuse, One-Dimensional, 173.
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 15–19, 40–46; John Rawls, Collected Papers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 29–32, 41–42.
Rawls, Theory, 507; on the link between ordinary language philosophy and Socratic analysis, see Oswald Hanfling, Philosophy and Ordinary Language (London: Routledge, 2001), 15–25.
Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
While I am sympathetic to G. A. Cohen's critique of Rawlsian constructivism, I see no reason to think that the resulting debate about whether normative principles should be “fact-dependent” or “fact-independent” is likely to be a helpful one. See G. A. Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008); and David Miller, “Political Philosophy for Earthlings,” in Political Theory: Methods and Approaches, ed. Marc Stears and David Leopold (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). The authentically Austinian response, I think, is to say that without clarification of how (and in which contexts) we would ordinarily speak of agents “acting on principle,” of “being men or women of principle,” of “standing on principle,” of “having strong principles,” or of “adopting a principle,” on the basis of certain personal experiences, this debate about “principles” is sterile.
Michael Blake, “Distributive Justice, State Coercion and Autonomy,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 30 (2001): 257–96.
One natural reading of the libertarian objection to redistributive taxation is that it involves a form of “theft.” I agree that there is something to this charge; but notice that it does little to support Nozick's “forced labor” analogy, for surely we shouldn’t say that the essential problem with forced labor is that it involves theft.
David Schmidtz, Elements of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 151–52, 154.
Note that “symbols” are distinct from “gestures”: “giving someone the finger” is not a “symbol” (though the finger involved may be), and the Swastika is not a “gesture.”
Grice was of course a student of Austin; despite his later doubts about ordinary language philosophy, Grice never repudiated Austinian techniques entirely.
Jean Hampton, “Righting Wrongs: The Goal of Restribution,” in The Intrinsic Worth of Persons, ed. Daniel Farnham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 124–34.
There is a large literature in sociology and adjacent disciplines, much of it inspired by Goffman (whose interest in everyday interaction was certainly Austinian in spirit, if not directly influenced by Austin), that could aid in this effort. Particularly suggestive are: Erving Goffman, Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order (New York: Transaction, 2010); Philippe Bourgeois, In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Randall Collins, Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); James Gilligan, Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and its Causes (New York: G. P. Putnams & Sons, 1996).
Consider the way in which diplomats and other official representatives are “dignitaries”; or a man's complaint about the “indignity” of a prostate examination; or the way in which a crime or misdemeanor can be (as a speeding ticket I once received put it) “an offence against the peace and dignity” of a municipality.
Austin, Sense, 70–72.
Austin, “A Plea,” 181.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Additional information
The author is grateful to Bill Gorton, Corey Brettschneider, George Klosko, Ryan Pevnick, Andrew Polsky, several anonymous referees for Polity, and audiences at the Midwest Political Science Association meetings, at the University of Virginia, and at the National Humanities Center for many constructive comments. Large parts of this article were completed while I was on sabbatical leave supported by an NEH Fellowship at the National Humanities Center for 2008–2009; I thank both those institutions for their generous support.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Bird, C. Political Theory and Ordinary Language: A Road Not Taken. Polity 43, 106–127 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2010.20
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2010.20