A Plea for Excuses

Austin gave it as his presidential address to the Aristotelian Society, and it was published in the society's Proceedings in the 1956-57 session. It was later reprinted in his posthumous Philosophical Papers, edited by J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock, which is the usual source for students. The address form explains its performance-like tone, with jokes, digressions, and an avowedly programmatic purpose. Readers should note that it reads as a spoken talk shaped for a learned society, so its brisk generalizations about method should be weighed against Austin's more cautious statements elsewhere.

He recommends a three-stage procedure: assemble a large stock of expressions used in excusing, group them by the kinds of situations in which they are used, and compare the cases to find what each term marks. Dictionaries, law reports, and psychology literature serve as supplementary sources. The aim is not to describe words for their own sake but to arrive at a sharper account of action. Austin calls the approach linguistic phenomenology, a label that reflects his claim that attending to words sharpens our perception of the phenomena they describe.

A central contrast is between excuses and justifications: in a justification we accept responsibility but deny that the act was wrong, while in an excuse we accept that it was bad but deny full responsibility. He also separates 'by mistake' from 'by accident,' and distinguishes 'inadvertently' from 'unintentionally,' showing that they cover different failures in the execution of an action. These distinctions matter because theories of free will and responsibility often treat all defenses as one kind of thing. Legal theorists have found the excuse-justification contrast especially useful, and it remains a standard tool in the criminal law literature.

Ernest Gellner, in Words and Things, attacked ordinary language philosophy as parochial and conservative, treating common usage as an authority it does not possess. Defenders, including Stanley Cavell, argued that Austin's appeal to what we say is a more sophisticated claim about shared criteria and not mere lexicography. A further worry is that an English-language vocabulary of excuse may be specific to one culture. Austin anticipates some of these concerns, describing ordinary language as the first word and not the last, and he admits that it may be revised when there is reason to do so.

Austin acknowledges debts to the legal tradition, and the essay was influential among legal philosophers. H. L. A. Hart, in his work on responsibility and punishment, developed related analyses of the conditions under which an agent can be held liable, and the excuse-justification distinction became central to the theory of criminal defenses. The essay thus illustrates a case in which a piece of ordinary language philosophy fed directly into another discipline. Readers interested in the legal reception should compare Austin's paper with Hart's essays collected in Punishment and Responsibility.

A frequent misreading treats it as a lighthearted exercise in cataloguing the English vocabulary of apology, valuable only as a curiosity. Austin's claim is stronger: that this vocabulary is a record of the practical distinctions people have found worth drawing, and that ignoring it leads philosophers to oversimplify action. Another misreading takes him to say that nothing can be learned beyond what ordinary speakers say. He explicitly allows that distinctions may need to be refined, extended, or overturned, and describes his method as a starting point for theory rather than a replacement for it.