Sense and Sensibilia

Austin died in 1960, and the book was reconstructed by G. J. Warnock from Austin's lecture notes, which Austin had delivered repeatedly at Oxford in the years before. Warnock edited and arranged the material into continuous prose, so the text is an editorial reconstruction of lectures that Austin never prepared for publication. The brisk, sometimes mocking tone reflects a spoken performance. Readers should therefore treat individual quips and tangential remarks with caution, and recognize that the argumentative sequence reflects Warnock's reading of the notes as much as a finished text by Austin.

His chief target is the argument from illusion as used to establish sense-data, with Ayer's The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge as the main stalking horse, along with passages from H. H. Price's Perception and G. J. Warnock's colleague-era writings on the same theme. Austin contends that these writers treat a variety of distinct cases, such as mirages, reflections, afterimages, and hallucinations, as if they were all instances of one thing, being deceived by the senses. He then argues that many of these cases do not involve anything like deception, and that the move to sense-data presupposes an unexamined uniformity.

Austin argues that these terms have different uses that philosophers collapse. 'Looks' can express a comparison, a judgment held with reservation, or a description of how something presents itself, and each use has different conditions. Treating them as interchangeable lets the sense-datum theorist infer that when something looks a certain way we are aware of an item that really has that quality. He claims that attention to the actual employment of these words dissolves the inference. Critics have asked whether a linguistic point about idiom can by itself settle a question about the nature of experience.

Ayer replied in an essay arguing that Austin had attacked a crude version of the theory and misread its motivations. He contended that the sense-datum language is a proposal for a technical vocabulary and is not refuted by the fact that ordinary speech draws other distinctions. Ayer also maintained that Austin offered no positive account of perception that could replace the theory. Others, including some admirers of Austin, shared the worry about the absence of a constructive alternative. The exchange became a standard reference point in discussions of whether ordinary language arguments can settle technical philosophical questions.

Its influence is clearest in the revival of direct realist and disjunctive views of perception. Philosophers such as J. M. Hinton and, later, John McDowell and Paul Snowdon drew on Austin's resistance to a common-factor picture of veridical and illusory experience. Hilary Putnam's late natural realism, developed in The Threefold Cord, acknowledges Austin as an ancestor. Others reject the lineage, arguing that psychological and neuroscientific findings reintroduce the problems Austin dismissed. The book is therefore read both as a source of a living tradition and as an example of the limits of the ordinary language method.

A common misreading takes Austin to be defending a naive form of realism or claiming that philosophers' questions about perception are meaningless. His target is narrower: particular arguments built on loose or misleading use of ordinary words. He does not say that ordinary language settles everything, and he explicitly acknowledges that distinctions found in ordinary talk may be supplemented. Reading the book as a refusal to do philosophy mistakes the point of a method designed to show that some seemingly deep problems arise from careless description rather than from the nature of perception itself.