Online research in philosophy

The late J.L. Austin's influence on contemporary philosophy was substantial during his lifetime, and has grown greatly since his death in 1960. This third edition of Philosophical Papers, the first edition of which was published in 1961, includes all of Austin's published papers (except "Performatif-Constatif") as well as a new essay entitled "The Line and the Cave in Plato's Republic", which has been reconstructed from Austin's notes.

The disjunctive theory of perception claims that we should understand statements about how things appear to a perceiver to be equivalent to statements of a disjunction that either one is perceiving such and such or one is suffering an illusion (or hallucination); and that such statements are not to be viewed as introducing a report of a distinctive mental event or state common to these various disjoint situations. When Michael Hinton first introduced the idea, he suggested that the burden of proof or disproof lay with his opponent, that what was needed was to show that our talk of how things look or appear to one..

Austin rejects the contention that every proposition has a contradictory. This paper finds problems with the case Austin makes for rejecting the contention in question.

Some of Austin's general statements about the doctrines of sense-datum philosophy are reviewed. It is concluded that Austin thought that in these doctrines "directly see" is given a new but inadequately explained and defined use. Were this so, the philosophical use of "directly see" would lack a definite sense and this would correspondingly affect the doctrines. They would lack definite truth-value. Against this, it is argued that the philosopher's use of "directly see" does not support Austin's general thesis that the sense-datum doctrines lack truth-value.

Alice Crary has recently developed a radical reading of J.L. Austin's philosophy of language. The central contention of Crary's reading is that Austin gives convincing reasons to reject the idea that sentences have context-invariant literal meaning. While I am in sympathy with Crary about the continuing importance of Austin's work, and I think Crary's reading is deep and interesting, I do not think literal sentence meaning is one of Austin's targets, and the arguments that Crary attributes to Austin or finds Austinian in spirit do not provide convincing reasons to reject literal sentence meaning. In this paper, I challenge Crary's reading of Austin and defend the idea of literal sentence meaning.