J. L. Austin Quotes
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Usually it is uses of words, not words in themselves, that are properly called vague.
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There are more ways of outraging speech than contradiction merely.
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Sentences are not as such either true or false.
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In the one defence, briefly, we accept responsibility but deny that it was bad: in the other, we admit that it was bad but don't accept full, or even any, responsibility.
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J. L. Austin; James Opie Urmson, Geoffrey James Warnock eds. (1979) Philosophical Papers, 3rd ed. New York: Oxford.
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Infelicity is an ill to which all acts are heir which have the general character of ritual or ceremonial, all conventional acts.
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Going back into the history of a word, very often into Latin, we come back pretty commonly to pictures or models of how things happen or are done.
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Like 'real', 'free' is only used to rule out the suggestion of some or all of its recognized antitheses. As 'truth' is not a name of a characteristic of assertions, so 'freedom' is not a name for a characteristic of actions, but the name of a dimension in which actions are assessed.
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The Nicomachean Ethics is only intended as a guide for politicians, and they are only concerned to know what is good, not what goodness means...and in any case one can know what things are good without knowing the analysis of 'good'
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We become obsessed with 'truth' when discussing statements, just as we become obsessed with 'freedom' when discussing conduct...Like freedom, truth is a bare minimum or an illusory ideal.
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Let us distinguish between acting intentionally and acting deliberately or on purpose, as far as this can be done by attending to what language can teach us.
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In one sense 'there are' both universals and material objects, in another sense there is no such thing as either: statements about each can usually be analysed, but not always, nor always without remainder.
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But I owe it to the subject to say, that it has long afforded me what philosophy is so often thought, and made, barren of - the fun of discovery, the pleasures of co-operation, and the satisfaction of reaching agreement.
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But surely, speaking carefully, we do not sense 'red' and 'blue' any more than 'resemblance' (or 'qualities' any more than 'relations'): we sense something of which we might say, if we wished to talk about it, that 'this is red.'
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Certainly ordinary language has no claim to be the last word, if there is such a thing.
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But suppose we take the noun 'truth': here is a case where the disagreements between different theorists have largely turned on whether they interpreted this as a name of a substance, of a quality, or of a relation.
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Why should it not be the whole function of a word to denote many things?
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If we say that I only get at the symptoms of his anger, that carries an important implication. But is this the way we do talk?
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Faced with the nonsense question 'What is the meaning of a word?' and perhaps dimly recognizing it to be nonsense, we are nevertheless not inclined to give it up.
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Words are not (except in their own little corner) facts or things: we need therefore to prise them off the world, to hold them apart from and against it, so that we can realize their inadequacies and arbitrariness, and can relook at the world without blinkers.
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However well equipped our language, it can never be forearmed against all possible cases that may arise and call for description: fact is richer than diction.
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It may justly be urged that, properly speaking, what alone has meaning is a sentence.
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Ordinary language is not the last word: in principle it can everywhere be supplemented and improved upon and superseded. Only remember, it is the first word.