Philosophical Papers by J. L. Austin

Author:J. L. Austin [Austin, J. L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 019283021X

(2)

He calls me a dictator, in spite of the fact that I have notoriously always acted only on the advice of Parliament!

He describes me as a dictator, whereas in fact, as he must have known, I have always acted only on the advice of Parliament.

end p.148

If many such examples are studied, the watershed between calling and describing appears to take shape.

Though cases in which we shall have to call, describe, &c., instead of, in black-and-white terms, identifying, stating, &c., are sure to arise continually, we feel ourselves sometimes bound to cope with them as they arise by means of fresh linguistic legislation. In calling there is indeed already implicit an element of legislation by precedent—this is case law and will regularly be necessary: but we may also demand statute law. Naturally, if the type of an item is highly novel, and does not appreciably resemble any of our stock of patterns, or none rather than another, it will be preferable not to call it or describe it by any of the names in our existent vocabulary, but rather to allot this type to some altogether new name as its sense: this is legislation of the kind already familiar in S 0 . But suppose the new type does match fairly well one, or more than one, of our existing stock of patterns, suppose 1228 is genuinely like a red, i.e. our hitherto familiar specific red. Our fresh legislation will then take the typical S 1form of classification and differentiation. That is, we shall not merely allot a new name, a 'specific' name, say 'crimson', to the type, but we shall also adopt the convention that crimson is a sort of red, thus giving the explicitness of statute law to the modification in the sense of the name 'red' and recognizing 'red' as the name of a multiform pattern, i.e. as a generic name. This legislation will show itself, in our restricted language, by the phenomenon of entailment between sentences of form S, which now appears for the first time: henceforward, '1228 is a crimson' will entail '1228 is a red'. The phenomenon merely of incompatibility was already present even in S 0 , for even there '1227 is a red' was incompatible, according to our legislation, with '1227 is a green'.

In the above account we have not, of course, dealt with by any means all of the kinds of case that arise in S 1 . We have discussed the case where the novel type is like up to a point but not beyond it, the sense of one of our available names, but not appreciably like the sense of any other—the case, we may say,

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