Work · Analytic Philosophy
Sense and Sensibilia
Against the sense-data theory.
Introduction
Austin gave lectures on perception at Oxford many times from 1947; after his death G. J. Warnock reconstructed them from his notes and published them in 1962. The title plays on Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. The main target is the claim, made in Ayer’s The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge (1940), that we never directly perceive material things but only sense data. Austin examines the argument from illusion – a stick that looks bent in water, a mirage – and shows how loosely it uses words such as “real”, “looks” and “appears”. “Real”, he observes, is a word whose negative use “wears the trousers”. Ayer replied in 1967.
Connections
Criticizes
- Language, Truth and Logic1936 · A. J. Ayer
More works by J. L. Austin
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