[posted March 14, 1997]
In the sketch of his (discontinuous) envelope argument in his Some Main Problems of Philosophy (Macmillan: 1953), Moore treats the various phrases, "appears to be," "appears like a thing would appear if it were presented in a certain way," as though they were synonymous. Austin, in the fourth chapter of his Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford: 1962), tries to call to our attention the fact that these philosophically favorite phrases are not interchangeable; as a result, if an argument is begun by using one phrase and then a different one is substituted without argument, the person equivocates and the argument fails.In his argument, Moore treats the notion of appearing or appearance as though it were quite independent of the thing which appears to be such-and-such. Partly by a sort of linguistic trick, Moore begins to speak of "an appearance" as though it were an entity on its own--not merely as the way something like an envelope looks to someone from a certain vantage point. In this manner, he makes it seem possible to peel an appearance of an envelope away from the envelope as one might separate the skin of a grape from the pulp or a toupee from the bald head which it covers--to treat it, as Wittgenstein might say, as a transparent membrane, a ubiquitous thing in its own right. Also notice how Moore is happy to use familiar perceptual verbs with these new creations: so we supposedly see appearances. In effect, a new sort of perceptual object is quietly created in the way the familiar envelope is talked about. At first, it seems obvious that Moore's sentences about appearances are merely idiosyncratic ways of talking about the ways things appear to people; it seems that to say "the appearance you see is trapezoidal" is a perversely technical way of saying "what you see appears trapezoidal." But eventually, this phrasing is treated in a quite different way, not as simply a way of talking about the envelope which is seen; eventually, the "fact" that each person "sees an appearance" is used to deny that he sees an envelope ( "if what you see is trapezoidal and if the envelope is not, then what you see is not the envelope"). It is as though we began to talk of "the friendly side of Boardman" and "the sinister side of Boardman," and then distinguished each of these from "Boardman himself, " and finally concluded that since one was now seeing the friendly side and now the sinister side, that one was therefore never seeing Boardman himself. And, as a result of this way of speaking about Boardman, the "Boardman himself" ended up sounding like some preposterous metaphysical entity which could only be inferred by some crackpot deploying the most arcane of theories.
Austin's Method
In his "A Plea For Excuses," Austin sketches a justification for his methodology of
"proceed[ing] from 'ordinary language', that is, by examining what we should say when, and so why and what we should mean by it. . . .
"First, words are our tools, and, as a minimum, we should use clean tools: we should know what we mean and what we do not, and we must forearm ourselves against the traps that language sets for us. Secondly, 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 re-look at the world without blinkers. Thirdly, and more hopefully, our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connexions they have found marking, in the lifetimes of many generations: these surely are likely to be more numerous, more sound, since they have stood up to the long test of the survival of the fittest, and more subtle, at least in ordinary and reasonably practical matters, than any that you or I are likely to think up in our arm-chairs of an afternoon--the most favoured alternative method." (Austin, Philosophical Papers--3rd Edition (Oxford: 1979), 181-2.)Austin continues a little later:
"Then, for the Last Word. Certainly ordinary language has no claim to be the last word, if there is such a thing. ... [Although the precipitate of the acumen of many generations], that acumen has been concentrated primarily upon the practical business of life [and so may not provide distinctions needed if] our interests are more extensive or intellectual than the ordinary. And again, that experience has been derived only from the sources available to ordinary men throughout most of civilized history: it has not been fed from the resources of the microscope and its successors. And it must be added too, that superstition and error and fantasy of all kinds do become incorporated in ordinary language and even sometimes stand up to the survival test (only, when they do, why should we not detect it?). Certainly, then, 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." (Austin, Philosophical Papers--3rd Edition (Oxford: 1979), 185--footnote omitted.)