Austin’s Way with Skepticism: An Essay on Philosophical Method by Mark Kaplan

Abstract

Reviewed by: Austin’s Way with Skepticism: An Essay on Philosophical Method by Mark Kaplan Jason Bridges KAPLAN, Mark. Austin’s Way with Skepticism: An Essay on Philosophical Method. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. 192 pp. Cloth, $66.00 John Austin encouraged philosophers to pay attention to how language is ordinarily used. If we seek philosophical insight into such topics as knowledge, truth, and possibility, then, he thought, we would do well to examine how speakers use words like “know,” “true,” and “can” as they go about the business of everyday life. This advice sounds refreshingly down to earth. But how is it to work? What is the nature of the path Austin envisions from observations about ordinary use to philosophical understanding? No doubt his own essays are meant to illustrate the advice’s merits. But it turns out to be difficult to distill from the variegated arguments, examples, and aperçus contained in these essays straightforward answers to our questions. Mark Kaplan’s Austin’s Way with Skepticism is one of a recent flurry of monographs seeking to do what Austin himself apparently did not: to tell us what, in general, is the method of “ordinary-language philosophy.” Kaplan’s book is a fine work. It is thought-provoking and elegantly written. It patiently examines objections and carefully disposes of competing interpretations. There is much to be learned here, and anyone interested in Austin and his legacy should give it careful study. Although the discussion of particulars can get complex, Kaplan’s master thought is simple. What Austin demands of the philosopher is that “she must not be willing to espouse any philosophical doctrine that she would be unwilling to take to heart and act on in ordinary life.” This, says Kaplan, is the “requirement” of “fidelity to ordinary language.” We might just as well think of it as a requirement of fidelity to one’s espoused philosophical doctrines. Either way, the demand is: Live your philosophical truth—and if you find you cannot, then admit it was not your truth after all. It is not hard to see how to bring this “fidelity requirement” to bear against epistemological skepticism. Consider the initial reflections of Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy, which purport to show that we are incapable of acquiring knowledge of the world around us. This result is manifestly at odds with our perennial readiness in everyday contexts to ascribe instances of such knowledge to ourselves and others. The fidelity requirement directs a philosopher who professes to accept the skeptical result to give up making such ascriptions. Presumably no one would be willing to do this. Indeed, it seems plausible that no one could do this, willing or not. So the only way to honor the fidelity requirement is to renounce any commitment to the skeptical result. If this is indeed the substance of Austin’s “way with skepticism,” it seems to me to fall short of providing an adequate reckoning with the problem. It is a familiar point that philosophical arguments can have implications that look outrageous from the perspective of ordinary thought and talk. Certainly, this would not be news to skeptics themselves. Hume, to take a familiar example, is painfully aware that his skeptical conclusions will look absurd to him the moment he leaves his [End Page 410] study and ventures into the world outside. He is tempted on this account to throw his writings into the fire. Why doesn’t he? His problem is that, so far as he can see, his philosophical arguments are solid. To convince him he is wrong about this, it would hardly do to point out that there is an incongruity between the conclusions of these arguments and what he is inclined to think and say when immersed in the commerce of everyday life. Rather, we would need to take the actual measure of the arguments. We would need to examine the reasons Hume gives for his conclusions and endeavor to explain why they lack the force they at first seem to have. It is just this that Kant and other serious critics of Hume sought to do. It leaves us with the falsity of Hume’s conclusions...