Austin and Assurance

After his early death in 1960, J.L. Austin was nearly forgotten,. In recent years, there has been something of an Austin revival, as philosophers have given renewed attention to the issues of ordinary language and epistemology that Austin raised. Writing in the TLS , Duncan Pritchard notes that Krista Lawlor’s Assurance: An Austinian view of Knowledge and Knowledge Claims is an important contribution to this revival.

Lawlor focuses on “a ‘relevant-alternatives’ account of knowledge: to know something does not require the knower to rule out all possibilities of error, but only those that are ‘relevant’. To this account of knowledge she adds an account of knowledge claims: to claim that one has knowledge, on this view, involves presenting one’s audience with an assurance that what is claimed as known is true.”

Austin used this sort of argument against skepticism, and Lawlord follows.

Pritchard summarizes the point by citing Barry Stroud’s comment, “if scepticism is completely divorced from our everyday epistemic evaluations, then the sceptic’s claim that we have no knowledge sounds akin to someone arguing that there are no doctors in New York because what they mean by a ‘doctor’ is ‘someone with a medical degree who can cure any conceivable illness in less than two minutes.’”

That’s a pretty nifty refutation of skepticism, if it works. Pritchard has his doubts. It’s true that “our everyday practices of evaluating knowledge (epistemic evaluation) are from those in play with radical scepticism.” But the skeptic might reply that this is only because we don’t fully apply our everyday evaluations to their fullest, given the sheer busyness of life. When we do apply those very same standards more rigorously in our quieter moments, we find that we can’t know anything. Skepticism is just everyday reasoning in an intensified form.

Pritchard suggests that “when it comes to radical scepticism, there is something which Wittgenstein saw and Austin missed. For what Wittgenstein is keen to highlight is not just the differences between everyday and sceptical modes of epistemic evaluation, but also to emphasize how the latter is not a distilled version of the former, but rather trades on an essentially incoherent picture of the structure of reasons.”