Austin & 'Reality'

Will Bynoe on milk, therapy, and the nature of being.

Have a good look”, the magician says: “Can you confirm that this is a perfectly ordinary hat?” For you, this is no fun at all. You awkwardly turn it over a few times and self-consciously agree that it seems fine. Something is bound to be amiss – but what? You have no idea what sort of abnormality to guard against. In this setting, it is unclear what counts as an ‘ordinary’ hat, so you might object that it is senseless to confirm that it is one. ‘Ordinary’ has its meaning fixed by relevant contrasts; there is no single property which the word denotes in all settings.

Back in 1962, in Sense and Sensibilia, J. L. Austin complained that philosophers often put us in a similar predicament. They might draw our attention to a table and ask: Is this real, or is it an illusion, a ‘flicker on the cave wall’? Or they might get more personal, asking whether your life is authentic: Is this the real you?

As with the magician, these questions can leave us baffled and perhaps a little embarrassed. According to Austin, this is because the philosopher’s questions about reality are analogous to the magician’s question: like ‘ordinary’, ‘real’ only makes sense if the context makes it clear what counts as unreality. Unfortunately, the philosopher frequently withholds this context, giving the false impression that ‘real’ denotes an important property which both tables and (say) people might lack. This trick creates the bogus sense that something urgent is at issue.

Unreal Demands