Austin as Theorist

Explains why it is a mistake to think of Austin as an anti-philosopher; lays out what Austin had to say about the nature of knowledge; shows how Austin sought to reconcile his fallibilist take on the nature of knowledge with the thought that, if you know, you can’t be wrong; raises, and lays to rest, four worries about the account of knowledge presupposed by Austin’s critique of the dream argument: (i) that his account goes wrong in holding that what a person knows at a time depends on what there is special reason to suspect at that time, (ii) that his account is over-intellectualized, (iii) that his account fails to provide the sort of “in-virtue-of” explanations we expect a philosophical account to provide us, (iv) that he does not tell us how to deal with the skeptical argument from ignorance.