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Abstract

J. L. austin’s paper “Pretending,” whatever might now be its status amongst professional philosophers—and austin’s reputation remains high in many quarters—contains, in its examples, passages which deserve to rank with the best of twentieth-century comic prose.2 The paper minutely discriminates among the many different senses in which people might or might not be supposed to be pretending. it is part of austin’s long campaign against the supposed perfect ineffability of supposedly interior affects, the same campaign which leads him, in another work, to call “expressing” an “odious word,” or to add, after his first introduction of the term “emotion,” a sarcastic wish for its long continuance in good health.3 at one point in the essay, austin is considering the question of whether what someone in fact does matters to the question of whether they were really pretending or not: