For this second edition, the editors have returned to Austin's original lecture notes, amending the printed text where it seemed necessary.

I defend the normativity of meaning against recent objections by arguing for a new interpretation of the ‘ought’ relevant to meaning. Both critics and defenders of the normativity thesis have understood statements about how an expression ought to be used as either prescriptive or semantic. I propose an alternative view of the ‘ought’ as conveying the primitively normative attitudes speakers must adopt towards their uses if they are to use the expression with understanding.

This essay explains a Pyrrhonian skepticism in contrast with Cartesian skepticism, and then argues that what externalists and contextualists oppose is only Cartesian skepticism. It contends that externalists and contextualists actually back themselves into a Pyrrhonist position because externalists give up the search for reasons for belief, and contextualists admit that believers have no reasons for their beliefs within epistemological contexts, which is whenever skepticism is at issue.

In this paper I want to consider whether the 'phenomenal concepts' posited by many recent philosophers of mind are consistent with Wittgenstein’s private language argument. The paper will have three sections. In the first I shall explain the rationale for positing phenomenal concepts. In the second I shall argue that phenomenal concepts are indeed inconsistent with the private language argument. In the last I shall ask whether this is bad for phenomenal concepts or bad for Wittgenstein.