Preamble

I will begin with some remarks about ordinary usage and philosophical usage. Readers who are keen to embark at once on the main argument might want to skip to the next section.

There is a strong prima facie case for being guided by ordinary usage if one is centring a philosophical discussion on certain words, such as ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’. The reasons for this are familiar, or ought to be, having to do with the fact that it is usage – some sort of usage – that determines linguistic meaning. In this context, ordinary usage essentially means non-technical usage. If it were some technical usage that determined the meanings of the words under discussion, a question would arise why the technical meanings should be of more interest, philosophically, than the non-technical. If no good answer could be given to this question, we should have reason to turn back to considering the ordinary use and meaning of the words.

In ‘A Plea for Excuses’, J. L. Austin adopts the method of looking carefully at ordinary usage, a task he executes with characteristically microscopic precision. In the course of the essay, he points out that ‘the “opposite, or rather “opposites”, of “voluntarily” might be “under constraint” of some sort, duress or obligation or influence: the opposite of “involuntarily” might be “deliberately” or “on purpose” or the like. Such divergences in opposites indicate that “voluntarily” and “involuntarily”, in spite of their apparent connexion, are fish from very different kettles’. There is, I think, some truth in this as far as ordinary usage goes, similar remarks being possible in connection with the adjectives ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’. Certain uses of these words do consequently have a queer ring to them, such as Anscombe's calling being pushed out into the river in a punt to one's delight ‘voluntary’. It even sounds a bit odd to say of someone's fiddling with a pencil that it is voluntary. Are such uses therefore to be deemed technical? Or have Anscombe and others simply messed up the conceptual analysis?

I doubt if Anscombe would have wanted her use of these words to be regarded as technical.