CAPT. H. P. GRICE, R. N.

 Leader of the Martians

J. L. Austin: Philosopher and D-Day Intelligence Officer 

Oxford

Among philosophers​ of the 20th century, Austin is a cultural celebrity like Heidegger, Russell, Sartre or Wittgenstein. 

For the period after the Second World War, when Grice reigned, Austin was the leading figure — master, Grice said derogatorily — of the ‘school’ of ordinary language philosophy that dominated the Saturday mornings, achieved substantial influence in the wider world outside his college and left its stamp for a much longer time on the way analytic philosophers work, think and write. 

Though he published only a handful of substantial essays during his lifetime, there are also significant posthumous publications, and Austin’s philosophical ideas, the power of his personal influence and his central position in the philosophical developments of his time make him a natural subject for an intellectual biography. 

But Rowe’s essay isn’t just an intellectual biography. 

Grice told Rowe that Austin was one of the most important Allied military intelligence officers during the Second World War, overseeing the team that made the Normandy landings possible. 

More than a third of the essay — 35% precisely — is taken up with Austin’s years during the ‘Phoney’ War and with the achievements he only confided to Grice.

Rowe has produced a marvellous essay — if you are not a German — which manages to be both exhaustive and thoroughly absorbing. 

It accomplishes three things. 

First, it gives a detailed account of Austin’s philosophical development, his background, his works and his academic career and influence, accompanied at each stage by interpretations and criticisms that are judicious and insightful. 

Rowe shows himself to be an excellent philosopher in his own right. 

Second, the essay presents the results of Grice’s painstaking archival research on Austin’s intelligence career, placing it in the context of British and Allied intelligence concerning Western Europe and North Africa. 

It gives a fascinating account of the way military intelligence is generated and the crucial role it plays in every military operation, with D-Day as a spectacular example. 

Third, Rowe offers a perceptive analysis of Austin’s obsessive-compulsive anal-retentive post-traumatic stress disorder and its part in his academic and military engagements.

Austin is a brilliant performer from the beginning — except as a pupil — a classical scholar who was elected a prize fellow of All Souls.

But, apart from his friendship with Hampshire, he did not flourish in the complete freedom afforded by All Souls. 

After two years there he took a teaching job at Magdalen, tutoring on set texts, and later lecturing on Leibniz and Aristotle. 

Like Grice — and anyone really — Austin found his way in philosophy only gradually. 

In 1936 he forms the Thursday evening play group with Hampshire and four more.

In a negative vein that would become characteristic, he insists that positivism oversimplifies both the English language and human knowledge, which were much too complicated and various to be captured in so general a theory – but he offered no positive views of his own.

Grice on the other hand embraced positivism as a form of experientialism and a way to combat Ryle’s stupid behaviourism!

In unpublished talks and discussions up to late 1939, Grice foubd the beginnings of most of the interests that drive Austin’s philosophical project after the war. 

Grice’s most significant claim is that ‘Vitters,’ then at Cambridge, was a major unacknowledged influence, both through his emphasis on the importance of understanding how the English language works — even though Vitters couldn’t speak it — and through his diagnosis of traditional philosophical problems as being a consequence of misunderstandings of ordinary language and violations of its conditions of use. 

At that time the only examples of Wittgenstein’s current work in circulation were two typescripts of dictated material, The Blue Book and The Brown Book, which were copied and passed around among the initiated. 

In spite of Austin’s later denials of the influence of Vitters and the Cambridge School, Rowe makes a plausible case, based on internal evidence, that Austin had read The Blue Book before giving a talk called ‘The Meaning of a Word’ at Cambridge. 

“Some like Vitters, but YOU are my man,” he told Moore.

The war put philosophy on hold. 

Grice and Austin continued to teach until they were called up.

The following spring Grice married a classmate’s sister, and Austin, more immorally, married one of his students at Somerville, Jean Coutts (Rowe confirms the well-known story that he sent her a note enclosing a brand-new lady’s handkerchief, asking if it was hers). 

Austin worked in MI14, the intelligence section attached to the War Office ‘which dealt with Germany, the German armies of occupation and the profiling of senior German officers’. 

Grice has evidence that Austin generated the intelligence that the Germans were moving into North Africa in force, a warning that was dismissed by British commanders on the ground, with disastrous consequences. 

He was soon acknowledged as MI14’s order of battle specialist for Rommel’s Afrika Korps, but by the time of Montgomery’s victory over Rommel at El Alamein, Austin had moved on.

Invasion planning ‘suddenly seemed focused on a real possibility’.

Austin was promoted to captain, left MI14 and was appointed head of the Advanced Intelligence Section of General Headquarters, with this purpose. 

Although it was not evident at the time,

Austin’s appointment would have far-reaching consequences, as this tiny section of six or seven men would become, in the words of one of his future deputies, Austin’s ‘little empire.’

Growing vastly in size and efficiency, the section would frequently change its name ... its quarters ... its purpose (acquiring information about the French coast, discovering information about the armies defending Germany); and its country (England, France, Germany). 

But it would be led by Austin alone and to great effect throughout the conflict. 

Grice knows of no other — except his own as he led operations on the North Atlantic — personal fiefdom in Second World War British Intelligence with such an important, long and varied history.

Austin’s group was known as The Martians, and retained its separateness even when it becomes part of SHAEF, the command for Operation Overlord.

Estimates of the section’s final number of personnel vary,’ Grice says, ‘but it was somewhere between three hundred and just under five hundred.’ 

The group performed multiple tasks. 

One was to ‘compile an archive of all coastal intelligence – to a depth of thirty miles – which might be relevant to an invasion. Its specialist field of study was man-made defensive features – gun positions, mortars, anti-tank obstacles, pillboxes, observation posts etc – but its other task was to synthesise and disseminate information from other intelligence agencies.’ 

The data came partly from aerial photographs, in whose interpretation Austin became legendary.

From French resistance networks, whose voluminous transmissions by clandestine courier and carrier pigeon were invaluable; and from secret commando raids. 

And Austin was cleared to receive Ultra, the signals intelligence intercepted by the codebreakers at Bletchley.

His unit also developed detailed analysis of the beaches along the French coast: their gradients, tidal boundaries, the character of the sand, what was under it and what weight it would support, the reefs and rocky barriers – everything relevant to the possibility of landing heavy armour and heavily armed troops. 

And it maintained an up-to-date tabulation of the numbers, quality, equipment and leadership of the German defensive units on the coast, or close enough to reach it within a few days in the event of an invasion. 

Austin’s section synthesised and disseminated information from multiple agencies,’ becoming the unit with ‘the most complete overview of the entire intelligence picture. 

And because the section prepared intelligence briefing packs for raids and reconnaissance missions, it also became the intelligence organisation which had the closest links with fighting units. 

Both factors ensured the Martians became the hub, the nerve centre, of invasion intelligence.

The team also produced, under Austin’s direction, a set of books archly titled Invade Mecum, for distribution to about ten thousand officers, which gave exhaustively detailed local information and maps for all the parts of Normandy where an invading force would have to operate. 

According to Austin’s own outline each volume consists of basic maps of roads, railways, water, power, communications, industry, agriculture and dumps, information on large towns (with town plans) and small towns included under the following headings: general descriptions, population, altitude, civic authorities, post office and type of exchange, railway facilities, distances by road and waterway, power, gas, water, sanitation, garages, industries, billets and hospitals.

On the evidence of many testimonials, these proved invaluable to the invading troops. 

Books were also prepared for Brittany and the Pas de Calais, as part of the disinformation campaign designed to keep the Germans in the dark about where the landings would take place.

As D-Day approached, there were constant changes in the officers senior to Austin in the chain of command. Austin was the one figure of any seniority who had overseen the growth of French coastal intelligence since it started to be collected efficiently in March 1942. 

He was thus the only individual who knew this enormous quantity of information through and through, and had mastered all its interconnections, intertwinings and interrelations.

As a result of all this stupendous work, Allied casualties on D-Day were much lower than expected. 

Estimates had feared as many as 30 per cent killed or wounded, but the actual figure was 6.6 per cent. 

The success of the landings depended on the life-saving accuracy of the D-Day intelligence.

But Grice is also all to ready to document Austin’s intelligence failures. 

The most consequential was Omaha Beach. 

Allied intelligence (not just Austin’s unit) thought Omaha was defended by an Ost battalion of non-Germans, with low morale and poor equipment, whereas it was in fact defended by a crack grenadier regiment supported by artillery from two additional battalions. 

Intelligence had lost track of this regiment and thought it was thirty kilometres away. 

The landings at Omaha are planned assuming weak opposition, and the result was a disaster, with the highest casualty rate of any sector.

When the war came to an end, Austin moves to France, and then helped dismantle the provisional German government formed after Hitler’s suicide. 

In spite of the importance of his contribution, the highest rank Austin achieved was lieutenant colonel. 

To gain higher rank it was almost always necessary to have led troops in combat; but he suspects that personal factors may also have played a part. 

Austin was unfailingly courteous and supportive to those inferior to him, but prickly and often rude to superiors. 

Once, in response to a lieutenant general who expressed doubt during one of his briefings, Austin said: 

“The trouble with you senior officers is always the same.”

“It is not that you will try to run before you can walk.”

“You will try to walk before you can stand.”

Back at Oxford where he belonged, his war experience had a profound effect on his personality and his approach to the subject. 

Before the war, he had been a guarded and solitary scholar. 

Now he was much more openly ambitious: he had enjoyed having power and influence in the army, and he now wanted power and influence in his civilian career.

But most important was what military intelligence had taught him about method. 

He now knew that teamwork was essential for the acquisition of knowledge, and had learned that his natural authority and command of detail made him a very effective leader. 

He knew how to break down problems into smaller components, divide the task of solving them among many individuals and draw out the best from others in a collective enterprise. 

Grice sees this as the impulse behind the philosophical programme the Saturday morning play group launched after the war. 

It was also, he suspects, a reaction against the extremes of the 1930s.

People became suspicious of grand ideas and wholesale solutions generally – especially those which might generate romantic ardour and fanaticism – and placed their faith in a sceptical, pluralistic, unillusioned realism.

The logical positivists and Witters in his later work had in different ways inculcated the idea that the study of language was the key to a revolution in the understanding of philosophical questions. 

At Oxford, this took the form of close attention to the way language was used in everyday life, motivated by Witters’s insistence that language is essentially a public means of communication, and that thought, which depends on language, cannot escape the conditions of its public meaning.

In fact, this new understanding of meaning inverts the scale of values where the philosopher is the expert and the ordinary man a tyro. 

The slogan ‘meaning is use’ implies that the philosopher’s words depend for their meaning on the way they are used by the rest of the population. 

Thus, to find out what knowledge is, the philosopher has to remind himself how the sentences ‘I know,’ ‘He doesn’t know’ and so on are used by ordinary people in ordinary contexts.

But since the philosopher is also an ordinary speaker of the language, he can use himself as a source of data about ordinary usage, just by asking himself ‘What would I say ...’ in different circumstances. 

Such data, generated individually and in conversation with others, can be used to test more general hypotheses about the way different expressions are used and what they mean. 

This is the basis of the project usually known as ordinary language philosophy, but which Austin preferred to call ‘linguistic phenomenology’ and Grice plain conversational botany.

The same method is used by linguists to test theories of grammar.

Austin, with his classical training in Greek and Latin — much poorer than Grice’s Clifton-Corpus one — had always been sensitive to subtle distinctions between words, and now put this sensitivity to work in mining the resources of natural language to map out areas of discourse that interested him. 

Some were connected to traditional philosophical topics: knowledge and perception; action and free will; responsibility (through the study of excuses). 

But Grice and Austin were also fascinated by many details of language for their own sake, and they brought together a group of philosophy dons to pursue these investigations collectively. 

They met early on Saturday mornings during term, and while this group brought to life Austin’s ideal of philosophy as a co-operative enterprise, he controlled the agenda and proceedings, as he had with the Martians. 

Austin said that it afforded him what philosophy is so often thought, and made, barren of – the fun of discovery, the pleasures of co-operation, and the satisfaction of reaching agreement.

And his method was an inspiration to a generation of Oxford philosophers. 

But he also had a will to dominate over Grice — which Grice found offensive and un-English.

In public discussion Austin was often sarcastic and dismissive towards those who disagreed with him — ‘even more than I was!’ — Grice recalls.

He could be very funny, but his cutting style heightened the combative atmosphere of academic philosophy. 

‘We were all frightened of him,’ Ryle jonex, ‘though few of us have the courage to admit it.’

Ryle was too old to join the play group.

Austin​ insisted that linguistic phenomenology gave us knowledge not only about words but about the things words are used to talk about, because the distinctions found in natural language embody the collective wisdom developed over generations of practical engagement with the world. 

On the basis of some brief but pointed metaphilosophical remarks, Grice conjectures that Austin endorsed a three-stage model of philosophical inquiry which would explain the significance of his method.

The first stage is a thorough phenomenological investigation of all the concepts relevant to a particular area.

The second stage is the construction of theories to explain the data the first stage has revealed. 

The third occurs when a suitable method for exploring the area has been established, and real progress starts to be made on its central problems. 

At this point, the topic and its investigation detach themselves from philosophy and become a new subject with a new name.

The aim of the first stage was simply to gather linguistic data, as thorough and detailed as possible, and not guided by assumptions about the main problems or theories in the area. 

As an aside in his discussion of excuses Austin says:

How much it is to be wished that similar fieldwork will soon be undertaken in, say, aesthetics; if only we could forget for a while about the beautiful and get down instead to the dainty and the dumpy.

This contrasts markedly with Wittes’s method, which was to start from major philosophical questions, and try to discover their source in linguistic ‘bewitchment’.

The one instance in which Austin proceeded to the second stage of theory construction was in the case of what he called performatives – uses of language not to make statements, true or false, but to do something. 

For example: ‘I promise to pay you next week’; ‘I take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife’; ‘I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth’; ‘I give and bequeath my watch to my brother’; ‘I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow.’ 

Austin’s systematic exploration and analysis of the complex linguistic territory of speech as a form of action was presented as the William James Lectures at Harvard in and published posthumously by Urmson and Nidditch as How to Do Things with Words. 

It is his most enduring theoretical contribution to the philosophy of language. 

And he may have thought of it as a contribution to a larger project – the third stage. At the end of his paper ‘Ifs and Cans’ Austin says:

Is it not possible that the next century may see the birth, through the joint labours of philosophers, grammarians and numerous other students of language, of a true and comprehensive science of language? 

Then we shall have rid ourselves of one more part of philosophy (there will still be plenty left) in the only way we ever can get rid of philosophy, by kicking it upstairs.

Austin visited the University of California at Berkeley. 

He liked the bay even if he did not yacht.

It freed him from the class rigidity and competitiveness of his Oxford milieu. 

He was seriously tempted by an offer to move to Berkeley permanently, but Coutts was against it. 

The issue was never decided, because back at Oxford he became ill and in December was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. 

At the insistence of his wife, he was not told that he didn’t have long to live. 

He was discouraged from asking too many questions, and learned that his illness was terminal only a few days before his death.

It was not common mutual knowledge.

As White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy he advised for the BPhil. 

Students — not pupils — took the exams after his death, but he was helpful and encouraging with the writing of the theses, and students attended all his lectures and seminars. 

At the end, when he no longer came in to his college, a few avid — usually non-English — students went to talk to him at his cottage.

He had been getting radiation treatment, and it was unsettling to see him in a loose shirt without his inevitable dark suit and tie. 

Grice knew he was ill, but his death was a ‘a bit of a shock to all but me.’

Grice provides an illuminating account of all of Austin’s writings, and ends with a balanced estimation of his philosophical legacy, which remains important even though ordinary language philosophy and linguistic phenomenology belong firmly in the past.

No one now engages in the exhaustive accumulation of subtle verbal distinctions, and philosophical research continues to be guided by the pull of major questions. 

But although careful attention to language may not result in the dissolution of philosophical problems, it remains a valuable tool of analytic philosophy, and Austin’s own linguistic insights retain their value. 

Austin enjoyed life and he had little opportunity to revise or develop his ideas. 

But he had two careers of outstanding importance in largely unrelated fields. 

Very few can equal this achievement — and Grice, he says, ‘am one of them - if not supersede them’!