J.L. Austin and the law

About this book

"Yeager's aim in this book is to confront the idea of responsibility by mapping the work of J. L. Austin onto the criminal law." "Yeager's position is that the criminal-law vocabulary, or at least its deployment, threatens to freeze up or impede assessments of responsibility. In other words, the prevailing view of criminal law, a view that he traces to skepticism, may be, at its worst, a real snag in any meaningful attempt to come to grips with who is answerable for what, and to what extent. Yeager's thesis is to show that if we were to adopt the criminal-law way of talking about things - a mode of expression that he characterizes as false - the very purpose of ordinary moral language would be undermined."--BOOK JACKET.