 Austin didn’t think that the investigation of language was more than a preliminary to theorising, either in philosophy or science. He wasn’t averse to theory construction, even if its outcome were potentially revisionary (see e.g., 1957: 189). His concern was only that such theorising should be properly grounded, and that it should not be driven, for example, by an initial failure to keep track of distinctions that we mark in our ordinary use of language. Further, Austin draws an important distinction between “words and facts or things,” and he seems to suggest that we have ways of investigating the world—that is, facts and things—which can bypass the “blinkers” sometimes imposed on us by our words. We’ll return to Austin’s distinction between the world, including facts—which Austin thinks of as particular or concrete—and words, including the statements we make in using words, in   section 2.2.   And we’ll return to Austin’s idea that we can have unblinkered awareness of the world—unblinkered, that is, by the linguistic or judgmental capacities that we bring to bear on what we experience—in   section 3.1.