Ordinary language philosophy

For the philosophy of language, see Philosophy of language.

Ordinary language philosophy (OLP, sometimes called linguistic philosophy) is a methodological approach within analytic philosophy which treats many traditional philosophical problems as the result of misunderstandings of how words are ordinarily used. Rather than proposing ideal or artificial languages, ordinary language philosophers investigate the actual use of expressions in everyday contexts, and often argue that once such uses are described carefully, many philosophical "problems" dissolve or change their shape.^{[1] [2]}

In the twentieth century OLP was primarily associated with the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, early to mid-century philosophers at the University of Cambridge such as G. E. Moore and John Wisdom, and mid-century philosophers at the University of Oxford, including Gilbert Ryle, J. L. Austin, P. F. Strawson, H. L. A. Hart, and Paul Grice.^[1] Because a number of its most prominent practitioners taught at Oxford, OLP is sometimes informally referred to as "Oxford philosophy".^[3]

The approach peaked in influence during the 1940s–1960s and then rapidly declined as more formal and scientific styles of analytic philosophy gained prominence.^[2] Since the late twentieth century, however, ordinary-language-inspired work has played a significant role in post-analytic philosophy, especially in the writings of Stanley Cavell, John Searle, and a number of feminist philosophers and literary theorists who have adapted ordinary language methods for social, ethical, and aesthetic questions.^[4][5][6] Recent work in the history of analytic philosophy and in experimental philosophy has also re-examined and in some cases revived aspects of the ordinary language tradition.^[7][8]

Central ideas

Although ordinary language philosophers differed in emphasis and temperament, several shared commitments can be identified.^{[1] [2]}

Meaning and use

A central theme, especially in the later Wittgenstein, is that the meaning of an expression is inseparable from its use in the language-games in which it figures.^[9] Rather than looking for meanings as abstract entities or inner mental items, OLP investigates the roles expressions play in concrete activities such as giving orders, making jokes, issuing apologies, or reporting observations.

On this view, philosophers often generate puzzles by abstracting words such as "know", "understand", "believe", or "object" from the ordinary circumstances in which they are learned and employed, and then treating the resulting abstractions as if they named special objects or metaphysical entities. When the ordinary uses of those words are carefully described, the temptation to posit such entities can diminish or disappear.^[1]

Ordinary language and philosophical method

Ordinary language philosophers typically treat everyday linguistic practice as an important, though not infallible, source of data about our concepts. A familiar methodological slogan—sometimes associated with Austin and Warnock—is that, given the practical importance of many areas of discourse, it is unlikely that ordinary language will be radically misleading about them. Instead, its richness and variation often provide clues to distinctions that matter in everyday life (for example between excusing and justifying, or between knowing and being certain).^[3][7]

In practice this method involves detailed case-by-case comparisons of how expressions are used, frequently relying on constructed but realistic examples. Austin's analyses of the verbs "promise", "know", or "excuse" and Ryle's use of "category mistakes" in criticising certain pictures of the mind are often cited as paradigms of this style of argument.^[2]

Some ordinary language philosophers also developed what came to be called the "paradigm case argument": if a term has clear, uncontroversial applications in ordinary talk—paradigm cases of knowledge, voluntary action, or freedom, for example—then this is taken to undercut sceptical claims that such phenomena are impossible. This line of reasoning was influential but also controversial, and later critics argued that ordinary usage by itself cannot settle all substantive philosophical questions.^[1][2]

Therapeutic and anti-essentialist tendencies

Many ordinary language philosophers adopt a "therapeutic" or "diagnostic" conception of philosophy, especially under Wittgenstein's influence. Philosophical puzzlement is often seen as a product of distorted pictures of how language works, and philosophical progress as consisting in dissolving those puzzlements by carefully describing ordinary uses, rather than in constructing theories that go beyond them.^[9][1]

This attitude is connected to a general suspicion of essentialism. Ordinary language philosophers are typically wary of questions such as "What is knowledge?" or "What is truth?" when these are understood as asking for an underlying essence common to all cases. Following Wittgenstein's notion of family resemblance, they often argue that many important concepts do not correspond to a single entity or essence, but instead exhibit overlapping patterns of similarity across different uses.^[9][1]

History

Background in analytic philosophy

Early analytic philosophers such as Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and the young Wittgenstein tended to view ordinary language as too ambiguous or logically misleading to serve as a secure basis for philosophy, and attempted to replace or regiment it with more precise logical languages.^[2] Logical positivists in the Vienna Circle likewise emphasised formal logic and scientific language as the proper medium for philosophical clarification.

Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) fits broadly within this "ideal language" project, aiming to display the underlying logical form of meaningful propositions. By the early 1930s, however, his unpublished lectures and notes—later collected in the Blue and Brown Books—began to develop a strikingly different picture, foregrounding the diversity of everyday language-games and the idea that "there is nothing wrong with ordinary language" as such.^[9]

Cambridge ordinary language philosophy

In the 1930s and 1940s Wittgenstein's later views influenced a circle of philosophers at Cambridge, including G. E. Moore, Norman Malcolm, Alice Ambrose, Oets Kolk Bouwsma, Friedrich Waismann, and John Wisdom. These figures experimented with treating philosophical problems about, for example, other minds, perception, or the external world as confusions that arise when ordinary expressions are wrenched from the contexts in which they normally function.^[1]

Wisdom in particular pioneered a style of writing in which imagined conversations and everyday examples are used to deflate metaphysical disputes, while Malcolm's work on knowledge and dreaming applied Wittgensteinian techniques to epistemological and skeptical questions.^[2]

Oxford and the ordinary language movement

From the mid-1940s a distinctively Oxford-based strand of ordinary language philosophy emerged. Figures such as Ryle, Austin, Strawson, Hart, and Urmson used detailed analyses of ordinary talk to address questions in philosophy of mind, action, language, and law.^[3] Austin's work on speech acts and on perception, Ryle's critique of the "ghost in the machine" picture of the mind, and Hart's account of legal rules are among the best-known results of this period.^[2]

Although these philosophers differed in their views and often resisted being grouped into a single "school", commentators have nevertheless identified recurring themes: an emphasis on carefully cataloguing ordinary uses of expressions; scepticism about large-scale metaphysical system-building; and the hope that many philosophical puzzles will lose their grip once the relevant language is seen clearly.^[1][3]

Decline and historiographical reassessment

By the late 1960s ordinary language philosophy had become unfashionable in many Anglophone departments. Formal semantics, modal logic, generative linguistics, and scientifically oriented philosophy of mind came to define much mainstream analytic work.^[2] At the same time, a number of philosophers—including Paul Grice and Ernest Gellner—criticised ordinary language methods as theoretically shallow or unduly conservative.^[10][11]

The narrative that OLP enjoyed a brief dominance in the mid-twentieth century before suffering a "strange death" has itself been questioned. T. P. Uscchanov and others argue that the history is more complex, and that ordinary-language-inspired work persisted in diverse forms outside the narrow Oxford canon.^[12] A recent quantitative study of journal publications from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first finds that work centrally concerned with "meaning and use" peaked in the early 1960s but continues to shape analytic debates, especially in philosophy of language and mind.^[7]

Anticipations and affinities

Ordinary language philosophy has affinities with pragmatism and related traditions that emphasise the practical functions of language. The British pragmatist F. C. S. Schiller has been described as a forerunner of OLP: in Riddles of the Sphinx (1891) and later writings he criticises both abstract metaphysics and reductive naturalism for losing touch with ordinary ways of talking about the world.^[13]

Some commentators have also noted that classical authors such as Seneca the Younger already complained about philosophers who "quibble about words" instead of addressing questions about how to live, a concern that resonates with later ordinary language critiques of purely verbal disputes.^[14]

Contemporary developments and influence

Post-analytic ordinary language philosophy

After the decline of OLP as an academic movement, several philosophers drew on its methods while distancing themselves from some of its ambitions. Stanley Cavell developed a distinctive "ordinary language" approach that connects Wittgenstein and Austin with Emerson and the American literary tradition, applying ordinary language insights to scepticism, tragedy, film, and everyday ethics.^[15][16] Because Cavell engages extensively with literature, psychoanalysis, and continental thinkers, his work is often regarded as part of postanalytic philosophy.^[5]

John Searle, a student of Austin, used ordinary language analysis as a starting point for a systematic theory of speech acts and social reality, arguing that many institutional facts (such as money, promises, or marriages) are constituted by publicly recognisable linguistic practices.^[17] Grice, while criticising some ordinary language arguments, likewise took careful attention to what we say as a crucial starting point for theorising about meaning and implication.^[10]

Feminist and literary appropriations

Since the late twentieth century, a number of feminist philosophers and literary theorists have turned to ordinary language philosophy as a resource for critiquing forms of social injustice and for rethinking questions about gender, embodiment, and the "ordinary". Work by Nancy Bauer, Alice Crary, Sandra Laugier, Linda Zerilli, and Toril Moi, among others, has shown how detailed attention to everyday uses of language can illuminate issues such as sexual objectification, care, political judgment, and the ethics of attention.^[5][18][19]

This strand of work emphasizes that "ordinary" language is not neutral or homogeneous: it carries sedimented social norms and power relations, and can both reveal and obscure possibilities for critique and transformation. Here OLP's descriptive ambitions are combined with political and ethical concerns in ways that differ from the largely apolitical self-presentation of the mid-century Oxford philosophers.^[6]

Ordinary-language-inspired approaches have also influenced literary studies more broadly, for example in accounts of style and voice that draw on Wittgensteinian and Austinian ideas about example, criteria, and the everyday.

Experimental and "critical" ordinary language philosophy

Recent work in experimental philosophy has explored how empirical methods from linguistics and cognitive science can complement ordinary language analysis. Eugen Fischer and collaborators have proposed a "critical ordinary language philosophy" that uses experimental techniques—such as eye-tracking and controlled surveys—to identify systematic biases and fallacious inferences that may underlie certain philosophical arguments (for instance, in debates about perception).^[8] On this view, traditional ordinary language diagnosis of philosophical puzzles can be strengthened by empirical evidence about how people actually process and interpret key expressions.

Other contemporary authors defend renewals of ordinary language philosophy against both its mid-century critics and more recent caricatures, arguing that attention to ordinary use remains central to much analytic work, even when not explicitly labeled as such.^[4][6][7]

Criticism

Triviality, conservatism, and insularity

From its early days, ordinary language philosophy faced the charge that it produced only minute distinctions and anecdotes about word use, without delivering substantive philosophical theories. Russell and some logical positivists regarded ordinary language as too confused to help with deep questions about knowledge, reality, or science, and worried that deference to everyday usage would merely entrench common prejudices.^[2]

Gellner's book Words and Things (1959) mounted a famous sociological and methodological attack on "linguistic philosophy", accusing its practitioners of confusing language with reality, of policing ordinary usage in a dogmatic fashion, and of ignoring rapidly changing social forms in favour of the linguistic habits of a narrow elite.^[11] The book provoked considerable controversy, including a public exchange between Gellner, Russell, and Ryle in the pages of The Times.^[11][12]

Methodological worries

Within analytic philosophy, Grice and others argued that appeals to ordinary language can easily be misused. Grice criticised certain "ordinary language arguments" that infer truths about meaning or metaphysics directly from claims about what it would or would not be appropriate to say in particular circumstances, pointing out that utterances can be inappropriate for many reasons besides falsity (for example, because they are misleading, impolite, or irrelevant).^[10] Such considerations motivated the development of conversational implicature and later pragmatics, which retain attention to use but embed it within more explicit theoretical frameworks.

Critics have also questioned whether ordinary language can bear the theoretical weight some ordinary language philosophers place on it. For example, the assumption that a rich vocabulary for some domain (such as the mental or the moral) must reflect a correspondingly rich structure of underlying facts has been challenged as linguistically and historically naive.^[7] Others note that the "ordinary" usage appealed to in classic OLP often presupposed a relatively homogeneous community of speakers, ignoring linguistic variation across class, gender, ethnicity, and region.^[5][6]

Political and ethical concerns

From a feminist and critical-theoretical perspective, some authors worry that an uncritical appeal to ordinary language risks reinforcing oppressive social norms: what we "ordinarily" say about, for example, women, racialised groups, or disabled people may itself be shaped by injustice. Ordinary language philosophers working in feminist and social philosophy have responded by stressing that ordinary language is also a site of contestation and creativity, in which marginalized speakers develop counter-vocabularies and new forms of expression.^[5][18]

See also

• Definitions of philosophy
• Ideal language philosophy
• Linguistic phenomenology
• Speech act
• Postanalytic philosophy