Ordinary language philosophy

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Ordinary language philosophy

"Linguistic philosophy" redirects here. For the philosophy of language, see Philosophy of language
Philosophy of language

Philosophy of language is the reasoned inquiry into the nature, origins, and usage of language. As a topic, the philosophy of language for Analytic philosophys is concerned with four central problems: the nature of Meaning , language use, language cognition, and the relationship between language and reality....
.

Ordinary language philosophy or linguistic philosophy is a philosophical school that approached traditional philosophical problems as rooted in misunderstandings philosophers develop by forgetting what words actually mean in a language. These approaches typically involve eschewing philosophical "theories" in favour of close attention to the details of the use of everyday, "ordinary" language.

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Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian-United Kingdom philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language....
and the works of Gilbert Ryle

Gilbert Ryle

P. F. Strawson

Sir Peter Frederick Strawson British Academy was an England Philosophy. He was the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at the University of Oxford from 1968 to 1987....
, and Norman Malcolm

Norman Malcolm

Norman Malcolm was an United States philosophy, born in Selden, Kansas. He studied philosophy with O.K. Bouwsma at the University of Nebraska, then enrolled as a graduate student at Harvard University in 1933....
. The name comes from the contrast between these approaches and the earlier approaches that had been dominant in analytic philosophy

Analytic philosophy

Analytic philosophy is a generic term for a style of philosophy that came to dominate English-speaking countries in the 20th century. In the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Scandinavia, Australia, and New Zealand the overwhelming majority of university philosophy departments identify themselves as "analytic" departments....
, now sometimes called ideal language philosophy. Ordinary language philosophy was a dominant philosophic school between 1930 and 1970, and remains an important force in present-day philosophy.

History

Early analytic philosophy had a less positive view of ordinary language. Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, Order of Merit , Fellow of the Royal Society , was a British people philosopher, mathematical logic, mathematician, historian, advocate for social reform, and pacifism....
tended to dismiss language as being of little philosophical significance, and ordinary language as just being too confused to help solve metaphysical and epistemological problems. Frege, the Vienna Circle

Vienna Circle

The Vienna Circle was a group of philosophers who gathered around Moritz Schlick when he was called to the Vienna University in 1922, organized in a philosophical association, of which Schlick was chairman, named the Ernst Mach Society in honour of Ernst Mach....
(especially Rudolf Carnap

Rudolf Carnap

Rudolf Carnap was an influential Germany-born philosophy who was active in Europe before 1935 and in the United States thereafter. He was a leading member of the Vienna Circle and a prominent advocate of logical positivism....
), the young Wittgenstein, and W.V. Quine, all attempted to improve upon it, in particular using the resources of modern logic

Logic

Logic is the study of the principles of valid demonstration and inference. Logic is a branch of philosophy, a part of the classical Trivium . The word derives from Greek language ?????? , fem....
. Wittgenstein's view in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is the only book-length philosophical work published by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein during his lifetime....
more or less agreed with Russell that language ought to be reformulated so as to be unambiguous, so as to accurately represent the world, so that we could better deal with the questions of philosophy.

The sea-change brought on by Wittgenstein's unpublished work in the 1930s centred largely around the idea that there is nothing wrong with ordinary language as it stands, and that many traditional philosophical problems were only illusions brought on by misunderstandings about language and related subjects. The former idea led to rejecting the approaches of earlier analytic philosophy--arguably, of any earlier philosophy--and the latter led to replacing them with the contemplation of language in its normal use, in order to "dissolve" the appearance of philosophical problems, rather than attempt to solve them. At its inception, ordinary language philosophy (also called linguistic philosophy) had been taken as either an extension of or as an alternative to analytic philosophy. Now that the term "analytic philosophy" has a more standardized meaning, ordinary language philosophy is viewed as a stage of the analytic tradition that followed logical positivism and that preceded the yet-to-be-named stage analytic philosophy continues to be in (Rortyian

Richard Rorty

Richard McKay Rorty was an American philosopher. He had a long and diverse career in Philosophy, Humanities, and Literature departments. His complex intellectual background gave him a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the analytic philosophy tradition in philosophy he would later famously reject....
neo-pragmatism and Kripke-esque

Saul Kripke

Saul Aaron Kripke is an American philosophy and logician, now emeritus from Princeton University. He teaches as distinguished professor of philosophy at CUNY Graduate Center....
philosophy).

Although heavily influenced by Wittgenstein and his students at Cambridge

Cambridge

The city status in the United Kingdom of Cambridge is a College town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies about 50 miles north of London....
, ordinary language analysis largely flourished and developed at Oxford

Oxford

Oxford is a City status in the United Kingdom, and the county town of Oxfordshire, in South East England. It has a population of 151,000. The rivers River Cherwell and River Thames run through Oxford and meet south of the city centre....
in the 1940s, under Austin and Gilbert Ryle

Gilbert Ryle

Gilbert Ryle , was a United Kingdom philosopher, and a representative of the generation of British ordinary language philosophys influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein's insights into language, and is principally known for his critique of Cartesian dualism, for which he coined the phrase "the ghost in the machine"....
, and was quite widespread for a time before declining rapidly in popularity in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is now not uncommon to hear that "ordinary language philosophy is dead". Wittgenstein is perhaps the only one among the major figures in this vein to retain anything like the reputation he had at that time. On the other hand, the linguistic turn

Linguistic turn

The linguistic turn was a major development in Western philosophy during the 20th century, the most important characteristic of which is the Attention of philosophy, and consequently also the other humanities, primarily on the relationship between philosophy and language....
remains one of most important and controversial movements in contemporary thought, and many of the effects of this turn, which are felt across many academic disciplines, can be traced to ordinary language philosophy.

Central ideas

Wittgenstein held that the meanings of words reside in their ordinary uses, and that that is why philosophers trip over words taken in abstraction

Abstraction

Abstraction is the process or result of generalization by reducing the information content of a concept or an observable phenomenon, typically in order to retain only information which is relevant for a particular purpose....
. From England came the idea that philosophy has got into trouble by trying to understand words outside of the context of their use in ordinary language (cf. contextualism

Contextualism

Contextualism describes a collection of views in philosophy which emphasize the context in which an action, utterance, or expression occurs, and argues that, in some important respect, the action, utterance, or expression can only be understood relative to that context....
).

For example: What is reality? Philosophers have treated it as a noun denoting something that has certain properties. For thousands of years, they have debated those properties. Ordinary Language philosophy would instead look at how we use the word "reality". In some instances, people will say, "It seems to me that so-and-so; but in reality, such-and-such is the case". But this expression isn't used to mean that there is some special dimension of being that such-and-such has that so-and-so doesn't have. What we really mean is, "So-and-so only sounded right, but was misleading in some way. Now I'm about to tell you the truth: such-and-such". That is, "in reality" is a bit like "however". And the phrase, "The reality of the matter is ..." serves a similar function — to set the listener's expectations. Further, when we talk about a "real gun", we aren't making a metaphysical statement about the nature of reality; we are merely opposing this gun to a toy gun, pretend gun, imaginary gun, etc.

The controversy really begins when ordinary language philosophers apply the same levelling tendency to questions such as What is Truth? or What is Consciousness?. Philosophers in this school would insist that we cannot assume that (for example) 'Truth' 'is' a 'thing' (in the same sense that tables and chairs are 'things'), which the word 'truth' represents. Instead, we must look at the differing ways in which the words 'truth' and 'conscious' actually function in ordinary language. We may well discover, after investigation, that there is no single entity to which the word 'truth' corresponds, something Wittgenstein attempts to get across via his concept of a 'family resemblance' (cf. Philosophical Investigations
Philosophical Investigations

Philosophical Investigations is, along with the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, one of the two major works by 20th-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein....
). Therefore ordinary language philosophers tend to be anti-essentialist

Essentialism

In philosophy, essentialism is the view that, for any specific kind of entity, there is a set of characteristics or properties all of which any entity of that kind must possess....
. Of course, this was and is a very controversial viewpoint. Anti-essentialism and the linguistic philosophy associated with it are often important to contemporary accounts of feminism

Feminism

Feminism is the belief that women should have equal political, social, sexual, intellectual and economic rights to men. It involves various movements, Theory, and philosophies, all concerned with issues of gender difference, that advocate equality for women and that campaign for women's rights and interests....
, Marxism

Marxism

Marxism is the political philosophy and practice derived from the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marxism holds at its core a Marxist analysis of Critique of capitalism and a theory of social change....
, and other social philosophies that are critical of the injustice of the status quo

Status Quo

Status Quo, also known as The Quo or just Quo, are an England rock music band whose music is characterized by the twelve-bar blues....
. The essentialist 'Truth' as 'thing' is argued to be closely related to projects of domination, where the denial of alternate truths is understood to be a denial of alternate forms of living. Similar arguments sometimes involve ordinary language philosophy with other anti-essentialist movements like post-structuralism

Post-structuralism

Post-structuralism encompasses the intellectual developments of continental philosophy and critical theory who wrote with tendencies of French philosophy#20th century....
.

Important books of ordinary language philosophy

The Claim of Reason by Stanley Cavell
Stanley Cavell

Stanley Louis Cavell is an United States philosopher. He is the Cabot family Professor Emeritus of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University....
Sense and Sensibilia by J.L. Austin
Blue and Brown Books by Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian-United Kingdom philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language....
Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian-United Kingdom philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language....
Philosophy and Ordinary Language by Oswald Hanfling
Oswald Hanfling

Oswald Hanfling, was a Germany Philosophy....
The Concept of Mind
The Concept of Mind

In his prominent work, The Concept of Mind , the philosopher Gilbert Ryle described what he saw as the "fundamental mistake" made by Descartes' Dualism , and underlying much of western philosophy....
by Gilbert Ryle
Gilbert Ryle

Gilbert Ryle , was a United Kingdom philosopher, and a representative of the generation of British ordinary language philosophys influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein's insights into language, and is principally known for his critique of Cartesian dualism, for which he coined the phrase "the ghost in the machine"....
Dilemmas by Gilbert Ryle
Gilbert Ryle

Gilbert Ryle , was a United Kingdom philosopher, and a representative of the generation of British ordinary language philosophys influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein's insights into language, and is principally known for his critique of Cartesian dualism, for which he coined the phrase "the ghost in the machine"....
Individuals by P.F. Strawson