- "Linguistic philosophy" redirects here. For the
philosophy of language, see Philosophy of language.
Ordinary language philosophy or
linguistic
philosophy is a philosophical school that approaches
traditional philosophical problems as rooted in misunderstandings
philosophers develop by distorting or forgetting what words
actually mean.
This approach typically involves eschewing philosophical "theories"
in favour of close attention to the details of the use of everyday,
"ordinary" language. It is generally associated with the works of
J.L. Austin,
Gilbert Ryle,
HLA
Hart,
Peter Strawson,
John R. Searle,
and the later works of
Ludwig
Wittgenstein.
The Wittgenstein scholar
A. C. Grayling
(Wittgenstein, Oxford University Press, (Oxford), 1988,
p. 114) is certain that, despite the fact that Wittgenstein’s
work might have possibly played some "second or third-hand [part in
the promotion of] the philosophical concern for language which was
dominant in the mid-century", neither Gilbert Ryle nor any of those
in the so-called "Ordinary language philosophy" school that is
chiefly associated with J. L. Austin were Wittgensteinians. More
significantly, Grayling asserts that "most of them were largely
unaffected by Wittgenstein’s later ideas, and some were actively
hostile to them".
The name comes from the contrast between this approach and earlier
efforts that had been dominant in
analytic philosophy, 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 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
(especially
Rudolf Carnap), the young
Wittgenstein, and
W.V. Quine, all attempted to improve upon it, in
particular using the resources of modern
logic. Wittgenstein's view in the
Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus 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The sea change brought on by Wittgenstein's unpublished work in the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 neo-pragmatism and
Kripke-esque philosophy) .
Ordinary
language analysis largely flourished and developed at Oxford
in the
1940s, under Austin and Gilbert Ryle,
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 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 is why philosophers trip over words taken
in
abstraction. 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).
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 leveling 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). Therefore ordinary language philosophers
tend to be anti-
essentialist. 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,
Marxism, and other
social philosophies that are critical of the injustice of the
status quo. 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.
Important books of ordinary language philosophy
Wikis
Quiz
Map
Search
