Ordinary language philosophy
Listening to what we actually say, in which circumstances and why, before theorizing: the subtlety of common usage taken as a philosophical instrument.
c. 1945 – c. 1970
After the war, Oxford became the centre of a way of doing philosophy that treated the everyday use of words as a store of distinctions refined by generations of speakers. This is the Oxford strand of ordinary language philosophy, whose other major source is the later at Cambridge: his lectures and manuscripts circulated and shaped some of its members. , already active in the 1930s, wrote one of its major works, The Concept of Mind (1949); was its presiding figure, with his “Saturday mornings” where the difference between doing something “by mistake” and “by accident” was examined collectively; developed there his criticism of 's theory of descriptions (“On Referring”, 1950). Rather than standing in head-on opposition to , it contested the idea that an ideal language built by logic should sit in judgement over common language. Its members nonetheless disagreed: on truth, Austin and Strawson clashed in 1950; Ryle analysed the mind in terms of dispositions, that is, tendencies to act in certain ways in certain circumstances, an analysis the others did not take over as such; Strawson returned to a descriptive metaphysics, which describes the actual structure of our thinking about the world without claiming to reform it. After Austin's death (1960) and criticisms such as 's (Words and Things, 1959), its collective influence waned, but the theory of speech acts, which originates with Austin, lives on in and in linguistics.
Justification
(“Systematically Misleading Expressions”, 1932) shows that sentences with the same grammatical form hide different logical forms, and that many problems arise from the false conclusions drawn from them; The Concept of Mind calls a category mistake the attempt to look for the mind as one more thing alongside the body. (“A Plea for Excuses”, 1956) makes the methodical examination of ordinary distinctions a starting point: ordinary language is not “the last word”, it can be supplemented and superseded, but it is “the first word”. What is at stake is what usage can settle: in looking at words we also look at the situations they serve to tell apart, what Austin calls linguistic phenomenology, instead of submitting common language to an ideal one.
Ryle, “Systematically Misleading Expressions” (1932) · Ryle, The Concept of Mind (1949), ch. I · Austin, “A Plea for Excuses” (1956)
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Justification
What the school shares is the search for an expression's meaning in its uses rather than in some entity it would name; the emphasis varies between members. (How to Do Things with Words, lectures of 1955 published in 1962) starts from performative utterances, “I promise”, “I name this ship”, which describe nothing but perform an act, provided the circumstances are right (his felicity conditions). He then distinguishes, in every utterance, its meaning in the strict sense (what it says, with its reference) from its illocutionary force (the act it performs): description and reference do not disappear, they become uses among others. (On Referring, 1950) puts it his own way: it is not expressions that refer, it is speakers who use them to refer. The role of intention grows with (“Meaning”, 1957), for whom to mean something is to intend to produce an effect in a hearer through their recognition of that intention.
Austin, How to Do Things with Words (1962), lectures I, VIII and XII · Strawson, “On Referring” (Mind, 1950) · Grice, “Meaning” (Philosophical Review, 1957)
Lineages
See on the friezeAll lineages↓ Influence exerted
- challenged byLogical positivismAustin takes apart Ayer's theory of sense data by showing that the philosopher wrenches ordinary words, « illusion », « appear », « real », away from their precise use.Read
- continued bySearleA student of Austin at Oxford, Searle systematized his discovery: he classified speech acts and set out the rules that make an utterance a promise, an order or an assertion.Read