Ordinary language philosophy
Ordinary language 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.
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. Because a number of its most prominent practitioners taught at Oxford, OLP is sometimes informally referred to as "Oxford philosophy".
The approach peaked in influence during the 1940s–1960s and then rapidly declined as more formal and scientific styles of analytic philosophy gained prominence. 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. 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.
Central ideas
Although ordinary language philosophers differed in emphasis and temperament, several shared commitments can be identified.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. 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.
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.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.
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.
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.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.
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. 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 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.
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.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.
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. 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.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.
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. At the same time, a number of philosophers—including Paul Grice and Ernest Gellner—criticised ordinary language methods as theoretically shallow or unduly conservative.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. 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.
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 and later writings he criticises both abstract metaphysics and reductive naturalism for losing touch with ordinary ways of talking about the world.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.
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. Because Cavell engages extensively with literature, psychoanalysis, and continental thinkers, his work is often regarded as part of postanalytic philosophy.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 are constituted by publicly recognisable linguistic practices. 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.