School
Ordinary language philosophy
Ordinary language philosophy is the approach that treats close attention to how words are ordinarily used as a key to solving philosophical problems.
It flourished at Oxford from the 1940s to the 1960s, influenced by the later Ludwig Wittgenstein, with Gilbert Ryle, J. L. Austin, Peter Strawson and Paul Grice. Ryle attacked the picture of the mind as a ghost in the machine, Austin developed the theory of speech acts, and Strawson challenged Bertrand Russell's theory of descriptions. Grice's work on implicature both drew on the method and corrected it. Stanley Cavell carried it into American philosophy and criticism. On this site it answers questions on speech acts (6.10.2), language, mind, perception and meta-metaphysics.
Thinkers of this school
- J. L. Austin1911 – 1960
- Gilbert Ryle1900 – 1976
- Paul Grice1913 – 1988
- Peter Strawson1919 – 2006
- Stanley Cavell1926 – 2018
Guide: Schools of Philosophy: The Main -isms and the Questions They Answer
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Twenty years of translating have convinced me that meaning is use
Every day at work I meet words that the dictionary claims to define and that my clients use in ways the definition doesn't cover. Heimat is the famous German case, but the ordinary words are worse. “Fair” in English. Geist. The French…
Started by Claire Dubois6 replies -
Austin answered the argument from illusion, but the argument from hallucination survives him
Lately I have been rereading J. L. Austin's Sense and Sensibilia (1962), the lectures reconstructed after his death in which he takes apart A. J. Ayer's sense-datum theory. Austin's treatment of the stick in water is brilliant. The argument from illusion says:…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen5 replies -
For ordinary speech, Aristotle was right: “All S are P” presupposes there are some S
Modern logic reads "All S are P" as "for anything, if it is S, it is P". If nothing is S, the statement comes out true automatically. So "All the unicorns in my garden are pink" is true, and so is "All…
Started by Oskar Nyberg6 replies