Ordinary language
from 1945 Post-war Oxford; Wittgenstein's later work runs alongside
Before theorising about a word, look at what people actually do with it — the distinctions in ordinary use are usually finer than the ones philosophers invent.
- Active
- from 1945
- Where
- Oxford
- Status
- In use
- Tradition
- Analytic tools
What it is
The method takes ordinary usage as data rather than as sloppiness to be corrected. Its claim is that a language which has survived generations of practical use has already made the distinctions that matter, and that a philosopher inventing a technical sense often loses more than they gain.
Austin's practice is close to fieldwork: collect the actual expressions, notice which ones will not substitute for each other, and ask what difference each is marking.
How it works
Collect what is actually said, in full sentences and in context. Find pairs that seem interchangeable and test them against cases where only one will do. Ask what the difference marks. Only then ask whether the philosophical problem survives.
Austin's insistence on the whole sentence in a real context is the discipline. Words considered in isolation lose the differences the method is looking for.
The moves, in order
- Collect the expressions actually used, in context
- Find pairs that appear interchangeable
- Locate cases where only one of the pair will do
- Ask what difference that marks
- Restate the original problem using the distinction found
The procedure
Proposition Reasonable notice is not the same as the notice period.
- The dispute is whether four weeks was reasonable notice to vacate.
- Collect what is actually said. We say a landlord gave short notice, gave no notice, gave proper notice, gave fair warning, and sprang it on the tenant.
- These are not interchangeable. Proper notice concerns compliance with a rule; short notice concerns duration; sprang it on concerns the tenant's ability to respond.
- The case where only one will do: a landlord who gives the full statutory period on the day before Christmas has given proper notice and may still have sprung it on the tenant, and ordinary speech marks that difference without effort.
- So ordinary usage already distinguishes complying with the period from giving the other party a real opportunity to act, and the lease's phrase reasonable notice tracks the second.
Therefore Four weeks may be the notice period and still not be reasonable notice, because the two expressions do different jobs in the language the parties were using.
No theory of reasonableness was constructed. The distinction was already sitting in ordinary speech, and the method's whole claim is that this is the usual case.
What it is good for
Contract and statutory interpretation, and any dispute where a technical reading has drifted from what the parties would have meant. It is also a corrective to philosophical vocabulary that has stopped tracking anything.
Where it fails
Usage is not evidence about the world. That we distinguish two things in speech shows something about us, and Gellner's attack — that the method turns philosophy into lexicography and quietly makes existing usage authoritative — landed hard enough to end the movement's dominance.
It is also useless where ordinary language has no purchase. Quantum mechanics, mathematics and much of ethics involve subject matter that everyday speech never had to handle, and there is nothing to collect.
And the appeal to what we would say usually means what the philosopher would say. Experimental work has repeatedly found that ordinary speakers do not share the intuitions attributed to them.
Common misconceptions
That it holds ordinary language is always right. Austin's claim was more careful: that it embodies the distinctions worth having as a starting point, and is the first word rather than the last.
Where it came from
Post-war Oxford, principally Austin, Ryle and Strawson, running alongside and partly independently of Wittgenstein's later work at Cambridge.
What became of it
Dominant in Britain through the 1950s, largely displaced by the 1970s, and its substance absorbed into linguistics and pragmatics rather than refuted.
Lasting influence
Speech act theory came directly out of it, and through Grice it produced the modern study of implicature, which is now a technical field.
Why it still matters
The movement is over; the habit of checking usage before theorising is standard practice.
Put another way
Reading the manual the users wrote by using the thing.
Texts
J. L. Austin, A Plea for Excuses
The best statement of the method and the best demonstration of it, in about twenty pages.
Where to start
Read A Plea for Excuses. Then notice how many distinctions your own working vocabulary already makes that no rule states.
The surprising bit
Austin's meticulous collection of ordinary excuses produced speech act theory, which turned out to be a formal apparatus with applications in law and computing that he never sought.
In their own words
Ordinary language is not the last word: in principle it can everywhere be supplemented and improved upon. Only remember, it is the first word
Who held it
H. P. Grice, Ernest Gellner
Connections
- Relies on
- Endoxa
- Set against
- Formalisation, Explication
- Influenced
- Distinction-drawing
- Parallel to
- Endoxa
The verdict
An excellent first move mistaken for a whole method, and better regarded as the discipline of looking before theorising.