Ordinary Language Philosophy

The claim

Meaning is use. A word does not stand for a thing in some ideal correspondence; it does a job in a form of life, and philosophical confusion begins when it is asked to do that job with the surroundings removed.

What it held

The later Wittgenstein is repudiating his own earlier book. The Tractatus had one relation between language and world — picturing. The Investigations begins by showing that language does hundreds of different things, and that looking for the essence common to them is the mistake.

The tools are famous. Language-games: describing, joking, praying, ordering, thanking, each with its own rules. Family resemblance: the things called games share no single feature, only overlapping similarities. The private language argument: a language whose terms could only be understood by one person could have no criterion of correct use, so nothing would distinguish being right from seeming right.

At Oxford, Austin worked differently but in the same direction, cataloguing the distinctions ordinary usage already draws — doing something by accident is not the same as doing it by mistake, and the difference matters in a courtroom. His discovery of performatives, sentences that do rather than describe, opened speech act theory.

Ryle's attack on the ghost in the machine argued that Cartesian dualism is a category mistake: like asking to be shown the university after seeing the colleges.

How it argued

Assemble reminders about how a word is actually used, and describe rather than explain. Wittgenstein insisted philosophy leaves everything as it is.

What it was arguing against

The assumption that ordinary language is defective and needs replacing by a logically ideal one, which was the shared premise of logical atomism and the Vienna Circle.

Where it disagreed with itself

Whether dissolving problems is solving them. Gellner's Words and Things attacked the whole movement as quietist evasion, and Russell agreed.

Common misconceptions

That it says philosophy is nonsense. The claim is narrower: certain problems arise from misuse of language, and those are the ones that dissolve. And Wittgenstein's therapeutic image is not dismissal — he thought the confusions were deep and hard to escape.

How it began

Wittgenstein returning to Cambridge in 1929 having concluded that the Tractatus was wrong, and thirty years of teaching that was published only after his death.

What became of it

Living in its methods, dead as a movement. Its assumptions are now built into philosophy of language and mind rather than argued for.

Lasting influence

Speech act theory through Austin and Searle. Philosophy of mind after Ryle. Legal philosophy through Hart, who was one of Austin's circle.

Why it still matters

The private language argument remains one of the most discussed arguments in philosophy, and speech act theory is used across linguistics and law.

Put another way

A fly in a bottle, and philosophy's job as showing it the way out.

Where to start

The first hundred remarks of the Investigations. Slow, strange and worth it.

The surprising bit

Wittgenstein published one book in his lifetime and disowned it. The Philosophical Investigations appeared two years after his death and reversed almost everything in the first.

In their own words

Connections

Answers

Logical Atomism, Cambridge Analysis

Opposed by

Vienna Circle, Logical Atomism

Influenced

Pittsburgh School (Sellarsian Realism)

The verdict

A method that made the twentieth century's most influential philosopher famous twice, for opposite positions.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy