II.—ORDINARY LANGUAGE AND COMMON SENSE

Abstract

TIT philosophy has for its task the study of linguistic usage is a view so widely held these days that it has almost reached the canonical status of a platitude. We learn all that, as philosophers, we want to learn about promises, for example, by taking the word 'promise', and examining.on the one hand its syntax (e.g. the contrast between 'promising to' and 'promising that ') and on the other hand its semantics (e.g. the contrasts between 'I promise' and 'I promised'; between 'I promise' and 'He promises'; between 'I promise' and 'I intend'; etc.). It has been argued by Malcolm in more than one place that Moore's great achievement in pbilosophy has been to bring out the absurdity of philosophically sceptical paradoxes, and to bring it out by showing how they violate ordinary language. This, it is said, is what Moore was clearly doing in his Defence of Common Sense and again in his Proof of the External World . To be sure, what Moore said he was doing was defending common sense. But Malcolm asserts that common sense and ordinary laiaguage are the same thing. His chief criticism of Moore appears to be thal hatving successfully shown how the sceptics are violating ordinary usage by doubting or denying that there are material objects, that this is a hand, and so on, he proceeds to violate ordinary usage himself in saying 'I know that this is a hand'. Moore's assertions , he says, do not belong to 'common sense', i.e. to ordinary language, at, all. They involve a use of 'know' which is a radical departure from ordinary usage. 1 Some elucidation is here necessary of the phrase 'ordinary language '. 1. Malcolm has a definition of it (in Moore a;nd Ordinary Language 2), such that an expression is an ordinary expression if it would be used to describe a given situation. It is not necessarily the case that it is used to describe the situation, for the situation may never, or not often, occur. And an expression describes a situation (i) if it describes it correctly, or (ii) if,