In defense of ordinary language philosophy

Abstract

What role does ordinary language play in philosophical theorizing today? One might think: little. After all, analytic philosophy has moved past its “ordinary language” phase; in metaphysics, for example, few would think that attending to “time” and related words has anything to teach us about the nature of, and how we persist through, time. The aim of this paper, however, is to argue that contemporary analytic philosophy pays more attention to ordinary language use than the implicit historiography mentioned above suggests. Moreover, and moving from description to evaluation, the paper argues that this is philosophically defensible. In many areas of philosophy, to learn about a phenomenon weought to pay at least some attention to how ordinary language users speak about it.