Linguistic Analysis: Ayer and Early Ordinary Language Philosophy

Abstract

The period in which Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic (LTL) was published saw the emergence of a second view that appeared to have a common doctrine: that philosophical problems are really linguistic. The second view was the early stages of what would come to be known as ‘ordinary language philosophy’ (OLP). Both views have their roots in Wittgenstein: for Ayer and the positivists, it is in the ‘ideal language’ view, which manifests in the Tractatus. For OLP, it was the later work of Wittgenstein (post 1929), which culminated in the Philosophical Investigations. My aim in this paper is to draw out the ‘ideal language’ view in terms of its historical development, to show how it figures in Ayer’s positivism. Emphasizing this, I think, enables an appreciation of the differences between early OLP and the Ayer of LTL. These differences are important to draw, as the subtleties of vision of early OLP can often be drowned in a conflation of it with positivism. Both views saw, for example, that philosophical problems arise from the non-ordinary uses of certain propositions and are the source of metaphysical perplexity—which is self-inflicted. However, the divergence between the ways Ayer on the one hand, and OLP on the other, understood this problem, and the ‘method of linguistic analysis’ proposed to resolve it is enormous. Examining this divergence provides an excellent insight into both challenges to traditional metaphysical theorizing.