When Words Are Called For: A Defense of Ordinary Language Philosophy

Abstract

In this fascinating and provocative book, Avner Baz argues that the much maligned methods of Ordinary Language Philosophy (OLP), when properly applied, reveal that central debates in contemporary philosophy are fundamentally misguided. Baz's radical argument targets what he calls the ‘prevailing program’ in philosophy. The ‘prevailing program’ is an approach to gathering data in support of philosophical theories: I will call the question of whether or not our concept of x, or ‘x’, applies to some real or imaginary case when it is raised as part of an attempt to develop or test a philosophical theory of x, ‘the theorist's question’; and I will call the research program that takes answers to the theorist's question as its primary data ‘the prevailing program’. (p. 87) For example, philosophers have investigated the concept of knowledge, or the meaning of ‘know’, by asking whether or not the concept (or the expression ‘know’) applies in, or truly describes, certain imagined situations: Gettier scenarios, barns in barn façade county, Mr. Truetemp's reliable beliefs about the temperature, contextualist ‘bank’ cases, and so on.