Ordinary Language Philosophy Research Articles

The Grammar of the Ordinary

In this paper I explore what it means to take ordinary language as the raw material of philosophy. To do so, I contrast what I call ‘grammar’ or the grammatical approach, which is characteristic of L. Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and ‘ordinary language philosophy’ (OLP) as J.L. Austin understood it. I show that, while ‘standard’ OLP tends to focus on ‘historical situations’ understood as virtually plausible stagings of our actual uses of concepts, and thus contrasts ‘normal’ and ‘parasitic’ uses of language; the grammarian focuses on the logical possibilities of language through the invention of fictitious language-games. The latter thus extends the ‘ordinary’ up to the abnormal and the extraordinary and rather contrasts it with mere apparent uses that are no uses of language at all.

Home Language and Philosophers’ Language

This paper investigates whether Wittgenstein can be considered an ‘ordinary language philosopher’. A central role in his thinking is that of what may be called our ‘home language’ - the language we bring along in coming to do philosophy. The intelligibility of philosophers’ language depends on its relation to the home language. This is the central point of Philosophical Investigations § 116. Traditional philosophical ‘uses’ of a word like ‘knowledge’ have a problematic relation to our customary uses of the word. In consequence, traditional philosophers have sometimes lost the grip on how such words are actually used in human interaction.

O pojęciu pojęcia i używaniu nazwy „pojęcie” w literaturze prawniczej

The article deals with the history of the perception of the essence of the concept from antiquity to modern times and the mutual relationship between the concept and the name as two vertices of the so-called “semantic triangle”. The pretext to discuss these issues is quite common in legal literature treating a concept as a synonym for a name and even using the terms “concept” and “name” interchangeably. The author investigates the origins of such erroneous practice, presents its most common manifestations and tips on how to avoid this type of logical and semantic errors. The research methodology includes analysis of philosophical ideas, ordinary language philosophy and thought experiments.

‘Someone lives in me’: how essayists enter our lives

ABSTRACT When we read, we imagine an author who wrote what we are reading and we imagine what they are like. This essay describes how authorial personae are shaped, in particular those of essayists, by considering the work of Michel de Montaigne and Joan Didion in relation to their use (or lack) of friendliness and knowingness. Drawing on ordinary language philosophy, with particular reference to Toril Moi, along with philosopher Alexander Nehamas’s conception of friendship, I explain the sense of quasi-conversational connection that readers can experience when reading Montaigne and Didion, and argue that applying a language of sociality to reading can reveal how our picture of an author influences our interpretation of their text.

Evoked questions and inquiring attitudes

Abstract Drawing inspiration from the notion of evocation employed in inferential erotetic logic, we defend an ‘evoked questions norm’ on inquiring attitudes. According to this norm, it is rational to have an inquiring attitude concerning a question only if that question is evoked by your background information. We offer two arguments for this norm. First, we develop an argument from convergence. Insights from several independent literatures (20th-century ordinary-language philosophy, inferential erotetic logic, inquisitive epistemic logic, and contemporary zetetic epistemology), all converge on the evoked questions norm. Second, we show that suitably interpreted, the evoked questions norm correctly predicts several underappreciated kinds of bad questions. It does this, in part, by recovering versions of previously defended ignorance and knowledge norms. Some of those bad questions cannot be predicted by either norm singly, but only when corporately taken to reflect a common normative category. We identify this category as evocation.

From the Ordinary to the Everyday

Abstract This is a new English translation of “De l’ordinaire au quotidien,” originally published in French in 2023. In paragraph 116 of Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein seems to outline the fundamental goal of his philosophy: “What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.” The everyday use to which Wittgenstein constantly refers is far from self-evident: it is just as elusive and indeterminate as our forms of life. The project of Philosophical Investigations is not to replace disqualified logic with the study of use, finding therein a new foundation or new convictions, even purely practical ones. The study of everyday language use presents new problems, arduous in a different way from those of logical analysis, as J. L. Austin and the Oxford School later showed—the same school that, in coining the term Ordinary language philosophy, formalized the Ordinary rather than the Everyday as a central concept. The present article considers several reasons for returning to the concept of the Everyday, Wittgenstein’s point of departure, in the philosophy of language.

The extraordinary task of crafting a more ‘ordinary’ geography: Post-vanguardism and the art of not-knowing best

This commentary responds to the provocations in Shawn Bodden's paper, ‘Working through our differences', in which he draws on the work of the late Clive Barnett and Ordinary Language Philosophy to advocate for a more ‘ordinary’ orientation to geographical inquiry. In the interests of generating wider debate, I push Bodden to go a step further and fully embrace the extraordinary task he is asking us to take on. The consequences of his argument imply that we need to reject the vanguardist approach taken by many human geographers over the past 50 years. We need to start to embrace the art of not-knowing best. I draw attention to the resources of pragmatist philosophy to help us to think how to do this.

Susan Stebbing on Logical Positivism and Communication

In this paper, I look at Susan Stebbing’s articles and reviews that critically engage logical positivism. These appeared before the publication of A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic and helped shape the early British reception of logical positivism. I highlight Stebbing’s adoption of G. E. Moore’s tripartite distinction between knowing a proposition, understanding it, and giving an analysis of it and, in light of this distinction, her focus on whether the principle of verifiability can ground a plausible account of communication. Stebbing thinks not, and I reconstruct her reasons, as well as her own account of communication. In doing this, I relate her criticisms to her rejection of methodological solipsism and her dissatisfaction with the logical positivist treatment of statements about other minds and the past. I also argue that Stebbing’s work provides a bridge to later criticisms of logical positivism by ordinary language philosophers. Foregrounding Stebbing’s engagement with logical positivism, especially her focus on communication, paints a fuller picture of how the logical positivists came to be part of analytic philosophy despite having different concerns than many of the British philosophers engaging their work.

ВИНИКНЕННЯ ТА РОЗВИТОК ОКСФОРДСЬКОЇ ФІЛОСОФІЇ ЯК ПЕРЕДУМОВА ФОРМУВАННЯ ФІЛОСОФІЇ ПОВСЯКДЕННОЇ МОВИ

B a c k g r o u n d . According to a common prejudice, especially prevalent among philosophers in the continental tradition, the philosophy of everyday language (sometimes referred to as Oxford philosophy), with its focus on what we usually say and mean, fundamentally expresses a positivist attitude. Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), who significantly contributed to the spread of this view, interprets the appeal to the concept analysis in these philosophers' writings as purely ideological: it fails to recognize the constructed nature of the social and views the social as a domain of brute facts where critical thinking should cease. Therefore, to grasp the essence of the ordinary language philosophy, it is crucial to identify the prerequisites for the emergence of this philosophical style and delve into its historical context. M e t h o d s . In this article, the author employs the method of historical-philosophical reconstruction to clarify the conditions of the formation and genesis of Oxford philosophy. General scientific methods of cognition – such as analysis, synthesis, and generalization – are used to elucidate key ideas and concepts that influenced the development of Oxford philosophy's method. Additionally, methods of systematization and comparison are applied. R e s u l t s . The article identifies the historical prerequisites for the formation of Oxford philosophy, specifying the key ideas and concepts that impacted the development of the ordinary language philosophy. It clarifies the distinctions and interconnections between the concepts of the philosophy of everyday language and Oxford philosophy. C o n c l u s i o n s . For ten years following the end of the Second World War, the University of Oxford became a hub of exceptionally productive philosophical activity. This period laid the groundwork for the emergence of a new and original philosophical movement known as the "Ordinary language philosophy" or "Oxford philosophy". However, equating the ordinary language philosophy entirely with Oxford philosophy is not accurate. The former term pertains specifically to the methodology of analyzing natural language expressions in the post-World War II era. In contrast, Oxford philosophy encompasses a broader historical context, including the pre-war period of philosophical activity at the University of Oxford. Thus, Oxford philosophy should be understood as a historical-philosophical stage that ultimately led to the formation of the philosophy of everyday language.

Knowledge, Confidence, and Epistemic Injustice

In this paper I begin by explaining what epistemic injustice is and what ordinary language philosophy is. I then go on to ask why we might doubt the usefulness of ordinary language philosophy in examining epistemic injustice. In the first place, we might wonder how ordinary language philosophy can be of use, given that many of the key terms used in discussing epistemic injustice, including ‘epistemic injustice’ itself, are not drawn from our ordinary language. We might also have doubts about the usefulness of ordinary language philosophy in this area, given ordinary language philosophers’ aversion to theory. Finally, we might have doubts about the usefulness of ordinary language philosophy due to the fact that the study of epistemic injustice is clearly a study of practical matters concerning the way the world is and has been historically. If ordinary language philosophy is just concerned with grammar, what use can it be to practical and social philosophy concerning current issues? In response to these worries, I demonstrate the usefulness of ordinary language philosophy in practice by applying the insights of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Alan R. White to a problem that Miranda Fricker raises, but does not answer: about whether there is a confidence condition on knowledge. I also make use of Gilbert Ryles distinction between ‘the use of ordinary language’ and ‘the ordinary use of an expression’ to show that the terminology used in examining epistemic injustice is ordinary in some sense.

Working through our differences: Limits of ontology in the ordinary lives of critical geographical theory

You won’t get far in geographical theory today without bumping into one ontology or another. Metaphysical assertions about key spatial concepts – ‘space is open’, ‘community is exclusionary’, ‘the political is agonistic’ – guide empirical analysis. In this mode of theorising, the vocation of critical geography is to correct conceptual misunderstandings and thereby direct political action. Curiously perhaps, the geographer becomes one who – in the name of emancipatory projects – points people to their proper place. An alternative approach to critical theory might consider instead how people place themselves. Just such a concern animates the varied enterprises operating under the name of ordinary language philosophy. This article examines how philosophies of ordinary language might contribute to new avenues of geographical research by examining the relationship between Stanley Cavell's writings on the human voice as a site of embodied and passionate response and Clive Barnett's call for an action-theoretic approach to social inquiry as an alternative to ontological critique. Taken together, their work recommends a programme of inquiry into ordinary critical geographies: how people circumstantiate the meaning, worth and wisdom of their actions, and, in doing so, work to place themselves in the world.

Design and the Polysemy of Value: On a problem within the language of valuation studies

Value and valuation are notoriously difficult terms, because they mean very different things in different contexts for different scholars. This problem can be described in linguistic terms as “polysemy”. In this article, I propose to reformulate the problem of value through the lens of polysemy as a problem within language. I offer an alternative to approaches that either narrow down value to one particular definition or disregard it altogether, turning value into a container concept for a variety of concerns. I seek thereby to avoid the twin risks of fragmentation or smothering. Following the lead of ordinary language philosophy, I distinguish between three different “grammars of value”. Scholars address value differently depending on their grammar. This shows best in the ways they present value as an intuitively intelligible phenomenon, and in the ways in which they challenge such intuitive understandings of value in their studies. To illustrate these grammatical distinctions, I refer to ethnographic studies of design practices, including excerpts from my own research in a German architecture office.

Two sorts of philosophical therapy: Ordinary language philosophy, social criticism and the Frankfurt school

In a recent article, Fabian Freyenhagen argues that we should understand first-generation Frankfurt School critical theory (in particular, the work of Adorno and Horkheimer) as being defined by a kind of ‘linguistic turn’ analogous to one present in the later Wittgenstein. Here, I elaborate on this hypothesis – initially by calling it into question, by detailing Herbert Marcuse’s extensive criticisms of Wittgenstein (and other analytic philosophers of language) in One-Dimensional Man. While Marcuse is harshly critical of analytic ordinary language philosophy, he is much more sympathetic to a different sort of ordinary language philosophy, which he unpacks with reference to Karl Kraus. I show how, by getting Marcuse’s criticisms of Wittgenstein and other analytic philosophers, and lauding of Kraus, into view, we can better understand the first generation of the Frankfurt School as having practised a sort of ‘non-quietistic’ philosophical therapy (that may or may not have been the sort of thing that Wittgenstein himself had in mind).

Values-Based Practice: A Theory-Practice Dynamic for Navigating Values and Difference in Health Care

AbstractThis chapter introduces values-based practice as a resource for working with individually diverse values in health and social care, and describes its origins in an on-going development through the resources of philosophy. The chapter is in two main sections. Section I, Values-Based Practice, builds on two brief interactive exercises to introduce and explain the key features of values-based practice. As a relatively recent addition to the range of resources for working with values in health and social care, values-based practice is distinctive in focussing on the diversity of values comprising individual lived experience. Like evidence-based practice, values-based practice is a process-driven rather than an outcome-driven methodology. That is to say, rather than offering prescribed answers, both approaches offer processes that support decision-makers in coming to answers for themselves based on the particular circumstances presented by the situation in question. Although entirely complementary, the processes involved are of course different. Where evidence-based practice relies on meta-analyses of the results of high-quality clinical trials to inform a consensual model of decision-making, values-based practice builds on learnable clinical skills and other process elements to inform a dissensual model of decision-making rather than seeking to overcome value-conflicts in reaching consensus. Working within a premise of mutual respect for differences of values, and guided by three key principles linking values and evidence, values-based practice, as described in the chapter, supports dissensual decision-making, balanced according to the circumstances presented by the decision in question, within frameworks of locally-set frameworks of shared values. Section II, The Theory-Practice Dynamic, then outlines the theory-practice dynamic on which values-based practice is based. The origins of values-based practice in mid-twentieth century ordinary language philosophy of the Oxford School are outlined. As the chapter illustrates, although a limited area of analytic philosophy, many aspects of values-based practice are informed by ordinary language philosophy, ranging from its premise, through the training exercises and other process elements described in Section I, to its role in hybrid empirical studies supporting its model of service delivery. The development of values-based practice, furthermore, as section II goes on to describe, is ongoing, with key initiatives drawing not only on both analytic and Continental traditions of European philosophy, but also on non-European philosophies such as those of Africa and the Caribbean.

Dyslexia as ‘paradox’

AbstractThis article is written by a dyslexic scholar in opposition to the psychological discourse on dyslexia. The methodological approach adopted is ordinary language philosophy; I argue that dyslexia is a paradoxical concept. As such, dyslexia as a concept lacks clarity and cohesion. The alternative concept of Lexism (the Othering of and discrimination against dyslexics by normative practices and assumptions of literacy) is a more helpful concept for those who wish to understand the nature of a dyslexic's existence.

Title in English: (Analytic philosophy as a tributary of deliberative tributaries)

Ideas and knowledge are not born out of nothing but are a series of extensions and this is made clear by knowing the reference roots of pragmatics as it is a product of a number of cognitive materials such as philosophy, semiotics, etc. psychological and social research. Linguistic expressions are fraught with confusion, ambiguity, confusion, or falsity, and there are several schools, including the Cambridge School, represented by Wittgenstein, which subjects philosophical texts to linguistic analysis, and the Oxford School, called Ordinary Language Philosophy, represented by Austin and tries to analyze and clarify logical expressions until they become simple. Hence, analytic philosophy is the source from which the theory of speech acts, as the first deliberative school, drew its philosophical epistemological origins.

Whither Rough Ground? On the “Ordinary” of Ordinary Aesthetics

AbstractThis article is a criticism of the narrative self-understanding offered by advocates of Ordinary Aesthetics. Even though the frustration with the philosophy of art (in contrast with philosophical aesthetics) is, in many ways, an overdetermined result, the sense of the ordinary as available through the withdrawal of this art-centred concern is misguided. This article argues that the reported death of art and the seemingly consistent suggestion that “anything goes” do not relieve contemporary philosophy from its being situated precisely in the wake of these practices of sense-making. I claim that Ordinary Aesthetics is dealing in an illusory conceit to the extent that defences of Ordinary Aesthetics are indebted to a demand that aesthetics may be a living field of philosophical inquiry today only if the fate of artworks is deleted from that narrative. Arguing this point requires an account of the idea of the death of art, associated with Hegel but perhaps more recently with Danto, and I sketch how Danto’s account does not cohere with the account provided in Ordinary Aesthetics. But because the claim of Ordinary Aesthetics amounts to a claim about the capacities of human sense-making independent of historical trajectories and a sense of the ordinary as that which is just available to a timeless abstraction of the human sensorium, my criticism of Ordinary Aesthetics requires a deeper defence of the relation of the faltering of narratives of art with the philosophical effort to make sense of ordinary experiences. Doing so requires that I provide alternatives: what I regard as two related though quite different philosophical approaches, namely, Cavell’s Ordinary Language Philosophy (which is startlingly absent from defences of Ordinary Aesthetics) and the program of a philosophical aesthetics elaborated in Adorno.

Cook Wilson on judgement

ABSTRACT John Cook Wilson is increasingly recognized as an important predecessor of ordinary language philosophy. He emphasizes the authority of ordinary language in philosophical theorizing. At the same time, however, he circumscribes the limits of that authority and identifies cases in which it threatens to mislead us. My aim is to consider in detail one case where, according to Cook Wilson, ordinary language has mislead philosophical theorizing. Judgement was one of the core notions of the logic, epistemology, and philosophy of mind of Cook Wilson’s time. Cook Wilson rejects this notion, in the form developed by his contemporaries, in part because it is based on a problematic analogy between ordinary language and the thoughts expressed in that language. Cook Wilson’s discussion of judgement also highlights the extent to which Cook Wilson was critical of, but also responsive to, his contemporaries. In addition, variants of the language-thought analogy Cook Wilson opposes continue to feature in twenty-first century epistemology and philosophy of mind. Cook Wilson’s criticism of the analogy thus raises questions about recent work as well as the theories of his contemporaries.

An objective metric for Explainable AI: How and why to estimate the degree of explainability

This paper presents a new method for objectively measuring the explainability of textual information, such as the outputs of Explainable AI (XAI). We introduce a metric called Degree of Explainability (DoX), drawing inspiration from Ordinary Language Philosophy and Achinstein’s theory of explanations. It assumes that the degree of explainability is directly proportional to the number of relevant questions that a piece of information can correctly answer. We have operationalized this concept by formalizing the DoX metric through a mathematical formula, which we have integrated into a software tool named DoXpy. DoXpy relies on pre-trained deep language models for knowledge extraction and answer retrieval in order to estimate the DoX, transforming our theoretical insights into a practical tool for real-world applications. To confirm the effectiveness and consistency of our approach, we conducted comprehensive experiments and user studies with over 190 participants. These studies evaluated the quality of explanations by healthcare and finance XAI-based software systems. Our results demonstrate a correlation between increases in objective explanation usability and increments in the DoX score. These findings suggest that the DoX metric is congruent with other mainstream explainability measures. It provides a more objective and cost-effective alternative to non-deterministic user studies. Thus, we discuss the potential of DoX as a tool to evaluate the legal compliance of XAI systems. By bridging the gap between theory and practice in Explainable AI, our work fosters transparency, understandability, and legal compliance. DoXpy and related materials have been made available online to ensure reproducibility.

Stanley Cavell’s Philosophical Literary Criticism

An American philosopher Stanley Cavell (1926–2018) is one of those philosophers who, consciously starting from the assumption of the mutual complementarity of philosophy and literature, develop their theoretical reflection at the meeting point of both these fields and treating their reflection as a form of writing. In Cavell’s opinion, literature is in no way inferior to philosophy in terms of its cognitive values. He goes so far as to question the validity of the rigid, insurmountable division into these two areas, and describes his own writing as epistemic criticism which is a kind of philosophical literary criticism. Although he comes from the analytical school, Cavell remains extremely critical of this tradition of philosophizing, accusing it, as he puts it, of “forgetting the human voice”, losing touch with reality and being alienated from life and in the result calling analytical philosophy “the discipline most opposed to writing, and to life”. At the same time, he turns to the continental tradition and tries to combine these two different intellectual traditions on the basis of his considerations. In this way, Cavell places himself at the intersection of various intellectual currents. His area of interest is also extremely wide and varied, including philosophy, literature, film, theater and music.
 In my article I intend to focus on a few chosen aspects of Cavell’s work that is still not recognized enough in academic studies, namely on the Cavell’s use of philosophical concepts and chosen methods used by Cavell to analyze literary texts – the paraphrase method, the problem of the open work, the literalization of language method (in the context of Cavell’s analysis of Beckett’s Endgame), the problem of the ordinary connected with Cavell’s version of the ordinary language philosophy (in the context of the chosen features of Wittgenstein’s philosophy). In concluding part I also make some provisional remarks on Cavell’s hermeneutics and also suggest that it could be fruitfully read in the context of the thought of Emmanuel Levinas and his philosophy of the Other.