Ordinary Language Philosophy Research Articles

Ideology: towards renewal of a critical concept

In this response to our critics and fellow-travellers we reaffirm our claim that contemporary media studies should reinvent a critical concept of ideology. We do this through addressing some of the problems with older critical conceptions of ideology and suggesting potentially fruitful ways forward through engaging with research traditions that have become neglected or are overlooked in the field. This avowedly inter-disciplinary position draws on political philosophy, critical realism, ordinary language philosophy, and discursive psychology. At the end of the essay we show how a critical concept of ideology can be applied in analysis of news reporting.

Philosophical and Linguistic Sources of Herbert L. A. Hart’s Theory of Law

Abstract The paper presents H. L. A. Hart as a leading exponent of the analytic orientation in legal philosophy. Hart showed that the principles and methods of analytic philosophy yield fruitful implications to law, where they may foster fresh ideas and innovative solutions. The text emphasizes the linguistic aspect of Hart’s works; his achievements in legal theory are discussed in the context of the principles of ordinary language philosophy.

Where's the disagreement? The significance of the ordinary in Austin and Ayer

J. L. Austin is commonly known as an ‘ordinary language philosopher’. Ordinary language philosophy, in turn, is generally known as a philosophy of language which employs everyday language as a standard of correctness – an arbiter between meaningful speech and nonsense. By means of a return to the somewhat heated debate between Austin and A. J. Ayer, this paper challenges this picture. I argue that if there is one philosophical tradition that encourages us to turn ‘ordinary language’ into a problem for philosophy, it is ordinary language philosophy. There is no simple instruction of the form ‘If you are philosophically troubled, then turn to ordinary language and you will see the true sense’ coming out of Austin's work (rightly construed).

Referential Zero Point

Perhaps the most important controversy in which ordinary language philosophy was involved is that of definite descriptions, presenting referential act as a community-involving communication-intention endeavor, thereby opposing the direct acquaintance-based and logical proper names inspired reference aimed at securing truth conditions of referential expression. The problem of reference is that of obtaining access to the matters in the world. This access may be forthcoming through the senses, or through descriptions. A review of how the problem of reference is handled shows though that one main practice is to indulge in relations of acquaintance supporting logical proper names, demonstratives, indexicals and causal or historical chains. This testifies that the problem of reference involves the zero point, and with it phenomenology of intentionality. Communication-intention is but one dimension of rich phenomenology that constitutes an agent’s experiential space, his experiential world. Zero point is another constitutive aspect of phenomenology involved in the referential relation. Realizing that the problem of reference is phenomenology based opens a new perspective upon the contribution of analytical philosophy in this area, reconciling it with continental approach, and demonstrating variations of the impossibility related to the real. Chromatic illumination from the cognitive background empowers the referential act, in the best tradition of ordinary language philosophy.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the Perception of Reality from the Visual Field of the Other: Analysis of the Relation between Ordinary Language Philosophy and Poststructural Critique of Vision

The first objective of this work is to establish a parallel between the ordinary language philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein as well as the philosophy of Stanley Cavell and poststructuralism and its theories through their apprehension of vision and seeing as conceptual categories. The second objective is the analysis of perception of reality from the visual field of the other (children, women, other civilizations and peripheral parts of society) as a place of position of the subject in the frame of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic poststructural theory, Jacques Derrida’s deconstructivism and psychoanalytic poststructural feminist theories (Irigaray, Kristeva).

The Central Concepts of Ordinary Language Philosophy in the Art of Marcel Broodthaers and Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos

While claiming that there are no fixed meanings behind words, Wittgenstein has focused attention on the possibilities of manipulation with linguistic categories. ‘Language game’ can be changed by rotations of the semantic field. On the trace of this philosophy, language became the most important media in many practices of visual arts of the second half of the 20th century. I will focus on two cases: Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos and Marcel Broodthaers.Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘language game’ and Austin’s concept of the ‘performative’ have become the main tools in building delicate art projects like Broodthaers’ museum or Mangelos’ noart strategy. Here I’d like to prove that Broodthaers’ construction of a museum (Musée d’Art Moderne) was based on the same concept as Austin’s ‘performative’ and that the revolutionary act in this art project was to show that saying that something is art is not a given, it is not a statement. Who is declaring what art is, and how is this ‘action performed’ (Austin), is the main subject of Mangelos’ Picasso phenomenon. When Mangelos asks the spectator to think about the concept of ‘kitsch’ he draws our attention to those who have the power or the license to declare that some art is ‘kitsch’ and some is true art. This issue could be related to Clement Greenberg’s attempt to discard everything popular, commercial in art by naming it ‘kitsch’.The main ideas of ordinary language philosophy were important for both Mangelos and Broodthaers. The idea that the language and more precisely, grammar of the language that defines the rules of connecting names and things is a place where the solution (solution meaning the answer to questions about the nature and definition of art) is hidden (behind the obvious), provided a very fruitful basis for their research.

Stanley Cavell, Classical Hollywood and the Constitution of the Ordinary (With Notes on Billy Wilder)

When in his Tanner lectures Stanley Cavell sets out to define Ordinary Language Philosophy or – rather – to explain how it demarcates philosophy as such, he takes up psychoanalytic literary criticism in order to articulate the terms of this task. Yet the constitution of the ordinary, in Cavell, is never quite accessed from within psychoanalysis-cum-literature alone; instead, it takes another relation, that of psychoanalysis and literature to classical Hollywood, for Cavell to address the ordinary in terms of its constitution. I propose to discuss this complex using two films by Billy Wilder as a passageway to Cavell’s analytic procedure.

On Flew’s Compatibilism and His Objections to Theistic Libertarianism

Flew strongly defends a compatibilist thesis in the free will debate before going on to totally object to theistic libertarianism. His objections basically rely on his compatibilism embracing the notion of agent causation, which is not very common in compatibilist theses. Since he is a strong proponent of ordinary language philosophy, he also holds that linguistic analyses can certainly solve the free will problem as well as many other problems of philosophy. In doing so, he first uses the paradigm cases based on our common sense experience and then assumes the verity of principle of alternative possibilities. This study attempts to show, on the one hand, that there are some serious difficulties in both his justification of compatibilism and his objections to theistic libertarianism, and on the other hand, that he cannot easily defend both at the same time.

Listening to Cage: Nonintentional philosophy and music

Listening to Cage: Nonintentional Philosophy and Music threads together the writings of ordinary language philosophy and the music of John Cage, responding specifically to requests made by Cage and Stanley Cavell. While many texts downplay or ignore the philosophical demands in Cage’s music and other texts find grandiose spiritual and philosophical material tied to his work, this text rejects both efforts. It challenges the basic directions of the growing secondary source material on Cage, finding it largely contrary to what Cage himself and his music teaches. That secondary material constantly offers an intentional approach to the music which is to make Cage understandable or easier to understand. The present text makes him appropriately difficult and basically unapproachable, asking the reader for serious acknowledgment of what Cage says he does, namely, “I have nothing to say and I am saying it.” While there is little hope of stopping the Cage industry that academia and publishers have grown, this text wishes at least to try to slow it down. The footnotes of this text include direct conversation material with Cage from the 1980s and 1990s regarding many subjects—his own compositions, our life struggles, remarks on Wittgenstein, Thoreau, philosophy, and music—all with a new context for their hearing.

Meaning, Intention, and Responsibility in Rai Divinatory Discourse

Meaning, Intention, and Responsibility in Rai Divinatory Discourse Martin Gaenszle (bio) In linguistic theories of what constitutes meaning in communication, or the purpose of a “speech act,” the notion of intention has been a crucial ingredient. If there were no intentions, so the general argument in the field of linguistic pragmatics goes, one could not distinguish meaningless words, like babbling, from meaningful speech. This position has been expressed in formal terms by the language philosopher H. Paul Grice: “‘A meant something by x’ is (roughly) equivalent to ‘A intended the utterance of x to produce some effect in an audience by means of a recognition of this intention’” (Grice 1973:46, also Du Bois 1993, emphasis mine). According to speech act theory, as developed in ordinary language philosophy by J. L. Austin and later expanded by John Searle, speech acts are performances that can have an intended effect on other persons, as in illocutionary acts like ordering, threatening, or demanding.1 In these cases an appellative act solicits the addressee to respond in some way. But speech acts can also be performances that are merely expressive of certain intentions, as in sentences that use verbal expressions of fearing, wishing, or hoping (Searle 1983). Intentionality is, in any case, a basic aspect of all linguistic communication and interaction. In other words, speakers are persons who have an intention to convey something to other persons; they want to “affect” the other person in some way, and the speaker as an individual agent is therefore taken to be responsible for these intentional acts and their consequences. This view of language in early speech act theory has been criticized by linguistic anthropologists as culture-bound, because in other cultural contexts, where other notions of personhood are prevalent, the situation may be quite different.2 In the context of the Ilongot studied by Michelle Rosaldo, for example, it is not so much propositions by individual speakers, but directive speech acts in complex social settings that are the paradigmatic case in linguistic communication. As summarized by Rosaldo, speech act theorists “think of ‘doing things with words’ as the achievement of autonomous selves, whose deeds are not significantly constrained by the relationships and expectations that define their local world. In the end, I claim, the theory fails because it does not comprehend the sociality of individuals who use its ‘rules’ and ‘resources’ to act” (Rosaldo 1982:204). This has consequences for the notion of a speaker’s intention, as the “force” of a speech act is not located in the individual actor alone. In fact, more recent studies in linguistic anthropology have stressed the social embeddedness of meaning and intention in social interaction.3 One important issue that emerged is the notion of responsibility. Who is the speaker as the source of the statement? The person who intends to convey something to others through words is also the person who makes certain claims and takes responsibility for the consequences of what is being said. Thus speech is a complex social act, often highly ritualized, in which roles and positions are negotiated. As Jane H. Hill and Judith T. Irvine point out in the introduction to their volume Responsibility and Evidence in Oral Discourse (1993), the focus on responsibility and the related notion of evidence (that is, claims to knowledge) in speech is in line with more dialogical approaches, which bring out the interactive and processual quality of the productions of meaning. One case in point in which the ordinary intentionality of the speaker is absent is in the context of divination, that is, divinatory speech or prophecy (Leavitt 1997). As John Du Bois stresses, non-intentionality is especially pronounced in so-called “mechanical divination,” which can be distinguished from “trance divination” (that is, oracular divination), but in both cases a suppression of intention, and thus “intentionless meaning” is involved (Du Bois 1993:53, 70 n. 8). But if it is not the speaker who has intentions, this does not mean that intentions are not involved at all. They can be attributed to a special kind of person, for example, a divinity. The following study of a shamanic divination in eastern Nepal deals with a form of speech...

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

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

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

Bazův projekt je výzvou pro současnou epistemologii. Ve svém vzkříšení filozofické metody J. L. Austina a pozdního Wittgensteina se snaží podat alternativu k dnešnímu přístupu založenému na intuicích filozofů. Tradiční argumenty proti filozofii běžného jazyka jsou ukázány jako nedostatečné: stojí na nepochopení toho, co pro autory poloviny dvacátého století znamená „použití“ slova a „význam“ slova. Při aplikaci na dnešní epistemologické příklady a dilemata se tato ukazují jako špatně sestavená, dokonce i ve své nejmírnější, kontextualistické verzi. Zároveň se však Bazův přístup svou radikálností dostává do prekérního vztahu k empiristické tradici.

Linguistic Experiments and Ordinary Language Philosophy

AbstractJ.L. Austin is regarded as having an especially acute ear for fine distinctions of meaning overlooked by other philosophers. Austin employs an informal experimental approach to gathering evidence in support of these fine distinctions in meaning, an approach that has become a standard technique for investigating meaning in both philosophy and linguistics. In this paper, we subject Austin's methods to formal experimental investigation. His methods produce mixed results: We find support for his most famous distinction, drawn on the basis of his ‘donkey stories’, that ‘mistake’ and ‘accident’ apply to different cases, but not for some of his other attempts to distinguish the meaning of philosophically significant terms (such as ‘intentionally’ and ‘deliberately’). We critically examine the methodology of informal experiments employed in ordinary language philosophy and much of contemporary philosophy of language and linguistics, and discuss the role that experimenter bias can play in influencing judgments about informal and formal linguistic experiments.

Voice as Form of Life and Life Form

This paper studies the concept of form of life as central to ordinary language philosophy (as understood in Wittgenstein’s, Austin’s and Stanley Cavell’s work): philosophy of our language as spoken; pronounced by a human voice within a form of life. Such an approach to Wittgenstein’s later philosophy shifts the question of the common use of language – central to Wittgenstein’s Investigations – to the definition of the subject as voice, and to the reinvention of subjectivity in language. The voice is both a subjective and common expression: it is what makes it possible for my individual voice, or claim, to become shared and for our forms of life to be intertwined with a lifeform.

The Normative Structure of the Ordinary

This paper aims to develop a new understanding of normativity based upon the priority of the ordinary. By relying upon diverse sociological and philosophical traditions, the paper seeks to emphasize the ordinary tacit assumptions which provide the basic structure of our experience of the world and its normative features. The general argument is that, whereas sociological traditions of social interactionism shed new light upon the “empirical fact of normativity”, ordinary language philosophy and pragmatism offer a theoretical account of normativity which is consistent with the picture of normativity which emerges out of these empirical descriptions. The paper synthesizes the main achievements of these traditions into a unified account of normativity.

Mountains, Cones, and Dilemmas of Context

The order of influence from thesis to hypothesis, and from philosophy to the social sciences, has historically governed the way in which the abstraction and significance of language as an empirical object is determined. In this article, an argument is made for the development of a more reflexive intellectual relationship between ordinary language philosophy (OLP) and the social sciences that it helped inspire. It is demonstrated that, and how, the social scientific traditions of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (CA) press OLP to re-consider the variety of problematic abstractions it has previously made for the sake of philosophical clarity, thereby self-reinvigorating.

Response to Stanley Cavell’s The World Viewed

Abstract Stanley Cavell’s The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology Film (1979 [1971]) is patient with the ways in which common sense is threatened by our experience of film. The book offers a perspective rather than an overview, foregrounding its own conditions – working mostly from the memory of films, for instance, and seeking to focus Cavell’s sense of a discontinuity in his moviegoing experience. Questions of cinematic ontology, held at an experiential level, join a broad philosophical-historical narrative concerning our lack of presentness to the world. Both of these strands develop preoccupations and discoveries found in Cavell’s reception of ordinary language philosophy. Disclosing the contours of the cinematic through juxtapositions with other media, in ways evoking both medium-specific and post-medium concerns, Cavell’s study of film further establishes the reach of his key term, ‘acknowledgment’.

Ernest Gellner's Words and Things: A Case Study of Empirical Philosophy

This article considers how Ernest Gellner used sociology and anthropology to attack ordinary language philosophy in Words and Things. It argues that this attack can be seen as a part of the movement to make philosophy more empirical or “naturalized,” something that has not been generally noted. It also discusses what general lessons to draw from Words and Things regarding how empirical knowledge should be used in philosophy. Among other things, the article argues that one important lesson is that empirical philosophers should make more use of “soft” social sciences, such as sociology and anthropology, and not focus exclusively on “harder” disciplines, such as physics and experimental psychology. Another upshot of the discussion is that philosophers should draw on empirical knowledge not only when they solve problems but also when they formulate them.

Thinking Through Examples: What Ordinary Language Philosophy Can Do for Feminist Theory

Toril Moi shows that Wittgenstein’s philosophy, and particularly his critique of the “craving for generality” transforms our understanding of concept, and theory. By teaching us how to think through examples, ordinary language philosophy releases us from the grip of the logic of representation—the logic of inclusion/exclusion—that dominates feminist theory today. Taking her examples mostly from intersectionality theory, Moi shows that ordinary language philosophy offers a powerful alternative to contemporary identity and anti-identity theories, and that this philosophy is more attentive to particulars, better capable of helping to make sense of women’s experiences than the standard attempts to “do theory.”

The Ethics of Care as a Politics of the Ordinary

T his paper sets out to strengthen a connection that, since the publication of my first writings on the concept of care, I have sought to establish between the ethics of care and my own philosophical background and ground—ordinary language philosophy as represented by Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, and Stanley Cavell—and thus to find in ordinary language philosophy (OLP), often considered to be disconnected from gender issues (except through speech act theory), resources for a reformulation of what for me is at stake in feminism: the inclusion and empowerment of women’s voices and expressiveness (and that means ALL women), and attention to their experience.