Analytic & pragmatist · c. 1945 – 1970
Ordinary language philosophy
Philosophical puzzles arise when words are taken out of their everyday use; looking closely at how language is actually used dissolves them.
What do our words mean in the way we actually use them?
Wittgenstein, back in Cambridge from 1929, came to reject the picture of language in his own Tractatus. After 1945, Oxford philosophers such as Gilbert Ryle and J. L. Austin, equally wary of ideal logical languages, turned to the fine grain of everyday speech.
The meaning of a word is its use within a practice (a “language-game”), not an object it stands for. Philosophers create problems, such as whether the mind is a ghostly thing inside the body, by stretching words beyond the contexts that give them sense. Map the actual uses, and the problem often disappears.
- The meaning of a word is its use in a form of life.
- Many philosophical problems are confusions of language.
- Speaking is doing: utterances are actions.
It gave us speech-act theory, developed by Austin and then Searle, shaped linguistic pragmatics, and left philosophy with a lasting habit of attending carefully to usage.
Thinkers
1889–1951Ludwig WittgensteinViennese-born Cambridge philosopher who overturned his own first philosophy1900–1976Gilbert RyleOxford philosopher who mocked the “ghost in the machine”1911–1960J. L. AustinOxford philosopher of language who founded speech-act theoryKey texts
Where it came from
Reacted againstEarly analytic philosophyThe later Wittgenstein attacked the Tractatus’s own idea that language has a single hidden logical form.Reacted against
Logical positivism (Vienna Circle)Oxford philosophers rejected the positivists’ ideal logical language and found philosophy’s material in the ordinary speech the positivists wanted to reform.
What it led to
Borrowed byCritical theory (Frankfurt School)Habermas built his theory of communicative action on Austin’s and Searle’s speech-act theory.Borrowed by
Feminist philosophyButler’s “performativity” adapts Austin’s idea that some utterances do what they say.Carried on by
Analytic philosophy of mindRyle’s attack on the “ghost in the machine” cleared the ground, and his student Dennett carried the project forward.