The In Our Time episode that we listened to this Sunday was quite a chewy one for first thing in the morning! Its subject was Ordinary Language Philosophy which is a school of philosophical thought that dominated the subject during the first couple of decades after the Second World War. It then fell out of favour in the 1970s, but may be making something of a comeback now. The three experts who talked about it on the programme were Stephen Mulhall (University of Oxford), Ray Monk (University of Southampton) and Julia Tanney (University of Kent).
Ordinary Language Philosophy is a strand of Analytical Philosophy which developed in opposition to the idea that in order to do analytic philosophy you need to formalise the language used. Like the rest of analytic philosophy it grew out of the work of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell on defining what a number is. This school of philosophy (and mathematics) took the stance that to properly understanding a word you needed to look at it in its context rather than in isolation, and they used formal logic to talk about the underlying structures of sentences. This was also covered in the In Our Time episode about Russell which I listened to & wrote about a year ago.
Ordinary Language philosophers took the idea of context further, saying that studying sentences in isolation doesn’t give you enough context to understand their meaning. “The apple is red” means something different when you’re saying it because your eyesight is being tested or when you’re saying it because you hate green apples but someone has thoughtfully given you a red one. Tanney also gave a third example of context that felt much more clumsy – if you’re talking about colours for painting then you could be defining red by the apple (but you wouldn’t say that exact sentence so I think the analogy breaks here).
The main thrust of Ordinary Language Philosophy was a desire to bring philosophy back to reality. The members of this movement felt that a lot of philosophical problems could be shown to not be problems at all if you were willing to consider how words were actually used in their everyday contexts. The example they talked about on the programme was Socrates desire to think about questions like “what is truth?”. In his dialogues the other person would try and answer the question by talking about examples of truth, but Socrates would want the essence of truth not examples. And Ordinary Language Philosophy took the view that this was the wrong way to go about it – considering examples of truth in their real world contexts is how you build up an understanding of what “truth” is.
The three main thinkers that they talked about on the programme were Ludwig Wittgenstein, J L Austin and Gilbert Ryle. Originally Wittgenstein had agreed with Bertrand Russell that formal logic and formalisation of language was necessary to undertake philosophy, but he returned to these ideas in the 1930s in Cambridge and changed his mind becoming one of the main proponents of Ordinary Language Philosophy. Ryle and Austin were both at Oxford, and another name for this philosophical movement is Oxford Philosophy. At the time Oxford was one of the main centres of philosophical thought in the Western world – but oddly they said on the programme that Ryle and Austin didn’t really work in collaboration or discuss their ideas with each other.
The example of the sort of work that these philosophers were doing that’s stuck in my mind from the programme is Austin’s work on the nuances of excuses – which he was interested in from a moral philosophy point of view. He was interested in the difference between “it was a mistake” and “it was an accident” – at first glance you might think these are roughly equivalent, but there’s actually a significant difference in agency between the two excuses. If you say something was a mistake you are accepting responsibility for it, but if you say it was an accident then it’s something external to yourself that went wrong. So the excuses represent different moral statuses and different levels of culpability. The story Austin used to illustrate the difference was re-told by Mulhall – imagine you and your neighbour both have a donkey and you graze these donkeys together on common land. One day you decide that you don’t want a donkey any more and so go to the common to shoot it. You carefully aim, and fire but once you get to the donkey you’re horrified to discover that the donkey you’ve shot is your neighbour’s donkey! So when you go to your neighbour with his donkey’s corpse you say “I’m sorry, it was a mistake”. But if instead you’d aimed at the right donkey, but just as you fired the donkeys moved and the wrong donkey got hit by the bullet, then you’d say to your neighbour “I’m sorry, it was an accident”.
They ended the programme by discussing the “death” of Ordinary Language Philosophy in the 1970s. Tanney and Mulhall seemed to think that this was premature – the criticisms weren’t so great as to make the philosophy worthless, and Tanney in particular regarded herself as a part of that school of thought. And she was keen to stress that she felt it should become a significant line of thought again. Monk seemed a little more on the critical side, although he didn’t actually outright say one way or the other.