School of thought

Ordinary Language Philosophy

Movement

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Classification

Period
c. 1945-1970 CE
Regions
europe
Domains
Philosophy of Language , Logic

Overview

Ordinary Language Philosophy held that many traditional philosophical problems arise from misuses of everyday language — not from deep metaphysical puzzles but from philosophers unwittingly twisting words away from their normal functions. Rather than constructing ideal formal languages (as the logical positivists proposed), Austin, Ryle, and others argued that careful attention to how words actually work in ordinary contexts dissolves or transforms the problems.

Key ideas

  • Speech Acts: Austin showed that language does not merely describe the world — it acts upon it. 'I promise,' 'I pronounce you married,' and 'I bet you' are performative utterances that accomplish something in their very saying, not statements that are true or false.
  • Category Mistakes: Ryle argued that the mind-body problem rests on a category mistake — treating 'the mind' as if it were a thing of the same logical type as 'the body.' Asking where the mind is, is like asking where the university is after being shown all its buildings.
  • Therapeutic Dissolution: Following the later Wittgenstein's insight that philosophical problems are often 'bewitchments' of language, ordinary language philosophers aimed not to solve traditional problems but to show them to be illusions born of linguistic confusion.

Key figures

J.L. Austin · Gilbert Ryle · P.F. Strawson · John Wisdom

Methods used

Positions held

Influenced by

Reacts to

  • Logical Positivism

    Against the positivists' project of an ideal formal language, Austin and Ryle argued that ordinary language works well and that forcing it into a logical calculus creates the very problems it claims to solve.

References