In Our Time - Ordinary Language Philosophy

Episode Date: November 7, 2013

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Ordinary Language Philosophy, a school of thought which emerged in Oxford in the years following World War II. With its roots in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ordinary Language Philosophy is concerned with the meanings of words as used in everyday speech. Its adherents believed that many philosophical problems were created by the misuse of words, and that if such 'ordinary language' were correctly analysed, such problems would disappear. Philosophers associated with the school include some of the most distinguished British thinkers of the twentieth century, such as Gilbert Ryle and JL Austin.With:Stephen Mulhall Professor of Philosophy at New College, OxfordRay Monk Professor of Philosophy at the University of SouthamptonJulia Tanney Reader in Philosophy of Mind at the University of KentProducer: Thomas Morris.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time. For more details about in our time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in the years after the Second World War, a small group of British philosophers emerged who were obsessed with a language,

inspired by the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Austrian genius, who had dominated British philosophers since the 1920s, They argued that the only way to analyze philosophical problems was by analyzing language. Over the next 20 years, thinkers including Jail Austin and Gilbert Ryle, turned their attention to what became called ordinary language. They argued that most philosophical problems are caused by ambiguities and our use of words and that these problems would disappear, if only we could understand in use language more rigorously.

The heyday, but also became known as the Oxford philosophy, as Oxford philosophy, lasted only 20 years, but left a lasting impression. We need to discuss ordinary language philosophy and his influences are Stephen Mulhall, Professor of Philosophy at New College Oxford, Ray Monk, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton, and Julia Taney, reader in Philosophy of Mind at the University of Kent. Stephen Mulhall, would you begin by giving us a bit more of an idea of what ordinary language philosophy is about, the sort of questions it examines? Sure, well, as you were saying, it really was the dominant mode in British philosophy. from the 30s when it took root in Cambridge and then in Oxford until probably the 1970s, I think. And I think the best way of understanding it

is really as a kind of late phase in the history of the analytical tradition in philosophy, which began at the beginning of the 20th century. And it resembles the earlier phases in that tradition, in that it takes its primary business to be the clarification of the nature and the structure of our means of representing reality. And the assumption is that if we do, engage in that clarificatory job, we'll actually discover something about the nature of that

reality. But what we also discover, and this is certainly another continuity with the whole of the analytical tradition, is that philosophical propositions turn out not to be mistaken, but genuine attempts to capture that reality, but turn out to be nonsensical or empty. So you get a radically fundamental critique of philosophy as an enterprise. It has to lose its metaphysical aspirations, and its main business becomes that of curbing its own tendency towards metaphysical statements. But where ordinary language philosophy differed from its predecessors in that tradition was that it didn't think that in order to engage in this clarificatory process, you had to employ a formal language, the resources of modern logic. Rather, all you had to do was deploy what the knowledge base that any competent speaker of the language already has, simply by virtue of being a competent speaker.

You stick with the overt grammar of everyday discourse, the normal ways in which we use language. And I think one of the reasons why they were so confident that that medium was going to suffice for their purposes, was that they had a radically different view of what language was. from their analytical predecessors. They understood their predecessors as viewing the meaningfulness of language as essentially a matter of it being a system of propositions that corresponded or failed to correspond to reality.

What they tried to substitute in place of that conception was a view of the meaningfulness of words and sentences as being primarily determined by the ways in which they were put to use in our practical activity and the role they played in the broader context of our form of life. You've used the word radical once or twice. Was this the whole thing, the 20th century adventure

and then taken up with the people we're going to talk about? Would you describe that as radical in the history of Western philosophy? In some ways, yes. It was radical if one takes the immediate historical context because the whole of the analytical tradition was in effect founded by means of what's called the linguistic term. The idea that the best way of understanding not just the nature of reality, but the nature of thought

and any other means of representing reality was to look at the way we talk about it, the modes of our discourse about reality. And that was a very significant break with the kind of Hegelian idealist project that was dominant in Cambridge and Oxford at the time. On the other hand, if you go much further back and you look at Socrates,

the founder of the whole subject, his medium for philosophical inquiry was conversation with people he happened to meet in the Agarar. So in that sense, it's an entirely authentic continuation of philosophy's origins. Sorry, can you give us a brief roundup of those who were involved in this enterprise, was it unified enough to be called a movement?

In the case of the ordinary language phase of analytical philosophy, I suppose there were three major figures. because Wittgenstein was certainly right at the heart of the whole enterprise. And he was, as it were, coming back into the business of philosophy in order to criticise with increasing radicalness his earlier contribution. He was one of the major figures in the first phase of analytical philosophy in Cambridge. And so ordinary language philosophy emerged in large part as a kind of self-criticism by Wittgenstein. But in Oxford, there were two equally significant figures,

Gilbert Ryle, who was an authoritative figure in Oxford for a very long period of time, and J.L. Austin, who began as a philosopher in the 1930s, but really came into his own and became extremely influential in the post-war period. Can I turn to you now, Raymond, B. Can we go back a little? The seed of ordinary language philosophy was shown in the late 19th century. Can you describe how that happened and who were responsible there? Sure. Well, as Stephen said, what characterises the tradition of analytic philosophy is a concern with language. And the phrase that's often used in this respect is the linguistic turn.

Philosophy, it said, took a linguistic turn that characterized it then for the 20th century. And it's an oddity of the analytic tradition that its origins lie not in the work of a philosopher, but in the work of a mathematician. This is Gottlob Frege, who was professor of mathematics at Jena University in Germany. and he wrote a book, he published in 1884 called The Foundations of Arithmetic, and it's there, according to Michael Dummett, that the linguistic turn is made, and Dummett has been even more specific than that. The book consists of numbered paragraphs, which was a technique that Wittgenstein would later use, and Dummett has said that in paragraph 62 of this book, we see the linguistic turn being made.

So what does Frege do in paragraph 62? Well, he begins the book with the question, what is number? And Frege says, it's a scandal of mathematics that we, you know, we've had thousands of years of the history of mathematics, and nobody yet has produced a satisfying answer to the question, what is a number? What is a number? Sorry, what is a number? Yeah, you're right. Yeah, I mean, I take those as a bit. I mean, slow, right?

Okay. So, so, you know, what are these things, numbers? And he begins the book with, by rejecting some, you know, answers that have been put forward. by previous philosophers. Then in paragraph 62, he makes this move. He says, well, we shouldn't seek to answer the question what is numbered directly. Rather, we should replace that question

with another question which we stand some hope of answering, which is, what is the meaning of a sentence that contains a number word? And so he's substituting, as it were, a metaphysical question for a question about language. So now it becomes how to analyze sentences that contain number words. And at this point, he invokes a principle that he announced right at the beginning of the book, which has since become known as Frege's context principle, which says, don't look for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a sentence.

And the sentence he chooses quite arbitrarily in a way is, the king's carriage was pulled by four horses. And that sentence has the word four in it. And Frege says, instead of trying to understand what the word four means in isolation, we should take that whole sentence and try to understand. that and then he gives a theory of that, the details of which needn't concern us, I don't think, but he gives a theory of the meaning of sentences that contain number words,

which then allow him to develop a completely general definition of number. Is there any way you can briskly tell us how? Okay, I'll have a go. All right, so the sentence that he chooses is that the king's carriage was pulled by four horses. And he says, you know, we've got to analyze that sentence. and he analyzes that sentence as what he calls an assertion about a concept. The concept is a horse that pulls the king's carriage.

And what he says that sentence is saying is that the number four belongs to that concept. And so now he says now his task is to give a general theory about what it is to say that a number belongs to a concept. And that's what he goes on to do. How was this taken up? And it obviously was taken up. We're talking about it almost as a start. point. And what was the dynamic in its early development?

Okay, it's an interesting dynamic in a way because nobody took much notice of this book when it was first published in 1884 and didn't really until the turn of the 20th century. And the first person to really understand it was Bertrand Russell, who had independently been working on very similar lines. So Russell also, Russell's place in this whole history is to inspire the subsequent generation at King's. and to change the nature of philosophy as it's practiced in the UK.

And so Russell puts logic right at the heart of philosophy. And in many cases, when he's trying to understand logic, what he does is analyse language. Julia Taney, there's a three-generational thing almost, what Ray Monk is talking about and Steve indicated. And then we come on to logical positivism and then come. There's intermingling and overlapping going on between those involved. Wittgenstein is involved twice and so and so forth. But after what has been described came the logical positivists centered on Vienna.

How did they take on what Stephen and Riemann have said? Okay, well, they started by loving the distinction between sense and nonsense. So they wanted to make use of this distinction that in fact Russell, I think, started. they had a political agenda, they had an empiricist agenda. They wanted to get rid of statements that were metaphysical or mystical or theological, and they wanted to try to set constraints on what counted as being a meaningful thing to say. So they used, in fact, the formal logic that was being developed by Frege and Russell as a tool in which to constrain what would count as meaningful

together with their empiricist agenda, which is their famous principle, of verifiability, verification. So the idea that they took on was that a statement is meaningful if it can be logically constructed or it is a statement which is true in virtue of the meaning of the words alone or true in virtue of the meaning of the words

in addition to the way the world is, where the way the world is is now subject to verification by observation, experience or experiment. Is for an example, can give us of that? Yeah. So for example, my dog, solitre. My dog is a mammal, is something that I don't need to move outside of my armchair here to guarantee the truth of. So people had the sense that, well, it has something to do with the meaning of the words dog and mammal. But my dog is feisty, is something where you would actually want to, that could be something that you could verify

within a few seconds of observing him. And where did that distinction take them? Well, that distinction, what they tried to do with that was they tried to set constraints on what they would be able to say and knock out all the things that people were saying that they didn't like. And it turns out that that constraint, and the idea was to try to get some kind of rigor and a scientific approach, a scientific conception of philosophy.

And that's going to be the thing that becomes very much disputed now by the ordinary language philosophers. we moved to them. They were knocking out things that they didn't approve of. We became part of the fun, didn't it? Can you just give us some idea of the knocking out that they did? Well, I think it was Heidegger who said nothing

Nuths, is that right? Nothing what? Nothing Noths. It's easier to say in German. Not much. That's an example. You couldn't really talk about aesthetics. You couldn't talk about ethics. You weren't allowed to talk about anything that wasn't verifiable. It was a scientific

fact is verifiable. It's not that you couldn't talk about it, but that you needed to be able to show, and by the way, mental, anything having to do with the mind. So Ray believes that I'm talking about ordinary language philosophy now was something that was very suspect to them. Because something talking about the mind,

a belief of Ray's, is not something that's on the face of it verifiable. So it was okay, but only as long as you can reconstruct it in this way with using logic and using translatability or synonymy of meanings to come up with something that could be then verified. So that was a whole project that continues to this day.

Are you still using a special language, a philosophical language at this stage in the development, before we come to ordinary language? What they are doing is using a system of... Yes, they're using the formal structure of the logicians, but they're also homing in on things like what they count as observable and different philosophers from the district.

from the tradition counted different things as observable. How most strikingly did ordinary language philosophy which you call it differ from logical positivism? Right. So the ordinary language philosophers were not impressed by this so-called scientific conception of the world. I don't think they thought there was such a thing as the scientific conception. And as Stephen said at the beginning, they were also became quite suspicious of the idea that

what could be said meaningfully is something that could fit into the tight constraints of a formal logical system. More interestingly still, they actually start to break down this distinction between statements that are analytic or supposedly true in virtue of the meaning of the words alone and the way the world is independently of our conceptual or linguistic resources. And we'll see later how that distinction starts to break down with the ordinary language. language philosophers. Stephen Mulhall, can we take, can we dive into what we call it an ordinary language philosophy

now? Would you clarify, let's start with the word ordinary? Yeah, well, one of the problems with this label is that it wasn't as if it was all, as it were explicitly agreed upon by those who were countered as members of the movement. We were speculating about whether or not it was in fact coined by the people who had various suspicions about it. But anyway, one of the problems with the label is exactly how you're supposed to take the term ordinary in the phrase ordinary language philosophy. It doesn't mean ordinary language as

opposed to extraordinary or unusual language. It doesn't mean ordinary as opposed to technical or specialized. These philosophers had no objection whatever to the idea of physicists establishing their own particular terminology in order to achieve the purposes they might have. The same with mathematics and so on and so forth. If anything, I think ordinary, contrasts with two things. One is transcriptions of language into a formal calculus. The contrast term there is what you might call

a formal or an artificial language. They want to talk about language as it's lived, as it's employed in the context of everyday life. The second contrast, I think, is probably between the ordinary and what you might call the metaphysical. I think all of these philosophers regard a certain mode of philosophical discourse

where philosophers think they're penetrating to the essence of some aspect of reality as deeply suspicious as prone to turn into emptiness or nonsense and so what they want to do is to bring the philosopher back from a context in which they think

they're saying something deeply meaningful and in fact not succeeding in saying anything at all back to the ordinary everyday contexts in which the words they're using actually have a concrete, specific significant sense. So ordinary language isn't the philosophy, it's a way to describe the philosophy. It's a way to describe the philosophy, but as it were, it's partly an attempt to capture the

medium through which one does one's philosophical work. The thought is, if you want to get clear about the nature of a particular phenomenon that might be causing philosophical trouble, the way to do that is to remind yourself of how we ordinarily employ the terms that refer to that phenomenon. And this, Ray Monk, as I understand it, He saidgenstein underpins this enterprise. One of the things he says, in many cases, the meaning of a word is the use to which it is put. Insofar as he had a theory,

that seems to be the sort of central theory. That's right. And I mean, he says several times in philosophical investigations, which is his later work, that what he's trying to do is get away from the way philosophers have tended to look at words. And, you know, he says, you know, philosophers going right back to Plato So in a platonic dialogue, you might have a question, what is truth, what is knowledge,

and the idea here is that the philosopher is going to look for the essence of truth or the essence of knowledge. And typically in one of those dialogues, Socrates will ask somebody who claims to know, and that somebody will give examples of truth or knowledge or whatever, and Socrates will say, no, I don't want examples, I want the essence. And so Wittgenstein in philosophical investigation says the key to unraveling these difficulties, the sort of cramps, as he described it, that we get into in philosophy, is to give up that idea of essence and replace it with a look at how we just use words

like truth and knowledge and mind and all. How we use those words in what he calls the form of life, you know, in the stream of life. The job that they do. Sorry? The job that they do. The job that they do and how we actually use them rather than thinking, you know,

in a sort of a priori kind of way, that there is going to be something, some essence to be found by the philosopher that hasn't been found by other people. And Julia Tani, he, Wittgenstein, put forward the idea of language games, which was very influential. What did he mean by language games? And where is this taking us in this ordinary language philosophy? Well, it helps to start out with the idea Ray talked about before of Frege's when he said that you understand the meaning of a number by looking at a sentence in which the word number appears.

Logicians took sentence to mean something. that was out there quite independently as if it was an inscription on a blackboard. And they wondered if they started to have a view about what those sentences understood on their own did. And their primary view was that they were used to describe some matter of fact or state of affairs in the world and that the constituent words were used to name properties, events, objects in the world. Now, what happens with the introduction of a language game is, Wittgenstein says, I'm using this expression in order to emphasize that if you want to understand language, you need to understand speaking a language. And speaking a language is part of, is an activity. It's a part of, it's a form of life. So if you want to understand the meaning of our expressions,

you can't really look at them as if they're just inscriptions on the blackboard where they keep their significance across different kinds of language games or different circumstances of employment. You can't tell, for example, even if something looks like a description, say the apple is red, you don't know that that's a description unless you know what it is I'm saying it, in what circumstances I'm saying it. I might be using it as a description because my doctor is testing my eyes,

but I might be delighted at your present because you've always been giving me green apples before, and I hate green apples, and now I'm expressing my delight in your thoughtfulness. Or I could be saying to, you know, we're going to paint our living room together. I want a certain kind of red. What kind of red do you want? Well, I want the apple is red. So I'm stipulating what's to count as red. In those other cases, they're no longer descriptions.

They've got different ways of evaluating them. And then to take it even further, we don't even know what's going to count as red until we know what it is that we're doing with that particular sentence. Does the fact that it's dyed red matter? Well, it doesn't matter if you're testing my eyes. It does matter if you're giving me a present, right?

So all of a sudden, these kind of, what Royall calls, elasticity of significance or inflections of meaning come into the very get seen in the very acts or activities in which we we speak the language and they can't be understood as logicians thought before independently of their circumstances of use. You wanted to come in soon. I was just going to say that in a sense the language game idea and the broader idea of the form of life as the context within which words have meaning or down is a certain kind of extension or development of Frego's context principle. It's just that the

idea of what the context is that does the constitutive work has been refocused. And the fundamental impact that it has in the first instance is it that it reveals the diversity and the heterogeneity of language use. Ray was talking earlier about Socrates wanting the essence of truth or the essence of knowledge. But what happens when you actually ask yourself how you use these terms is that you use them in an unending range of different ways according to context and purpose. So a kind of really fundamental philosophical impulse towards looking for unity, towards looking for a kind of systematic, simple account of a given phenomenon, is being fundamentally resisted by this change of method.

And can you tell us about, we haven't mentioned Austin so far here, and he died comparatively young Oxford philosopher, and he was a great influence there. If anybody could be called the ordinary language. It was he. There was an essay called a plea for excuses. Can you tell us why that was influential? It was influential as a kind of exemplary piece of ordinary language analysis.

What interested, Austin, in that essay, was the various ways in which we tried to defend ourselves against shortcomings in our actions. The thought is that excuses are what we proffer when we're willing to acknowledge that we've done something reprehensible, but we want to try and mitigate or perhaps entirely deny our responsibility for doing that action. So, for example, we might say that we've done something, we did it by accident or by mistake or unwittingly or unintentionally or clumsily or tactlessly. And so apparently endlessly on.

And Austin was just fascinated by the range and diversity of those possible modes of making excuses for oneself. But that was not just because, as it were, he was interested in diversity. It was because he thought that the specific weight of each kind of excuse was deeply significant. So, for example, we might think, if we aren't given time to reflect, that saying that we did something by accident and saying that we did it by mistake, there's pretty much no significant difference between those terms. And Austin told the really famous story about a donkey to try. Did he invent it, wrong?

It doesn't really matter anyway. As far as I know, he did, it's just a footnote. I want to hear the story about the donkey again. Okay. I have a donkey. You have a donkey. They're greys in the same field. One day I conceive a dislike of my animal.

So I take my gun to the field, draw a bead on it, shoot it. The beast falls in its tracks. I go up to examine the body, and I discover to my horror that it was your donkey. So when I turn up on your doorstep with its remains in my arms, what do I say? Do I say, I'm terribly sorry? I did that by accident or by mistake. Now, suppose I tell the same story up to the point where I draw a bead on the animal. Just as I pull the trigger, the beasts move, and to my horror, I shoot your donkey instead of mine.

Now, I'm back on the doorstep with the corpse in my arms. Do I say, I did that by accident or by mistake? Austin's claim is that in the first case what you did was a mistake in the second case it was an accident because in the first case Where does that take us? Well, first of all it gets us to see

that the distinction that's marked in ordinary language is a real distinction in order to imagine the context in which we employ the term I have to tell the story in two different ways the second thing is that when I'm on the doorstep I'm in a situation where I need to account for myself morally.

And the kind of story I can tell to mitigate what I've done and the kind of blame that's going to be directed at me by you depends on whether an accident befell me, something outside my control led to the death of your donkey, or whether I was responsible for misidentifying the donkey I shot in the field. So what this kind of reticulated field of excuses shows is, moral significance. Austin held the chair,

the White's chair, in moral philosophy at Oxford. This was an exercise in moral philosophy. Can you just give us some idea, Raymond, of the others at Oxford at the time? We've called it an Oxford, I think. We've had Wittgen's, we've had Austin, really, so forth, and we're coming to Ryle.

Were there quite a few of them? Did they talk, did they meet each other on the terms in which this conversation is taken place? Well, I mean, another very significant figure is P. F. Strelson, Peter Strelson, who in the 50s was widely regarded as, you know, possibly the greatest and most influential of the Oxford philosophers. Now, Strawson's work was quite different to both Riles and Austens. He had no problem describing himself as a metaphysician.

He described himself as a descriptive metaphysician. What he was trying to describe was our fundamental conceptual scheme. But crucially, I think, Straussen and most of the others did not regard themselves as being members of a coherent and cohesive school of philosophy. But there was a sense, I think, in those days, of Oxford as the philosophical centre in the world. And they did a series of radio broadcasts, which were published under the heading,

The Revolution in Philosophy. And I think they all felt that they were at the heart of what was happening. And indeed, you know, that was widely perceived. Other philosophers came, John Searle came from America. In those days, people went from America to Oxford to learn at the feet of Strausson, and Ryle and Austin and so on. Let's talk about Ryle in this context then, Julia Taney.

Can you tell us how, well, fitting in is not quite the right word, is it? But what did he bring to this feast of ordinary language philosophy? He's quite interesting because he was there at the very beginning. He read the tractatus, Wittgenstein's early work as a young philosopher. And he seemed to see where it was going and produced some of the work now that's very much associated with Wittgenstein. the idea that there is something like systematic ambiguity in our expressions and that they change ever so slightly depending on the context

and that certain kinds of expressions are misleading. They look like they're doing one thing on the face of it, grammatically speaking, but they might, when we look at them in the context, be doing something else, he started producing these ideas as early as 1932. And this is, you know, when Wittgenstein is not producing, publishing his ideas, He's not talking to a lot of people about them outside of Cambridge. And at the same time, Ryle tells us that although he and Austin were colleagues, and they sat on committees together, they didn't discuss philosophy together. And in fact, members of staff were actually banned from Austin's Saturday morning discussion groups where you have this generation of philosophers learning from Austin.

So he only found out when they shared students what Austin was doing. But it was almost as if something was in the air because I... Well, what was really big in the air for Ryle? Sorry to be so crude. It was this idea, and he calls it conceptual cartography, that the way to understand, if you want, meanings or understand how language works, is to look at the variations as they're employed. within the particular contexts.

And then you get, if you get, if you see that what you're doing is you might be making mishandling some of these expressions, because we, if they're, we can talk about mishandling them or handling them in a good way, you might see that in certain cases we're, we're mishandling it because it's true to say about it, something in this context, but not in another context, for example. You can imply or infer things or you can presuppose things. So the logical threads of an expression might change from one context to the next. And he was very famous for showing then that was the philosophical logic behind the idea, which he spelled out in his written work.

But then he famously put some of this philosophical logic to work when he wrote the concept of mind. And he tried to show how a lot of what's called the Cartesian conception of philosophy of mind results in these kind of misuses of language, especially when we talk about the mental, for example. Stephen Mulhall, I suspect that a few people listening to this program might think that, well, where are the big ideas? How does ordinary language philosophy get to the big ideas that we grew up to expect from philosophy,

telling us how the world works, why it's here, what to do and so on? Well, I think part, one of the problems that order language philosophers saw in the way philosophy had developed historically, was that presupposition that there were big ideas to pursue and hunt down and find the essence of. Now, that said, some ordinary language philosophers had more systematic aspirations than others. So Strausson, for example, was someone who was quite happy to do a certain kind of conceptual cartography where fundamental or basic categories that structured a great deal of the other kind of more diverse talk that we engage in were to be identified and laid out before us. And of course,

you know, I was talking about shooting donkeys and that sounds like an immensely local and concrete kind of a problem to worry about. But part of what Austin is trying to bring out by means of this endlessly detailed discussion is a much more general perception of the way in which human beings as agents are vulnerable to the way things go in the world. You know, we have a very strong tendency to try and think of ourselves as if our own essence resides in an aspect of ourselves that's immune to the contingencies and causalities of the world. But if you actually pay attention to the sheer range and pervasiveness of the ways in which we keep on having to justify ourselves because we go wrong in an apparently endless range of ways, what you get is

a completely different conception of agency as the kind of thing that makes us vulnerable to vicissitudes of all kinds. So you can draw more general morals. Raymunk, is the presence of Wittgenstein constantly felt among these people? Yes, I think constantly. More importantly, the words

of Wittgenstein. Yeah, and I think that the idea that a fruitful method in philosophy would be to look at how language is actually used and to insist on placing language in a context rather than looking at just...

I mean, Wittgenstein's view in his later work was that we, we in philosophy, have been misled by the practice of logic, because what logic is interested in is a very tiny part of language, which is that part that we use to say things that are true or false propositions. And Wittgenstein, in the investigation,

says, well, you know, how many different types of sentence are there? He lists, you know, saying something, ordering something, and questioning something, which is what he'd said in the investigation. the tractatus. In the investigations, he corrects that by saying there are countless different types of sentence in language. And he thought of using as a motto for the investigations, Kent's remark in Shakespeare's King Lear, I'll teach you differences. And that had a pervasive influence at Oxford at the time, especially I think in the work inspired by Austin, that the

philosopher's task is to make fine distinctions not to try and pretend that everything is really the same. Where did that leave? abstraction, Julia Taney. The attractions that we were boomingly brought up with, thinking those go the great thinkers, there go the great thinkers. That's right. And so we, I mean, as philosophers,

we tell our students that what we do in philosophy is to study knowledge or equality or the good or the mind. And how do you study it? Well, we don't want to study it. And this is

Ryle talking, we don't want to study them like their coins in a museum detached from their natural transactions, because there isn't something called the concept of mind or equality out there for people to study as if they're seeing something like a platonic form, although people do talk that way. The only sense that's to be made of studying knowledge is to look at the many various kinds of things we do with the affiliated expressions, such as I know I think I knew. She thought she knew, but she was wrong, and see what kinds of circumstances we use those in. And when we do actually look at some of those real-life examples, this is where the ordinary comes in, the ordinary or stock use of these well-known expressions and how when they're well-handled, as opposed to mishandled, we actually see that a lot of these philosophical problems, like problems about skepticism disappear, or they get dissolved. They don't require these great, great answers. that we were thinking that we were needed. Did you say that you wanted to reconceptualize the idea of concepts?

Well, so what... Steven's nodding, thank goodness. So, Ryle actually came out with the idea that there's something that he thought it was a movement. It was called it the Cambridge transformation of the conception of concepts, which it unfortunately hasn't happened, but the idea is that concepts, like I said,

don't name something out there. Concepts are abstractions from, from full sentences in use, and they're sort of double abstractions, because first you get sentences in use, and then you could form maybe something said in different languages so that they have the same use in different languages. So we're not now just talking about sentences, call those the proposition or what is said.

And then to understand the contribution of the individual words, in other words, the concepts, you have to see abstract those again from the use of the sentences. So concepts are not something out there in isolated splendor. The only sense to be made of these concepts is to see how they're abstracted from the sentences and use. Stephen Mulholl, ordinary language philosophy came in for a lot of criticism at the time and appeared to die, not a bit of it, to appear to die the death and be taken over and now being left in the wilderness of history in some way.

Is there any truth in that? Yes, there is. So will you tell us how it happened? Well, there's some truth in that. By the time of the 1970s, there were major incursions into this mode of doing philosophy in Britain from America. And although there was a great deal of, as it were, rather misdirected and superficial criticism of what was actually going on in the work of these thinkers, I think there were probably two more serious, as it were, professional worries about it. one had to do with a distinction that Wittgenstein certainly seems to rely on between the rules of a language game and the moves that one makes in the language game. And certain arguments of an American philosopher named Quine were felt to put that under a great deal of pressure.

Equally fundamentally, the idea that meaning and use had to be thought of as internally related, that was also subject to a great deal of pressure. in fact, in a tremendous irony, by a certain kind of misunderstanding of work that Austin did around the idea of speech act theory. That was actually put to a very un-Austinian use to argue that, in fact, we need to keep meaning and use much more separate than ordinary language philosophers were willing to do. I don't think either of those arguments were decisive, and a lot of ordinary language philosophers provided quite a lot of systematic rebuttals of them, but nevertheless that made a big impact on the profession.

And it could be said, Raymong, to have gone into decline what we are called awarding language philosophy. Yes, I think so. And to be replaced by a different way of doing philosophy that seeks precisely what those philosophers didn't, which is an overarching general theory. So theory came back? Theory came back.

When I was at Oxford as a graduate student in the early 80s, everybody was talking about Davidson, because Davidson had a general theory of meaning and I would say the majority of PhDs that were being done in philosophy in those days were being written on Davidson and there was very little trace of the work of Austin, for example.

As I understand it from what I've read what you put down in Julian Italian, you think this is, they will come back. Their dismissal was unfair. We are coming back. We are coming back. Oh, there, right. Go on, lead the charge.

Yes, we are. coming back. The microphone is yours. Stephen is right that a lot of the arguments were based on misunderstandings. It's not easy to interpret Wittgenstein after all. He writes in these little short phrases. Ryle's philosophical logic is hardly read. It's now been republished so people can read it and see what he was up to. But what they tended to do was look at the concept of mind and just try to fit him into the logical positivist or empiricist mold. And that's was a mistake. And now people are rereading Austin so that they're not reading them through the eyes, for example, of John Searle. So there are some of us who are getting graduate students,

I'm raising my fist up in the air, who are trying to lead a comeback for these philosophers. And what are the odds then, Stephen? Well, you should never lose hope. You know, after all, truth is what we're after. And if this is where truth resides, I have faith that it will out. Do you think that it touched on sufficient truth? It's needed the end of the programme, to survive, that it will survive, despite the vagus of fashion. I very much hope so. I think there really is a new generation of people reading Wittgenstein, reading Austin, in ways that avoid the misapprehensions that led to that premature obituary.

Yes. Well, thank you all very much indeed. Thank you, Julia Talley. Good luck with your crusade. Stephen Mulhall, Ray Monk. And next week we'll be talking about Shakespeare's play, The Tempest, which many people think was the last play. He wrote Caliban, Prospero, Trinculo, Wino Trinculo well.

Thanks for listening. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programmes to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.co.ukuk slash Radio 4.