“Nobody would really talk that way!”: the critical project in contemporary ordinary language philosophy

Abstract

This paper defends a challenge, inspired by arguments drawn from contemporary ordinary language philosophy and grounded in experimental data, to certain forms of standard philosophical practice. The challenge is inspired by contemporary philosophers who describe themselves as practicing "ordinary language philosophy". Contemporary ordinary language philosophy can be divided into constructive and critical approaches. The critical approach to contemporary ordinary language philosophy has been forcefully developed by Avner Baz, who attempts to show that a substantial chunk of contemporary philosophy is fundamentally misguided. I describe Baz's project and argue that while there is reason to be skeptical of its radical conclusion, it conveys an important truth about discontinuities between ordinary uses of philosophically significant expressions ("know", e.g.) and their use in philosophical thought experiments. I discuss some evidence from experimental psychology and behavioral economics indicating that there is a risk of overlooking important aspects of meaning or misinterpreting experimental results by focusing only on abstract experimental scenarios, rather than employing more diverse and more ecologically valid experimental designs. I conclude by presenting a revised version of the critical argument from ordinary language. Thanks to Emma Borg, Wesley Buckwalter, Kathryn Francis, members of the CCR summer seminar at the University of Reading, participants at the CCCOM Workshop on Communication and Understanding at the University of Stockholm, and three anonymous referees for very helpful comments on versions of this paper. Thanks to Robert Baron, Herb Clark, and Kristen Syrett for permission to reprint figures.

Investigative Ordinary Language Philosophy

“…14 It is practised by philosophers who start their inquiries in bad faith, with a preconceived 9 Malcolm (1951, p. 340). 10 More recently, Nat Hansen (2014Hansen ( , 2020 has developed the notion underpinning SOLP into what he terms a modest branch of the critical project in ordinary language philosophy, particularly as seen in the work of Avner Baz (2012). Hansen suggests that one does not have to say that anything which violates ordinary language is false or nonsense, but merely that one should challenge philosophically significant expressions that ignore how people actually talk to one another.…”

In defense of ordinary language philosophy

“…4 We are not the first to draw attention to this in the context of ordinary language philosophy. See Hansen 2014and 2020and Ludlow 1999. Not all epistemologists are concerned with ordinary language.…”

“…For an overview, see Parker-Ryan 2012. Relevant also is the so-called contemporary ordinary language philosophy (Hansen 2014(Hansen , 2020. This includes work in experimental philosophy, but also mainstream subdisciplines of contemporary philosophy, including ones discussed below.…”

Categorías emergentes de las habilidades retóricas y argumentativas en derechos de petición

“…Los actos comunicativos entre los seres humanos son cada vez más complejos (Sillars y Vangelisti, 2018); por tanto, las habilidades comunicativas requieren de procesos de comprensión y producción textual que demandan de una contextualización social y cultural, de la cual no siempre los usuarios son conscientes (Cassany, 2016). Por un lado, existe la posibilidad de la incertidumbre y el equívoco, situación que desde el origen de la comunicación ha permitido que se den reflexiones desde el lenguaje y la filosofía (Hansen, 2020), relacionando ambos conceptos con el pensamiento y lo que este representa en la construcción simbólica del conocimiento y la interacción, sugiriendo la necesidad de ir más allá de los signos verbales y centrarse en su uso en contexto (Wittgenstein, 2021). De igual forma, la inmediatez y la simultaneidad hacen que sea posible alternar conversaciones por diferentes canales e interlocutores en un tiempo y espacio, propendiendo por nuevas literacidades, la interacción a través de pantallas y la multimodalidad son características que predominan en los diferentes actos comunicativos (Shafirova y Cassany, 2019).…”