There is a widespread assumption that ordinary language philosophy was killed off sometime in the 1960s or 70s by a combination of Gricean pragmatics and the rapid development of systematic semantic theory. Contrary to that widespread assumption, however, contemporary versions of ordinary language philosophy are alive and flourishing, but going by various aliases—in particular (some versions of) "contextualism" and (some versions of) "experimental philosophy". And a growing group of contemporary philosophers are explicitly embracing the methods as well as the title (...) of ordinary language philosophy and arguing that it has been unfairly maligned and was never decisively refuted. In this overview, I will outline the main projects and arguments employed by contemporary ordinary language philosophers, and make the case that updated versions of the arguments made by ordinary language philosophers in the middle of the twentieth century are attracting renewed attention. (shrink)

J.L. Austin is regarded as having an especially acute ear for fine distinctions of meaning overlooked by other philosophers. Austin employs an informal experimental approach to gathering evidence in support of these fine distinctions in meaning, an approach that has become a standard technique for investigating meaning in both philosophy and linguistics. In this paper, we subject Austin's methods to formal experimental investigation. His methods produce mixed results: We find support for his most famous distinction, drawn on the basis of (...) his `donkey stories', that `mistake' and `accident' apply to different cases, but not for some of his other attempts to distinguish the meaning of philosophically significant terms (such as `intentionally' and `deliberately'). We critically examine the methodology of informal experiments employed in ordinary language philosophy and much of contemporary philosophy of language and linguistics, and discuss the role that experimenter bias can play in influencing judgments about informal and formal linguistic experiments. (shrink)

Linguists often advert to what are sometimes called linguistic intuitions. These intuitions and the uses to which they are put give rise to a variety of philosophically interesting questions: What are linguistic intuitions – for example, what kind of attitude or mental state is involved? Why do they have evidential force and how might this force be underwritten by their causal etiology? What light might their causal etiology shed on questions of cognitive architecture – for example, as a case study (...) of how consciously inaccessible subpersonal processes give rise to conscious states, or as a candidate example of cognitive penetrability? What methodological issues arise concerning how linguistic intuitions are gathered and interpreted – for example, might some subjects' intuitions be more reliable than others? And what bearing might all this have on philosophers' own appeals to intuitions? This paper surveys and critically discusses leading answers to these questions. In particular, we defend a ‘mentalist’ conception of linguistics and the role of linguistic intuitions therein. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the explosive claim Cavell inserts in the middle of The Claim of Reason that a narrative history of a certain style of philosophy should be called “Philosophy and the Rejection of the Human.” In order to understand the accusation, I shape interpretations of what Cavell means by nearly each of the terms of this dramatic sentence. I begin by comparing senses of “philosophy” by way of a comparison with Rorty’s critical review of The Claim of Reason; (...) I proceed by underlining how, in Cavell’s work, the notion “human” and its rejection also is entangled with that which Cavell describes as “skepticism.” It is necessary, therefore, to understand whether there is a specific characteristic difference between skepticism and the style of philosophy that is implicated in the “rejection of the human.” It seems as if there should be a difference, given Cavell’s notorious approval of the truth or the moral of skepticism and the apparent criticism of the philosophical style that rejects the human. I show that the difference can be discovered by focusing on Cavell’s understanding of criteria. In particular, I emphasize the space of a subject’s relation to criteria, a subjective claim to universality without objectivity, in pursuing and extending Cavell’s own appeal to Kant’s Critique of Judgment. It is this subjective component that is rejected in the style of philosophy that Cavell singles out. (shrink)

In his first paper, ‘Must We Mean What We Say?’, Stanley Cavell defended the methods of ordinary language philosophy against various charges made by his senior colleague, Benson Mates, under the influence of the empirical semantics of Arne Naess.1Cavell’s argument hinges on the claim that native speakers are asourceof evidence for 'what is said' in language and, accordingly, need not base their claims about ordinary language upon evidence. In what follows, I maintain that this defence against empirical semantics applies equally (...) well to experimental philosophy's attack on doing philosophy from the armchair. In so doing, I attempt to clarify – and adjust – Cavell's claim that statements about ordinary language are rule‐descriptions that are neither analytic nor synthetic. (shrink)