Philosophy and Ordinary Language: The Bent and Genius of our Tongue

by Oswald Hanfling

What is philosophy about and what are its methods? Philosophy and Ordinary Language is a defence of the view that philosophy is largely about questions of language, which to a large extent means ordinary language. Some people argue that if philosophy is about ordinary language, then it is necessarily less deep and difficult than it is usually taken to be but Oswald Hanfling shows us that this isn't true.
Hanfling, a leading expert in the development of analytic philosophy, covers a wide range of topics, including scepticism and the definition of knowledge, free will, empiricism, folk psychology, ordinary versus artificial logic, and philosophy versus science. Drawing on philosophers such as Austin, Wittgenstein, and Quine, this book explores the nature of ordinary language in philosophy.

Genres: Language, Philosophy

278 pages, Hardcover

First published December 16, 1999

Reviews

[Nat]

Hanfling defends a version of ordinary language philosophy (OLP) that is more radical than J.L. Austin's conception of "linguistic phenomenology" (a more or less canonical statement of what OLP is), which holds that by paying close attention to the meaning of certain words, we can "sharpen our perception of...the phenomena" those words are used to talk about, but which is not committed to the idea that the meaning of a word is the "final arbiter" of the phenomenon it picks out. In contrast to Austin's view, Hanfling is willing to say that the questions "What is knowledge?" and "What do we mean by 'knowledge'?" "are one and the same" (p.17).

That is definitely not a popular view about the relation between those two questions in contemporary philosophy. Some philosophers think that by investigating the meaning of "knowledge" (e.g.) we can learn something about the nature of knowledge (DeRose, Ludlow and Stanley say things along these lines) in addition to learning something about how we think about the nature of knowledge, while some others (Kornblith, Sosa) think that the questions should be treated separately.

I'm inclined to think that on one hand we might learn something about knowledge by investigating the meaning of "know", but on the other it could turn out that the word's meaning reflects a bunch of different ideas that a theory of knowledge should separate. When Hanfling comes to consider the meaning of the word "meaning", it becomes very clear that there is no illuminating connection between what the word means in ordinary use and what meaning actually is.

Hanfling says, "How else are claims about the meaning of 'meaning' to be evaluated? Are we to suppose that meaning is itself a natural kind with a scientific essence? It would be hard to make sense of this" (p.235).

It's actually not that hard to make sense of the idea that meaning is a natural kind with a "scientific essence" (which, I assume, just means that it can be explained by way of a scientific theory). But doing so requires departing from the ordinary meaning of "meaning". Every interesting theory of language distinguishes different aspects of meaning (sense and reference, character and content, explicit meaning and implicature, locution, illocution, and perlocution etc.) that aren't distinguished in the ordinary meaning of "meaning". Those distinctions are important because they pick up on different kinds of thing that function in different ways. It is those aspects of meaning that might have "scientific essences" (to use Hanfling's phrase). That possibility is obscured by the exclusive focus on the ordinary meaning of "meaning", which picks out a mess of phenomena and isn't something that is likely to be an interesting topic of scientific investigation.

(See this Language Log post for further [and funnier] thoughts along these lines, though Pullum isn't aware that people have tried to defend ordinary language philosophy of language: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/langua...)

All of that said, I think studying ordinary meaning is an interesting project, partly because it reveals how we think about certain topics before doing theory is messy and potentially confused. But it's a way of doing psychology or anthropology, not metaphysics (but note that psychology and anthropology are often more interesting than metaphysics!). So I think OLP is a potentially fruitful way of doing philosophy, but not in the way that Hanfling argues that it is.

[N.A. O. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book (before recent ones by authors such as Avner Baz, Julia Tanney, or Achinstein in the philosophy of science) was one of the only "modern" defenses of Ordinary Language Philosophy (OLP). In it Hanfling defends "what we say" by postulating a simple but powerful hypothesis: Questions of the sort "What is X?" and "What does X mean?" are the same. In particular, he argues at length that the standard objections to ordinary language philosophy are premised on 1) the tendency of philosophers to suppose that their investigations are similar to scientists, say, a biologist or geologist, with its own special objects (Propositions, logical forms, ideal language, "external worlds", etc.), 2) the philosopher's weird obsession with drawing on the everyday while also saying that it is inadequate to do proper philosophy, and 3) lastly, proposing that after they've done all their theorizing, that the 'folk' ought to adopt their way of speaking since it is more 'precise'.

To all of this, Hanfling asks: in what language will you be making this intelligible? Despite the protests of certain "realists", what we say is about our criteria of sentence/word employment and the related strategies of defending those uses. If the philosopher wants to claim he has a better language than even that of the scientist, he will have to (impossible on Hanfling's view) employ that language in a way that doesn't make ordinary expression meaningless and thus inert.

The text is great. While it may be jarring or dare i say, 'naive', to persons trained in or sympathetic to contemporary analytic philosophy, i say remove your prejudices and properly engage with the book.