Talk:Ordinary language philosophy

Series on Philosophy

This is a major portion of western philosophy, it should be included in the series on phil.

Untitled

Could we please have an article on Gilbert Ryle? Please?

We should most likely revise this article to include mention of the dispute about the early Wittgenstein's views... personally I think that to say Wittgenstein thought language had to be revised is completely wrong. His early philosophy is very different from his later work, it is primarily concerned with the limits of language and the nature of propositions, but it does not exclude poetry, metaphor and other forms of language as unimportant, in fact there is a good case for saying that Wittgenstein thought these were the MOST important. Recall his reading of poetry to the Vienna Circle in an attempt to get them to understand his work... which they notoriously failed in.

Revamp...

This article needs to be extended and elaborated upon by someone who knows enough about ordinary language philosophy. While not bad as it is, I think this article should be redone, and extended, so as to describe ordinary language philosophy in much more depth, and the various philosophers associated with it (insofar as the ideas are pertinent to the subject). Is anyone willing to do this? Kevin L. 06:18, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

Archive?

Is there a link missing to archived discussion? I thought I had entered discussion of the failure of ordinary language to describe the quantum world, but I don't see it or a link to an archive. David R. Ingham 05:48, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

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Please add this link to the article (it is to the best Essay online on this topic):

http://www.helsinki.fi/~tuschano/writings/strange/

Rosa Lichtenstein 10:57, 24 June 2007 (UTC)

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Linguistic philosophy redirects here, why?

08:52, 19 January 2009 (GMT) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 138.251.244.161 (talk)

Incoherent paragraph

I am by no means an expert on "Ordinary Language Philosophy". But the description this article gives of it seems weird to me. Let me address this peculiar paragraph:

For example: What is reality? Philosophers have treated it as a noun denoting something that has certain properties. For thousands of years, they have debated those properties. Ordinary language philosophy instead looks at how we use the word "reality" in everyday language. In some instances, people will say, "It may seem that X is the case, but in reality, Y is the case". This expression is not used to mean that there is some special dimension of being where Y is true although X is true in our dimension. What it really means is, "X seemed right, but appearances were misleading in some way. Now I'm about to tell you the truth: Y". That is, the meaning of "in reality" is a bit like "however". And the phrase, "The reality of the matter is ..." serves a similar function — to set the listener's expectations. Further, when we talk about a "real gun", we aren't making a metaphysical statement about the nature of reality; we are merely opposing this gun to a toy gun, pretend gun, imaginary gun, etc.

This tries to reach conclusions about the word 'reality', without actually addressing how the word 'reality' is used. For the phrase 'in reality' is not the same as the word 'reality', as we can see:

   He told us he was going to the supermarket, but in reality went to the movies.
   He told us he was going to the supermarket, but in fact went to the movies.

The above are certainly synonimous, because 'in reality' and 'in fact' are indeed synonimous, but

   Your investment project would be fine for Europe, but the Chinese reality demands a different approach.
   *Your investment project would be fine for Europe, but the Chinese fact demands a different approach.

are certainly not synonimous (and the latter sentence seems to be grammatically wrong). That's because 'reality' and 'fact' are not synomimous at all, and indeed demand different adjectives and verbs to make sence.

And the phrase, "The reality of the matter is ..." serves a similar function — to set the listener's expectations.

Which says even less about the word 'reality'. Besides, the phrase 'The reality of the matter' (because "The reality of the matter is..." does not look to be a phrase at all) doesn't perform an adverbial function; it is a nominal phrase, apt to be used as the subject of a sentence:

   The reality of the matter is that Wikipedia is not a good source.

and so it does not "serve a similar function" to 'in reality'.

Further, when we talk about a "real gun", we aren't making a metaphysical statement about the nature of reality; we are merely opposing this gun to a toy gun, pretend gun, imaginary gun, etc.

But again, 'real' is quite a different word from 'reality', and performs no adverbial function like 'in reality' nor nominal roles like 'reality'. Indeed, this last sentence very ironically uses the word 'reality' in a way that has nothing to do with the adverbial expression 'in reality' or the adjective 'real':

we aren't making a metaphysical statement about the nature of reality.

(my emphasys)

And this is certainly one of the "ordinary language" uses of the word 'reality' - more or less synonimous with 'the world', as we can see:

   The world is all that is the case.
   Reality is all that is the case.

So, is this paragraph actually a good description of "Ordinary Language Philosophy" (in which case I would have to conclude that "Ordinary Language Philosophy" is a method that pretends to "look at how words are used", but in fact does something quite different - apparently trying to determine the use of one word by its etymology)? Or is this one of the miriads of Wikipedia's own blunders, and "Ordinary Language Philosophy" is innocent of such sophistry? And in this case, can this paragraph be rewritten, so that it conveys what "Ordinary Language Philosophy" actually is? Ninguém (talk) 23:19, 23 December 2011 (UTC)