Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal

Volume 39, Number 2, 2019

Introduction
Who’s Afraid of Ordinary Language Philosophy? A Plea
for Reviving a Wrongly Reviled Philosophical Tradition

Alice Crary and Joel de Lara

1. A New Narrative about the Significance of Ordinary

Language Philosophy

Since roughly the late 1960s, to call a thinker an “ordinary language

philosopher” has typically been to insult them.1 It has been hypothesized
that the term itself was coined by detractors.2 Over the years, those
working under this heading or in association with figures considered to
be key exponents of the tradition have been subject to levels of derision
uncommon even for the harshest of intellectual disputes. Representatives
of ordinary language philosophy (henceforth, OLP) such as Ludwig
Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin, Gilbert Ryle, and Peter Strawson have been
accused of worshipping “the mid-morning incuriosity and philistinism of
the mean sensual man,”3 of representing “a deviation from the true path
of philosophy,”4 and of supposedly inciting readers to “give up” philosophi-
cal study altogether.5 Their approach to philosophy has been dubbed
“ridiculous,” and the fruits of their labor have been dismissed as “trivial,”
“banal,” and “boring.”6
What many regarded as the final grave for OLP was dug in the
1970s by Peter Geach and Paul Grice, whose critiques, while intellectu-
ally serious, had little to do with the procedures of the scholars whose
projects they claimed to be decisively discrediting.7 But the stage for the
denouement had already been set over a decade earlier when, in his 1959
book, Words and Things: An Examination of, and an Attack on, Linguistic
Philosophy, Ernest Gellner launched an attack on OLP that was in equal
parts crudely contemptuous and poorly argued. The central allegation of
Gellner’s monograph, which for the space of a year or two was the most
widely discussed book in Anglophone philosophy,8 was that OLP was
essentially politically conservative.9 Neither the fact that there was no

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clearly defensible case for this accusation nor the fact that many high-
profile advocates of OLP were philosophizing with an eye to advancing
politically radical endeavors kept the charge from sticking.10 With hind-
sight it is clear that, as Stephen Mulhall once remarked, “the need to
reject or transcend [OLP] far outweighed the capacity to provide good
grounds for so doing.”11 Although the idea that OLP died sometime in
the second half of the twentieth century came to be treated as a platitude,
what is most conspicuous in this stretch of intellectual history is not the
plausibility of any considerations against the core themes of OLP but the
intensity of the drive to bury them.
Despite its numerous, widely heralded burials, OLP has refused to die.
Many philosophers continue to work on, or in the spirit of, OLP—albeit
sometimes on the fringes of the discipline and often not under that label.
While the term is generally absent from philosophy course lists and schol-
ars rarely list it as an area of specialization, there have been signs recently
that OLP might be reasserting itself. Following what has been dubbed
the “strange death of ordinary language philosophy,”12 the approach that
many have thought (and still think) antiquated or vapid is starting to
reemerge in debates in various areas of philosophy. In addition to frequent
conferences and symposia on Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell, in the last
ten years there have been a number of conferences specifically on OLP,
along with the publication of various articles questioning the official his-
tory of OLP’s demise, the first collections of new articles on Austin in
decades, and several books arguing explicitly for a reconsideration of OLP
and what it can offer.13 OLP has shown up in recent debates in diverse
areas: from philosophy of language to philosophical accounts of pornogra-
phy, from epistemologyto gender and queer studies, from ethics to literary
theory, and from philosophical theology to discussions about the authority
and critical power of the interpretive methods of the social sciences.14 The
aim of this special issue is to provide a venue to think through some of
these inheritances—to think about what the methodology of OLP allows
so as to be able to clear-sightedly ask whether its marginalization was
justified or whether it was perhaps ideologically motivated. Bearing in
mind our best answer to these questions, we can begin to assess the con-
temporary significance of OLP.
Within mainstream—analytic—philosophy of language, until at least
the turn of the twenty-first century, it was widely accepted that what-
ever insights Wittgenstein, Austin, et al. had to offer specifically con-
cerning the study of language had been happily domesticated within
the theory of speech acts developed by John Searle in the late 1960s
and the accounts of speaker meaning and conversational implicature
developed by Grice around the same time.15 Central to this domestica-
tion is the relegation of what has come to be called the pragmatics of

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speech acts (what a speaker is doing in producing a certain speech act in

a certain context) to an ancillary level, somehow separable from the mean-
ing of the sentences in question. In this vein, Austin’s argument for the pri-
macy of what he called the “illocutionary” (the use of a sentence to perform
a range of conventional linguistic acts—promising, betting, etc.) over the
“locutionary” (the sentence seen as a bearer of a proposition, with “sense
and reference”)16 was inverted by Searle. Searle argued instead that locu-
tions can be isolated—can, as it were, have their illocutionary import
read out of them—without the need for pragmatic, contextual sensitivi-
ties.17 Meanwhile, Grice managed to convince a whole generation that what
ordinary language philosophers were discussing was merely “speaker
meaning”—what a speaker means by the production of a stretch of lan-
guage in a particular context—that is auxiliary to the meaning of words
and sentences.18 According to this paradigm, the ability of speakers to
use their words to perform illocutionary acts such as promising, betting,
etc., depends upon their words already having (referential) meaning.19
And hence Austin’s and Wittgenstein’s injunctions to start our philosophical
endeavors by looking at the actual use of words20 came to be seen as at
best irrelevant and at worse regressive.
Nevertheless, the model of philosophy of language as semantics—
which Searle and Grice helped to insulate from the critiques of OLP—has
repeatedly foundered when it comes to explaining the deeply contextual
nature of many features of word and sentence meaning. Most, if not
all, contemporary philosophers of language accept that natural language
sentences express determinate thoughts (or propositions) only in a
given context, with pronouns, demonstratives, and other indexicals and
variables needing contextual specification. Recently, so-called contex-
tualists—many of whom take themselves to be inheritors of OLP—have
argued that in addition to standard variables, a broad range of empirical
predicates contribute to the content of sentences in an essentially context-
dependent way, i.e., in a way that results in sentences having different
truth-conditions depending on their context of utterance.21 Self-avowed
contextualists have argued that, granted this first point, understanding
the meaning of sentences containing such predicates is under the control
of pragmatics.22
Admittedly, from the perspective of core themes of OLP, contextualists’
manner of making this point is unsatisfactory. Like their more traditional,
semantics-oriented “invariantist” rivals, contextualists assume that
understanding a sentence is a matter of grasping its truth-conditions. In
thus accenting truth-theoretics, and thereby failing to free themselves from
a focus on true/false statements that Austin criticized as “descrip-
tivism,”23 they occlude recognition—of a sort urged by both Austin and
Wittgenstein—of how sensitivity to what (quite possibly non-descriptive

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thing) a speaker is doing with her words (e.g., joking, warning, cajoling,
promising, confessing, questioning) is internal to our ability to grasp what
she is saying with those words on a particular occasion. Austin himself
said that he hoped to get philosophers to abandon their fixation on truth
and to recognize that it was one among many dimensions of linguistic
assessment—or, as he put it in How to Do Things With Words, that he
hoped to get philosophers to abandon their “true/false fetish.”24 Setting
these issues aside, granted that many contextualists represent themselves
as heirs of OLP, it is noteworthy that their debate with invariantists about
the significance of context-dependence and how to account for it, has
embroiled contemporary philosophy of language.
There is, moreover, an intense, analogous debate in contemporary
epistemology. Epistemic contextualists maintain that whether or not a
proposition qualifies as a piece of knowledge depends upon the context
in which it is produced. Specifically, for a proposition to qualify as a
piece of knowledge is for a speaker to establish that there are no “live
doubts” within that context that would undermine the truth or justifi-
cation of the proposition.25 Like their more exclusively language-focused
philosophical counterparts, epistemic contextualists often take them-
selves to be advocating OLP-inspired approaches.26 But they, too, under-
state and misrepresent the challenge to traditional research programs
posed by the procedures of Wittgenstein and Austin. Epistemic contextu-
alists share with their more traditional interlocutors the assumption
that knowledge is a state that consists in some kind of relation between
a subject and some fact such that, whatever else additionally she may
be doing in producing sentences such as “I know that . . . ,” she is
invariably representing this relation. With this commitment to a focus on
truth-theoretics that veers toward descriptivism, epistemic contextualists
inevitably neglect the range of things we do with words such as “know”
(e.g., reassure, acknowledge, protest, jest), effectively closing their ears to
Austin’s and Wittgenstein’s exhortations to attend to the indefinitely
open-ended ways in which we put such words to work.27 Although epis-
temic contextualism, like its contextualist cousin in the philosophy of
language, is thus subtly but significantly out of alignment with key ele-
ments of the tradition that is taken to inspire it, what is striking for the
purpose of this discussion is simply OLP’s reassertion of itself within
fields that many considered to have been inoculated against it.
Part of what seemed to recommend Grice- and Searle-inspired mis-
appropriations of classic contributions to OLP was the unappealing
character of the most widely accepted accounts of what it would be to
respect Wittgenstein’s and Austin’s injunction to attend to the use we
make of words. On what is arguably the standard story, traceable in
part to Gellner’s outsized influence,28 the pivotal idea is that established

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practices with linguistic expressions fix their meanings—so that any time
our employment of expressions alters, their meanings alter, and thus
there can never be a legitimate question about whether our discourses are
faithful to the nature of what we are talking about. The result is a simple-
minded and, to many, deeply unattractive image of our linguistic activi-
ties, according to which they appear to be immune to rational criticism.
It is not that no self-styled fans of OLP have championed this image. A
variety of thinkers who present themselves as following in Wittgenstein’s
and Austin’s footsteps have argued for the supposed inviolability of our
discursive practices to rational scrutiny. This includes a couple of genera-
tions of readers of On Certainty who take Wittgenstein to be arguing
that the moves we make within an area of discourse are invariably
characterized by rational invulnerability.29 It also includes a number of
literary theorists who, drawing on received assumptions about the leit-
motifs of OLP, insist on the tradition’s resonance with a similarly far-
reaching claim about the alleged immunity to the rational criticism of
our discourse that gets advanced within deconstruction and other vari-
ants of poststructuralist thought.30 The group of scholars who associate
OLP with claims about the supposed inviolability of linguistic practices
includes, in addition, some who are concerned with specific areas of dis-
course. A recognizable cohort of philosophers of religion have appealed to
OLP in defending forms of fideism,31 and similarly notable groups of moral
and political philosophers have claimed to be inspired by OLP in urging
the acceptance of forms of ethical and cultural relativism.32
Yet these appropriations of OLP depend for any plausibility they
have on bald misrepresentations of the tradition’s core texts. What is
pivotal to the writings of Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell is a claim not
about how word-use somehow determines meaning but rather—as we
might put it—about the role of our responses or sensibility in language.
These philosophers ask us to attend to the use we make of words because
they want us to register that, in trafficking in language, we inevitably
draw on our sense of the importance of similarities that tie new con-
texts in which words are used to older contexts of their employment.
Their thought is that we ourselves are thus implicated in every step of
thought and speech. This suggestion goes hand in hand with a vision of
language that is fundamentally different from anything that Searle,
Grice, and their philosophical scions see as OLP’s most promising con-
tributions. At the heart of this vision of language is the idea that a type
of pragmatic attention to speech situations that brings within its scope
what Austin calls the illocutionary (and that, contra contextualists, is not
antecedently focused on truth-theoretics) is necessary to capture what a
combination of words is being used to say in a given situation. We are
supposed to recognize that a practical sensitivity is internal to our ability

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to grasp word meanings. The resulting philosophical outlook is striking

because it transforms widely received assumptions about what is
involved in rational linguistic understanding, specifically by treating
practical attitudes as internal to the capacities exercised in it.33
To speak of the persistence of the oft-interred tradition of OLP is to
underline that variations on this outlook continue to show up in an array of
provocative intellectual projects that take the tradition as a significant ref-
erence point. There is, for instance, the doggedness with which a roughly
Aristotelian idea of “ethical perception,” introduced into the Anglophone
philosophical lexicon by readers of Wittgenstein,34 has remained in circu-
lation despite failing to establish itself as mainstream. Likewise, there
is the fact that OLP-inspired challenges to pictures of religious belief that
contest (even “reformed”) epistemological foundationalisms have infiltrated
philosophy of religion, despite the hostility to them of many influential
theologians.35 The legacy of OLP also has substantial presence in con-
temporary aesthetics and art criticism. To be sure, themes from OLP
remain on the margins of specifically analytic work in aesthetics. But this
relatively narrow body of work does not monopolize the field. Anyone who
wants to have a good overview of the current state of art theory and criti-
cism needs to have a take on the ways in which themes of OLP have been
used to describe the logic of aesthetic modernism in the work of, for exam-
ple, Cavell and Michael Fried—as well as in the contributions of genera-
tions of theorists whom Cavell and Fried have influenced.36
Something similar can be said about the role of ideas from OLP in
Anglophone political and social philosophy. Despite being largely absent
from central research programs, these ideas figure prominently in vari-
ous notable strands of contemporary political thought. Representatives
of OLP have been part of the impetus to critiques of “ideal theory,” and
they are important sources of inspiration for some approaches in French
sociology, where they have been used to illuminate challenges of ideology
critique.37 Themes from OLP also show up in compelling conceptions of
immanent critique. Figures such as Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell are
sometimes recognized as sources for alternatives to the exclusive insis-
tence on “instrumental reason” that is a hallmark of advanced neoliberal
capitalism and that has achieved such dominance in political and eco-
nomic theory that it is often treated as having the status of an image of
rationality as such.38
It is time to rewrite the narrative about the fate of OLP that has held
sway for approximately sixty years. Granted that, to again use Mulhall’s
words, in the 1950s and 1960s “the need to reject or transcend [OLP]
far outweighed the capacity to provide good grounds for so doing,” we
have every reason to think that the charge that OLP has a politically
conservative bent was at bottom a mere pretext for repudiating methods

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and concepts that represented, and still represent, a threat to the philo-
sophical and political status quo. Any respectable study of OLP reveals
challenges to the understanding of logical ideals that carve out the space in
which high-profile research in many areas of philosophy—ethics, philoso-
phy of religion, aesthetics, philosophy of language, epistemology, philos-
ophy of mind, and social and political philosophy—is pursued. Insofar as
OLP brings into question standard approaches in moral and political phi-
losophy in particular, it represents a specifically moral and political provo-
cation. Not only does OLP lack a conservative bent, it contains resources
for a thoroughgoing attack on the strains of liberal political theory that
have served as scholarly escorts to the rise of global capitalism. It is not
merely that OLP positions us to envision types of worldly interaction that
resist instrumental formulation. It also equips us to envision modes of
empirical or world-directed thought that resist assimilation to scientistic
models, specifically in that they are essentially matters of sensitivity to
practical values. It thus enables us not only to push back against what
Herbert Marcuse called “functionalization”39 but also to overcome limita-
tions of core strands of thought in analytic social philosophy that have
proved incapable of shedding light on and exposing the insidiousness of
entrenched forms of race-, gender-, age-, ability-, and species-biases. For
these reasons, the subversive tradition of OLP should be brought out of
exile and recognized as among our most valuable and practically perti-
nent philosophical assets.

2. The Essays

This issue, which is made up of seven articles and two long reviews,
assembles a set of new and arresting engagements with OLP that, taken
together, make the case—just outlined—for fundamentally refashioning
our understanding of the tradition’s philosophical and political import.
OLP represents a methodological provocation to contemporary philoso-
phy that has yet to be properly acknowledged. In “Conceptual Analysis,
Practical Commitment, and Ordinary Language,” Richard Eldridge con-
tributes to clarifying the nature of the provocation, offering an elegant
description of how OLP figures in the history of conceptual analysis
within the analytic tradition. Eldridge identifies two major strands of this
history: one starting with Russell and continuing through Carnap and
Quine, and the second beginning with Moore and continuing through Ryle
and Austin. The Russell-Carnap-Quine strand, which Eldridge traces to a
rebellion against British absolute idealism and Victorian moralism, aims
to promote and support the natural sciences as the paradigm of cognitive
achievement. The goal is to reveal the justificatory basis of the scientific
approach to reality as resting in a primitive, referential vocabulary into

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which all concept words could be reduced. The Moore-Ryle-Austin

strand, meanwhile, unfolds as a defense of the claims of common sense
against what these philosophers regard as the nonsensical abstractions
of metaphysics and epistemology. Its guiding aspiration is dispelling
general philosophical worries about concepts such as “knowledge,” “lan-
guage,” and “justice” by reminding ourselves of the detail and nuance of
ordinary language.
Eldridge wants us to see that both of these strands are problematic as
models of conceptual analysis. Apropos the Russell-Carnap-Quine strand,
he contends that it is not possible to devise a fixed vocabulary of ultimate
reference words into which natural scientific sentences can be analyzed
in a manner that exhibits their justificatory basis. Moreover, the obses-
sion with making sense of scientific prediction and control gives us a dis-
torted view of the very sorts of social and philosophical problems for
which such analysis is supposed to be helpful. Apropos the Moore-Ryle-
Austin strand, Eldridge objects that our ordinary usage of concept words
is often tangled, unclear, or contested, and hence that the appeal to such
usage in an effort to resolve philosophical questions is unsatisfactory.
Eldridge favors rejecting these strands and instead inheriting from
Cavell and the later Wittgenstein (and to a lesser extent, Strawson) what
he regards as a phenomenologically adequate yet robust account of con-
ceptual analysis. What recommends this model is that it registers the
contested nature of many, if not all, ordinary concept words, offering a
philosophical-anthropological account of what it is to learn a concept
(word) in the first place. Eldridge’s Cavellian idea is that a child’s learn-
ing a concept word does not involve coming to possess a universal or a
rule; rather, she develops a practical readiness to adapt to circumstances,
to make projective, imaginative leaps with concept words. The methodolog-
ical lesson to take from the OLP of Wittgenstein and Cavell, according to
Eldridge, is that there is no short-circuiting the need to patiently attend to
the details of difficult cases and use our powers of judgment, imagination,
and understanding of the past to make decisions or arguments about par-
ticular concepts, guided by a vision of our practical commitments.
This lesson about method has moral import. In “The Vulnerability of
the Ordinary: Goffman, Reader of Austin,” Sandra Laugier sounds con-
genial moral themes in the course of offering a rereading of Austin
through a comparative analysis with Erving Goffman, an heir to Austin’s
approach to speech acts and action. The leitmotif of Laugier’s essay is
vulnerability—both our vulnerability as situated speakers and the vul-
nerability of reality itself, insofar as it gets articulated by means of our
ordinary critical-perceptive skills. The payoff of this treatment of vul-
nerability is a plausible case for locating ethics at the heart of Austin’s
project—a case that contests an entrenched view of ethics as a self-con-

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tained region of thought and action.

Laugier’s opening act is to provide an account of the reception of
Austin’s treatment of speech acts, taking François Recanati as its stalk-
ing horse. Recanati takes himself to be following Austin in proposing a
theory of speech acts that defines for utterances the situation of com-
munication, the social act, and the relationship established by means of
the utterance. Whereas Recanati operates with the assumption that
speech acts can be decomposed into component parts that can be ana-
lyzed separately—here the proposition, there its illocutionary force,
there the pragmatic effects of producing this proposition in a specific
context—Laugier brings out how this distorts Austin’s account. Austin
viewed “what is said” in a situation as an indissoluble whole. Significantly,
by subsuming Austin’s insights within the prevailing descriptivist-repre-
sentationalist paradigm of language and trying to isolate the illocutionary
and perlocutionary aspects of speech as ancillary matters of the pragmatics
of uses of propositions, a Recanati-style reading of Austin undercuts the
central role of failure in his account. Pushing back against this interpre-
tive strategy, Laugier notes that Austin defines speech acts in negative
terms—in terms of various possible failures (“infelicities”). A speech act,
for Austin, only comes off in the first place insofar as a speaker performs it
carefully, appropriately, with tact, etc., avoiding a range of pitfalls. Far
from being the only or most important way of going wrong, falsity is but
one of many ways in which speech acts go wrong. What is limited about
more traditional exegetical paradigms, Laugier tells us, is that they
constrain the possibility of failure, treating the propositional content of
an utterance as somehow immunized against mishap. Yet failure is cen-
tral to all human action for Austin: our failures are precisely that which
creates the need for excuses, apologies, pleas, etc. These attempted repa-
rations reveal how our actions go wrong and thus what those actions
are in the first place.
Laugier’s organizing idea is that we can better see these themes in
Austin by recalling how they get taken up in Goffman. Goffman adopts
a similar approach to thinking about social actions and behavior more
generally, defining it negatively in terms of social ruptures and the
reparations we make when we have acted out of line. Actions are defined
precisely as risk-taking, flirting with jeopardy, and most generally, that
which reveals vulnerability for potential offenses and losses. Maintaining
“normal appearances” in Goffman, Laugier shows, is an endless and often
stressful process of collaboration, adjustment, and agreement with the
people involved trying to various degrees to avoid social embarrassment
and more importantly the collapse of the social. Yet, far from taking
Goffman to be advocating a sociology or ethics of conformism, Laugier
shows him to be an heir to Austin’s philosophy of vulnerability. She

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shows that Austin and Goffman are both vitally concerned with how we
miss reality, not because of a chasm between mind and world or between
the self and others, but because—due to lack of care and attention—we
fail to see it. An important lesson from Austin’s writings is, then, that
vigilance, sharp perception of detail, and carefulness are essential not
just as we do philosophy but as we navigate social life.
There are more and less faithful ways to assimilate the methodological
morals of OLP. In his contribution for this issue—“A Wittgensteinian/
Austinian Qualified Defense of Ryle on Know-How”—Rupert Read under-
lines the importance of avoiding a dogmatic attitude. Read observes that
in philosophizing we often proceed in ways that direct our attention away
from specific contexts and cases. He echoes Austin’s observation about
how philosophers tend to invoke a simple action as a model for under-
standing all action, “even when the model is really distorting the facts
rather than helping us to observe them.”40 Specifically, when it comes to
thinking about knowledge, it is common to treat everything that we call
knowledge on the model of propositional “knowledge-that.” Read reminds
us that Ryle helped to inaugurate a way of challenging this orthodoxy by
gesturing toward the realm of “know-how”—practical, embodied knowledge
that resists reduction to explicit, stateable propositions. Read encourages
us to acknowledge know-how and its distinctness from knowledge-that—
especially in contemporary culture where non-explicit, non-stateable forms
of knowledge get devalued—and he thereby offers a qualified defense of
Ryle on know-how.
But there is, Read warns, a danger in certain appeals to know-how:
that it is tacitly turned into the model of knowledge against which all
other forms must be compared. The insistence on the primacy of know-
how can become an anti-liberating move—a move that apes the intel-
lectualist’s insistence that all forms of knowledge can be explained
through one model. Read wishes us to see that Wittgenstein equips us
to resist this move. The ordinary language methodology he inherits
from Wittgenstein involves looking in detail at specific cases of “what
we should say when,” trying to let the differences of specific cases speak
for themselves. His thought is that Wittgenstein models for us a non-
dogmatic practice that involves entertaining deviant uses of words for the
purposes of seeing whether and how they can be stretched, while always
asking ourselves whether we have any good reason for so stretching them.
The foregoing treatments of OLP and philosophical method are help-
fully understood as expressions of distinctive conceptions of the logic of our
modes of speech. Martin Gustaffson directly addresses relevant logical
issues in “Category Mistakes and Ordinary Language,” specifically, by
drawing on strands of thought from OLP—and, in particular, from

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Wittgenstein’s later philosophy—to revisit venerable questions about

the nature of category mistakes.
Gustafsson canvasses three main approaches to explaining and resolv-
ing category mistakes. There is the anti-metaphysical view, according to
which category distinctions (and hence category mistakes) are merely
linguistic; there is the dogmatic-metaphysical view, according to which
the nature of reality itself rules out certain category distinctions; and
there is the critical-metaphysical view, according to which the question
of whether it is language or reality that is the bearer of category mis-
takes is itself an ill-formed question. Gustafsson make a case for think-
ing that the first two options fail to illuminate the genuine absurdities
of category mistakes and that they implausibly require a ‘sideways on’
view of reality or language. Although he offers a qualified defense of the
third option, his main aim is to get us to see that an assumption this
option shares with the other two options renders it ultimately unsatis-
factory. The trouble is the very idea that a general explanation of category
mistakes—say, one provided by general explanation of the relation
between language and world—is needed. What puzzles us with cate-
gory mistakes is hitting upon something that cannot or should not
meaningfully be said, but an elucidation of this phenomenon is not
going to be found in what we might think of as a general account of the
nature of the world or language. What we need are explanations of par-
ticular ways in which language is intertwined with the world, detailed
descriptions of linguistic practices, and clarifications of what is salient
within certain forms of life and why.
At the heart of Gustafsson’s piece is a critical engagement with a
recent and enormously influential attempt at a general explanation of
category mistakes: Ofra Magidor’s Category Mistakes. Magidor’s signature
gesture is to appeal to world-directed investigation to resolve category
mistakes, which she treats through the lens of empirical linguistics.
Magidor argues that in order to discover whether or not a sentence is a
category mistake, one needs to know certain facts. We know, for exam-
ple, that “That rock is thinking about the theory of relativity” is a cate-
gory mistake because empirical investigation shows that rocks cannot
think. Meanwhile, someone who thinks that “The priest is pregnant” is
a category mistake lacks the empirical knowledge that some Christian
denominations, for example, allow people of all sexes and gender identi-
fications to be ordained. It is not merely that empirical investigation
sheds light on why people feel certain propositions to be category mis-
takes; as Magidor sees it, it also clarifies whether or not something is a cat-
egory mistake. Without discounting the import of facts, Gustafsson
argues that this approach is unsatisfactory in that it undermines the
philosophical significance of category distinctions and overplays the

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role of empirical investigation. No empirical investigation is needed to

show that “The priest is pregnant” is not a category mistake; all that is
necessary is the sheer conceivability of someone who is a priest and is
also pregnant.
Moving toward a curative, Gustafsson turns to the work of Bernard
Harrison. Drawing on Harrison’s treatment of “Thursday is sleeping,”
Gustafsson suggests that there is an utterly non-mysterious explanation
of why there is no such thing as Thursday’s being asleep or awake. It is
not a matter of a grand philosophical question about whether or not the
nature of this category mistake rests in reality or language. All we need
to do is give detailed descriptions of the language games and practices
of talking about days of the week and of things that sleep. This is how
Gustafsson resists the impetus to the tripartite schema with which he
began—and how, by the same token, he contributes to our understand-
ing of Wittgenstein’s conception of logical grammar.
The aspects of OLP at play in this issue have notable precedents in
the history of philosophy, as Andrea Kern brings out in her article,
“Aesthetic Self-Consciousness and Sensus Communis: On the Significance
of Ordinary Language in Kant’s Analytic of the Beautiful.” Kern invites
us to see Kant—specifically in his treatment of judgments of beauty—
as an ordinary language philosopher avant la lettre. What underlies this
gesture is an unorthodox reading of Kant’s Analytic of the Beautiful in
the third Critique, according to which the so-called middle path that
Kant steers between an empiricist account of beauty as a subjective
feeling and a rationalist account of it as perfection cannot be disentan-
gled from his philosophical methodology. Central to this method is that
he does not develop a new concept of beauty to supplement those
offered by the empiricist and the rationalist; rather, he provides a dif-
ferent conception of what it is to have an understanding of beauty in the
first place. Kern takes Kant to dispute an important shared assumption
of the empiricist and the rationalist, namely that it is possible to inves-
tigate beauty from a position somehow external to the self-conscious-
ness of the judging subject. That Kant thought that no external basis
for judgments of beauty is possible is revealed by the kind of argument
he offers. He does not begin with a justification of the claim that judg-
ments of beauty are aesthetic judgments that depend on a feeling
rather than knowledge, but instead works to show that the ordinary
way in which we competently employ the predicate of beauty reveals
the two central features of such judgments: (1) that they are based on a
feeling, not on the concept of an object; and (2) that they make a claim
to universal validity that is nevertheless not logical. Insofar as the
empiricist wants to deny any claim to universality and the rationalist
wants to deny claim (1), they advance claims about beauty that they

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themselves ultimately cannot mean. The upshot of Kant’s argument, on

Kern’s presentation, is that we cannot deny his position without at the
same time denying ourselves the very capacity to employ the predicate
of beauty.
For Kant, famously, the absurdity of the empiricist position is revealed
by the absurdity of claiming that “X is beautiful to me.” What distin-
guishes the judgment of beauty from the judgment of the agreeable is
precisely that in claiming something to be beautiful we present our-
selves as speaking with a universal voice. This, of course, raises the
question of authority: How does anyone have the right to ascribe uni-
versality to a judgment given that, contra the rationalist on Kant’s
argument, the basis for such a judgment rests in the judging subject
herself? The question of the authority to speak in the first-person is
one that deeply interested Cavell, with whose interpretation of the
third Critique Kern aligns herself here. Kant’s account of the judgment
of beauty, Cavell shows, is reflective of what it is ordinary language
philosophers do when they proffer accounts of “what we mean when we
say such-and-such”: they are not making empirical claims and they are
not prescribing a norm for our use of language so much as expressing a
norm based on nothing more than themselves. These judgments err
only when the philosopher in question is made to realize that she can-
not properly mean what she was trying to say. Such judgments purport
to exemplify the sensus communis—that is the nature of their claimed
authority. But their peculiar status rests in the fact that the only thing
to vouchsafe this purported exemplification is the subject’s own capac-
ity of judgment. What Kant sought to do, Kern argues, is get us to see
that insofar as we are able to competently use the predicate of beauty
we are already able to speak on behalf of others. The judgments we
make in so doing are always liable to challenge and defeat; the only
way to obviate that is to withdraw into isolation and refuse to make
judgments at all.
It has often been objected to or about practitioners of OLP that their
project is somehow inherently anti-philosophical—that, for example,
the Wittgensteinian/Cavellian “therapeutic” approach amounts merely
to a deflation of philosophical questions motivated by a conservative
impulse to impede philosophical flights of wonder by insisting on the
universal legitimacy of “ordinary usage.” In this regard, Wittgenstein’s
remark that “what we do is to bring words back from their metaphysi-
cal to their everyday use” (PI 116) has often been taken as a dogmatic
call to embrace the legitimacy of whatever “everyday” people happen to
say about certain philosophical questions. On this reading, the therapy
would amount ultimately to an abandonment of philosophy (see, for
example, WT 37).

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In “On Homecoming: Wittgenstein, Cavell, and the Odyssey,” Yi-Ping

Ong reexamines PI 116 with a view to reflecting on the spirit and
methodology of OLP. Contesting interpretations that see in this remark
a straightforward normativity of “everyday use,” Ong, following Cavell,
instead reads it as a challenge to understand how we use words and
why, a challenge of self-knowledge provoked by our tendency to alienate
our words and our selves. Noting that PI 116 is specifically about philoso-
phers using words to “try to grasp the essence of [a] thing” (PI 116), Ong
invites us to read the remark in an interrogative mood of uncertainty
and homesickness—as if when wanting to give words a metaphysical
use we as philosophers are not sure what we are doing or why. So,
rather than finding in PI 116 a deflation of philosophical challenges
based upon an appeal to “everyday use” as somehow fixed and uncon-
testable, Ong, following Cavell, finds in the remark the articulation of a
different challenge: for us to get clear on what we mean by our words in
the first place. This reading of PI 116, Ong shows, is one illustration of
a recurring, dominant motif in Cavell’s œuvre: the idea of homesick-
ness and the quest to find a home.
To develop this theme, Ong turns to the western urtext of homesick-
ness and homecoming: the Odyssey. Homer’s epic of Odysseus’ journey
back home to Ithaca after the fall of Troy paints a picture of homecom-
ing as fraught and painful. Odysseus casts off the appearance of a lord
to reapproach his home and loved ones under the unfamiliar guise of a
beggar, suggesting something of the uncanniness of home, Ong argues.
Ong finds in the Odyssey reflections on what it means to have a home
and what it means to leave and return to it that presage Cavell’s reading of
PI 116 and his approach to philosophy more generally. For Wittgenstein,
returning our words to their “home” is to return them to the everyday
that we constitute; and yet, at the same time, there is nothing more
common than to resist commonness, to become dissatisfied with every-
day use, to find it suddenly unfamiliar, to reject one’s communion with
others. What “we” do as philosophers, Cavell’s Wittgenstein suggests, is
arrogate to speak for others about what “we” ordinarily mean with
words and diagnose the skeptical motivations that incite us to refuse
acknowledgment of others and their claims as to “what we should say
when.” But this will depend upon us feeling at home with the projec-
tions we give our words, at home with the community of which we are a
part and that we help to make up. As such, home, in Ong’s analysis, is
simultaneously a site of familiarity and comfort and somewhere from
which we depart or even flee. To inherit OLP after Cavell, Ong shows
us, is to grapple with the various ways in which we, as philosophers, can
end up using words in ways that render them idle by taking them too far

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afield, alienated from the work they normally do—in ways that reveal
our own alienation.
In the final essay of this special issue, “Toward a Non-Ideal Philosophy
of Language,” David Beaver and Jason Stanley turn our attention explic-
itly to the question of the political. In light of the election of Donald
Trump and the rise of other strongmen, it has become harder to avoid the
recognition that what the authors call ideal philosophy of language—a
cousin to ideal political theory—falls short in explaining the effects of cer-
tain uses of language. Taking semantics-oriented approaches in philoso-
phy of language as their starting point, Beaver and Stanley argue that
these approaches need to broaden their scope beyond overt and covert
communicative intentions to include aspects of the pragmatics of speech
practices, and, moreover, to do so in a manner that challenges entrenched
idealizing assumptions.
Beaver and Stanley begin by noting that language is often construed
in the analytic tradition as a complex cooperative activity, with words
conceived as labels for things and kinds of things. But, drawing on
Austin, they argue that language is often used to do things other than
describe states of affairs in the world for the purpose of cooperatively
coordinating action. Most pertinent, given their political aims, is the
fact that language can be, and all too often is, used to objectify and
dehumanize in the process of forming social out-groups. This is this not
an isolated phenomenon, however. There are many speech practices
central to the operation of contemporary politics that resist explanation
along standard lines in philosophy of language. Beaver and Stanley’s par-
ticular focus here is on the use of code words and dogwhistles, drawing on
feminist scholarship and recent work in social dominance theory and sys-
tems justification theory to compellingly capture how Trump, in particu-
lar, employs these rhetorical strategies to demonize certain groups of
people. Their larger aspiration is to urge that, when it comes to political
speech, it is no longer acceptable to work with ideal philosophical mod-
els of language that effectively compel us to ignore the social-linguistic
world that informs what speakers say and how they say it.
Beaver and Stanley identify thinkers within OLP, above all Austin,
as forerunners to their non-ideal approach, and they take steps toward
the tradition by identifying within the analytic tradition allies who
have likewise moved at least a certain distance from ideal philosophy of
language—above all, Robert Brandom, Rebecca Kukla, Lynne Tirrell,
and Mary Kate McGowan. In this way, Beaver and Stanley contribute
notably to rethinking the concepts and organizing assumptions of ideal
philosophy of language, and their paper offers a helpful guide for anyone
interested in following in their footsteps in doing justice to the messy com-
plexity of the sorts of speech acts that interest us in the political sphere.

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3. Acknowledgments

Many individuals deserve thanks for their support and assistance with
this issue. We would like to thank the authors for their valuable and
insightful contributions, and the translators for lending their expertise.
We are grateful to the rest of the staff of the Graduate Faculty Philosophy
Journal (GFPJ)—in particular, the other two Board members, Cayla
Clinkenbeard and Ceciel Meiborg, and the Senior Consulting Editor,
Alexis Dianda. Without their commitment and tireless work, the GFPJ
could not continue. We are also indebted to the Editorial Assistants of
the GFPJ—Alexander Altonji, Krishna Boddapati, Lizabeth Dijkstra,
and Samuel Yelton—for spending countless hours fact-checking and
copy-editing: your work is appreciated. We would like to offer our sincere
thanks not only to the rest of the faculty of the Philosophy Department of
The New School for Social Research for their continued support of the
GFPJ but also to David McClean for his unparalleled generosity. And
we want to acknowledge the input of the participants in the Séminaire
Wittgenstein organized by Sandra Laugier, Christiane Chauviré, and
Pierre Fasula at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne for their help-
ful input on a late draft of this text. Last but not least, I (Joel) would like
to express my gratitude to Emily Gillcrist for her patience and support.

NOTES

1. G.J. Warnock once reflected that “being an ordinary language philosopher

seems always to have been something of which one was accused, rather
than something which one claimed” (“Ordinary Language Philosophy,
School of,” in Nihilism–Quantum Mechanics, Interpretation of, vol. 7 of
Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Craig [London:
Routledge, 1998], p. 148).
2. See Sally Parker-Ryan, “Ordinary Language Philosophy,” Internet Encyclopedia
of Philosophy, https://www.iep.utm.edu/ord-lang/ (accessed November 21, 2018).
3. P.L. Heath, review of Words and Things: An Examination of, and Attack on,
Linguistic Philosophy, by Ernest Gellner, Philosophy 37:140 (1962), p. 177.
4. E.W.F. Tomlin, “Linguistic Philosophy: Forty Years On: A General Statement,”
Cambridge Quarterly 7:3 (1977), p. 232.
5. Hans Meyerhoff and Alvin N. Main, “A Conservative Therapy,” The Nation,
September 24, 1960, p. 183.
6. On the charge of ridiculousness, see, for example, Geoffrey K. Pullum,
“Ordinary Language Philosophy of Language: Not a Good Idea,” Language

332
 CRARY AND DE LARA/INTRODUCTION

Log, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000297.html
(accessed November 21, 2018). The charge of triviality is one that Ernest
Gellner, for example, repeatedly lodges (see Words and Things: An
Examination of, and Attack on, Linguistic Philosophy [London: Routledge,
2005], pp. 73, 89, 224, 233, 270; henceforth WT, followed by page number).
On the charge of banality, David Papineau, for example, reflects that
“thankfully, the banalities of ordinary language philosophy are no longer
with us, done to death by a thousand miserable attempts to solve philo-
sophical problems by careful attention to upper-middle-class English
usage” (“The Tyranny of Common Sense,” The Philosophers’ Magazine
34:1 [2006], p. 20). Lastly, on the charge that OLP is boring, see, for exam-
ple, Alan Wertheimer, “Is Ordinary Language Philosophy Conservative?,”
Political Theory 4:4 (1976), p. 405.
7. Two of the most widely respected attacks on OLP from this period were Peter
Geach, “Assertion,” chap. 8 of Logic Matters (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1972), pp. 250–69; and Paul Grice, “Logic and Conversation,” in
Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1989), pp. 22–40. For a succinct account of how Grice’s critical efforts fail
to make contact with the work of the thinkers he is supposedly attacking,
see Charles Travis, “Critical Notice of Studies in the Way of Words,” Mind
100:398 (1991), pp. 237–64. For a similar commentary on Geach’s work,
see Alice Crary, Beyond Moral Judgment (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2007), p. 64n. 22.
8. For a detailed discussion of the intense debates about Gellner’s book, which
were widely followed even outside academic circles, see T.P. Uschanov, “The
Strange Death of Ordinary Language Philosophy,” http://www.helsinki.fi/~tus
chano/writings/strange/ (accessed November 21, 2018).
9. In one of his most explicit formulations of this charge, Gellner writes,
“Later linguistic philosophy . . . is conservative in the values which it in
fact insinuates. Again it is not specifically conservative, not given to indi-
cating the needs to conserve this or that in particular, but conservative in
a general, unspecific way” (WT 296). Gellner does not mention particular
examples he has in mind or reflect on the unfalsifiable nature of the charge
of being conservative in an “unspecific way.” Nevertheless, he is not alone
in arguing that proponents of OLP are conservative. The most outspoken
defender of the image of Wittgenstein as a conservative thinker is J.C.
Nyíri (see “Wittgenstein 1929–31: The Turning Back,” in From Theology
to Sociology: Wittgenstein’s Impact on Contemporary Thought, vol. 4 of
Ludwig Wittgenstein: Critical Assessments, ed. Stuart Shanker [London:
Croom Helm, 1986], pp. 29–69; “Wittgenstein’s Later Work in relation to
Conservatism,” in Wittgenstein and His Times, ed. Brian McGuinness
[Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982], pp. 44–68; and “Wittgenstein’s New
Traditionalism,” Acta Philosophica Fennica 28:3 [1976], pp. 503–12). For
an account of how Gellner’s and Nyíri’s politically oriented critiques fail to
make contact with Wittgenstein’s procedures in particular, see Alice
Crary, “Wittgenstein and Political Thought,” in The New Wittgenstein, ed.
Alice Crary and Rupert Read (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 118–46.
10. In this connection, it is worth drawing attention to the political activities
of some earlier ordinary language philosophers. For instance, in the 1960s,

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G.E.M. Anscombe and Anthony Kenny mounted opposition to nuclear

weapons and the Cold War (see G.E.M. Anscombe, “War and Murder,” in
Nuclear Weapons and the Christian Conscience, ed. Walter Stein [London:
Merlin Press, 1961], pp. 43–62; and Anthony Kenny, “Counterforce and
Countervalue,” in Nuclear Weapons and the Christian Conscience, pp.
160–2). In 1956, Anscombe campaigned against the award of an honorary
degree to President Truman, primarily for his having authorized the use of
atom bombs in World War II (see G.E.M. Anscombe, Mr. Truman’s Degree
[Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956]). For an argument to the effect that
Wittgenstein’s later philosophy productively illuminated radical social
thought, see Alice Crary, “Wittgenstein Goes to Frankfurt (and Finds
Something Useful to Say),” Nordic Wittgenstein Review 7:1 (2018), pp. 7–41;
and Rupert Read, “Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations as a War
Book,” New Literary History 41:3 (2010), pp. 593–612, and “Wittgenstein
and the Illusion of Progress: On Real Politics and Real Philosophy in a
World of Technocracy,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements 78:1 (2016),
pp. 265–84. And, for a more general survey of some of the progressive posi-
tions of ordinary language philosophers—in particular, Wittgenstein—see
Ved Mehta, Fly and the Fly Bottle: Encounters with British Intellectuals
(Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1962).
11. Stephen Mulhall, review of Wittgenstein: Rethinking the Inner, by Paul
Johnston; Philosophy as Therapy: An Interpretation and Defense of
Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophical Project, by James F. Peterman; Aspects
of Mind, by Gilbert Ryle; and Realism, Meaning and Truth, by Crispin
Wright, Philosophical Investigations 17:2 (1994), p. 445.
12. Uschanov, “The Strange Death of Ordinary Language Philosophy.”
13. For examples of recent conferences on OLP, see “Ordinary Language
Philosophy” (University of Zurich, December 10, 2018); “Poststructuralism
and Ordinary Language Philosophy: A Symposium” (Indiana University,
April 8–9, 2016); “Skepticism, Pragmatism and Ordinary Language
Philosophy” (Paris-Sorbonne University, December 7, 2013); “The
Contemporary Significance of Ordinary Language Philosophy” (Nordic
Wittgenstein Society, May 24–5, 2013); “Feminist Theory and Ordinary
Language Philosophy” (Harvard University, April 2013); and “Ordinary
Language, Linguistics, and Philosophy” (St. Andrews University, June
23–5, 2011). For examples of articles questioning the official history of the
death of OLP, see Uschanov, “The Strange Death”; Ilhan Zeybekoglu, “On
Appeals to ‘Ordinary Language,’” Pharmakon Journal of Philosophy 2:1
(2009), pp. 36–46; Colin Bird, “Political Theory and Ordinary Language:
A Road Not Taken,” Polity 43:1 (2011), pp. 106–27; and Nat Hansen,
“Contemporary Ordinary Language Philosophy,” Philosophy Compass 9:8
(2014), pp. 556–69. There have been three notable collections on Austin pub-
lished recently: Christophe Al-Saleh and Sandra Laugier, eds., John L. Austin
et la philosophie du langage ordinaire: Histoire et actualité de la philosophie
d’Oxford (Hildesheim: G. Olms Verlag, 2011); Martin Gustafsson and
Richard Sørli, eds., The Philosophy of J.L. Austin (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2011); and Savas L. Tsohatzidis, ed., Interpreting J.L. Austin:
Critical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Monographs
offering reappraisals of OLP include Oswald Hanfling, Philosophy and

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Ordinary Language: The Bent and Genius of Our Tongue (New York:
Routledge, 2000); Avner Baz, When Words Are Called For: A Defense of
Ordinary Language Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2012); and Sandra Laugier, Why We Need Ordinary Language Philosophy,
trans. Daniela Ginsburg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
14. On philosophy of language, see, in particular, Charles Travis, Unshadowed
Thought: Representation in Thought and Language (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2000); Jason Bridges, “Wittgenstein vs. Contextualism,”
in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: A Critical Guide, ed. Arif
Ahmed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 109–28; and
James Conant, “Three Ways of Inheriting Austin,” in La Philosophie du
langage ordinaire, pp. 395–415. Nancy Bauer’s book, How to do Things
with Pornography (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), provides
an OLP-inspired account of pornography. On epistemology, see, in particu-
lar, Baz, When Words Are Called For; and Richard Moran, The Exchange
of Words: Speech, Testimony, and Intersubjectivity (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2018). Judith Butler employs a certain reading of Austin’s
notion of the performative in her Excitable Speech: A Politics of the
Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997). Members of a prominent group of
anthropologists and sociologists, who have presented themselves as doing
“ordinary ethics,” use resources from OLP in defending the authority of non-
nomothetic, and in particular, ethnographic methods. In this connection, see
Michael Lambek, ed., Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language and Action
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2010)—in particular, Veena Das’
essay in that collection, “Engaging the Life of the Other: Love and Everyday
Life” (pp. 376–99, esp. 376); Veena Das, “Ordinary Ethics,” in A Companion
to Moral Anthropology, ed. Didier Fassin (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell,
2012), pp. 133–49, esp. 133, and “What Does Ordinary Ethics Look Like?,” in
Michael Lambek, Veena Das, Didier Fassin, and Webb Keane, Four Lectures
on Ethics: Anthropological Perspectives (Chicago: Hau Books, 2015). See also
Webb Keane, Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2016); Crary, Beyond Moral Judgment, and
Inside Ethics: On the Demands of Moral Thought (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2016). On literary theory, see, for example, John Gibson
and Wolfgang Huemer, eds., The Literary Wittgenstein (London: Routledge,
2004); Garry Hagberg, Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning, and
Aesthetic Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); and Toril Moi,
Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and
Cavell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), which is reviewed
later in this issue. On philosophical theology, see, in particular, D.Z.
Phillips, Wittgenstein and Religion (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
1993). And, lastly, for work concerning the methods of the social sciences,
see, for example, Crary, “Wittgenstein Goes to Frankfurt”; Gavin Kitching
and Nigel Pleasants, eds., Marx and Wittgenstein: Knowledge, Morality and
Politics (London: Routledge, 2002); and Mark Theunissen, “The Idea of
Philosophy and Its Relation to Social Science,” Philosophy of Social
Science 44:2 (2014), pp. 151–78.
15. In this respect, see, in particular, John Searle, “Austin on Locutionary and
Illocutionary Acts,” Philosophical Review 77:4 (1968), pp. 405–24; and Grice,
“Logic and Conversation.”

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16. See, in particular, J.L. Austin, lecture 11 of How to Do Things with Words,
ed. J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), pp. 133–47.
17. For the clearest example of this, see Searle, “Austin on Locutionary and
Illocutionary Acts,” esp. p. 407.
18. See, in particular, Paul Grice, “Utterer’s Meaning, Sentence-Meaning, and
Word-Meaning,” in Studies in the Ways of Words, pp. 117–37; and “Meaning
Revisited,” in Studies in the Ways of Words, pp. 283–303.
19. In his writings in the late 1970s, Searle’s account of meaning became more
complex and, on first glance, more in line with OLP (see, in particular, John
Searle, “Literal Meaning,” chap. 5 of Expression and Meaning: Studies in
the Theory of Speech Acts [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979],
pp. 117–36). Although this may seem like a rapprochement with OLP, Searle
remains resistant to fundamental themes in Austin’s work (see Crary,
“Contesting Austin’s Legacy,” §2.1.iv of Beyond Moral Judgment, pp. 69–90).
20. This theme is sounded throughout the work of Austin and Wittgenstein,
though perhaps the best known articulation of it comes from Wittgenstein:
“For a large class of cases of the employment of the word ‘meaning’—though
not for all—this word can be explained in this way: the meaning of a word is
its use in the language” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations,
4th rev. ed., trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker, and Joachim
Schulte, ed. P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte [Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell,
2009], §43; henceforth PI, followed by section number). This remark has
often been misinterpreted as a proposal for a so-called “use theory of
meaning” (see, for example, Paul Horwich, “Meaning, Use and Truth: On
Whether a Use-Theory of Meaning is Precluded by the Requirement that
Whatever Constitutes the Meaning of a Predicate Be Capable of Determining
the Set of Things of Which the Predicate is True and to Which It Ought to
be Applied,” Mind 104:414 [1995], pp. 355–68). For an important critique of
such a reading, see James Conant, “Wittgenstein on Meaning and Use,”
Philosophical Investigations 21:3 (1998), pp. 222–50.
21. See, in particular, Charles Travis, “Pragmatics,” in A Companion to the
Philosophy of Language, ed. Bob Hale and Crispin Wright (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2000), pp. 87–107.
22. In addition to Travis, see Keith De Rose, “Contextualism: An Explanation
and Defense,” in The Blackwell Guide to Epistemology, ed. John Greco and
Ernest Sosa (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 187–205. Travis repeatedly
flags his debt to Wittgenstein and Austin (in addition to “Pragmatics,” see
his books, The Uses of Sense: Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Language [Oxford:
Clarendon, 1989], and Unshadowed Thought: Representation in Thought
and Language [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000], pp. xi, 156–7,
177–8, 240–9) and embraces what is seen as a radical account of the pri-
macy of pragmatics, whereas De Rose is more cautious on both counts.
23. For Austin’s most forceful elaboration of his critique of descriptivism, see
How to Do Things with Words, pp. 1–3, 100.
24. Ibid., p. 150.

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25. In addition to the aforecited texts by Travis and De Rose, see Stewart
Cohen, “Contextualism, Skepticism, and the Structure of Reasons,”
Philosophical Perspectives 13:1 (1999), pp. 57–89.
26. Indeed, it has become more or less standard to cite Austin and Wittgenstein
as historical forerunners to epistemic contextualism (see Patrick Rysiew,
“Epistemic Contextualism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
https://plato. stanford.edu/entries/contextualism-epistemology/ [accessed
December 11, 2018]).
27. Avner Baz has developed a penetrating critique of epistemic contextualism
(see Baz, “Contextualism and the Burden of Knowledge,” chap. 4 of When
Words Are Called For, pp. 134–60). Central to Baz’s work is his demon-
stration of how the organizing assumptions of epistemic contextualism
encourage an artificially constrained view of epistemic discourse that runs
contrary to the analyses of knowledge in Austin and Wittgenstein.
28. Others who contributed significantly to popularizing the understanding
of Wittgenstein traced out in this paragraph are Saul Kripke (see, in par-
ticular, his Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language: An Elementary
Exposition [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982]), and Norman
Malcolm (in particular, see his “The Groundlessness of Belief,” chap. 9 of
Thought and Knowledge: Essays [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977],
pp. 199–216, and “Wittgenstein on Language and Rules,” in Wittgensteinian
Themes: Essays, 1978–1989, ed. G.H. von Wright [Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1995], pp. 145–71).
29. To list them in chronological order, see Malcolm (in particular, “The
Groundlessness of Belief”); Marie McGinn (in particular, Sense and Certainty:
A Dissolution of Skepticism [Oxford: Blackwell, 1989]); Avrum Stroll (in par-
ticular, “Wittgenstein’s Foundationalism,” chap. 9 of Moore and Wittgenstein
on Certainty [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994], pp. 138–59); and
Danièle Moyal-Sharrock (in particular, Understanding Wittgenstein’s On
Certainty [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004]).
30. For work in literary theory that thus claims to align Wittgenstein’s thought
with deconstruction, see, for example, Charles Altieri, Reckoning with the
Imagination: Wittgenstein and the Aesthetics of Literary Experience
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015); Marjorie Perloff, Wittgenstein’s
Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996); and Henry Staten, Wittgenstein and
Derrida (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986). For a critique of these
sorts of assimilations of Wittgenstein to poststructuralism, see Martin Stone,
“Wittgenstein and Deconstruction,” in The New Wittgenstein, pp. 83–117. For
work in literary theory that suggests notable lines of filiation between
Austin’s thought and deconstruction, see for example, Jacques Derrida,
“Signature Event Context,” in Limited Inc, trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey
Mehlman, ed. Gerald Graff (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1988); and Butler, Excitable Speech.
31. The idea of “Wittgensteinian fideism” is often associated with the work of Kai
Nielsen and D.Z. Phillips (see, in particular, Kai Nielsen, “Wittgensteinian
Fideism,” Philosophy 42:161 [1967], pp. 191–209; and Kai Nielsen and

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D.Z. Phillips, Wittgensteinian Fideism? [London: SCM Press, 2005]). For

further suggestions that Wittgenstein inclined toward fideism, see also
Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View?, ed. Peter
Winch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).
32. A list of some of the earliest, trend-setting contributions to the massive lit-
erature that attributes to OLP forms of moral and cultural relativism
might include D.Z. Phillips and H.O. Mounce, Moral Practices (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), and Ilham Dilman, Wittgenstein’s Copernican
Revolution: The Question of Linguistic Idealism (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2002).
33. It would be hard to overestimate Cavell’s role in underlining Wittgenstein’s
and Austin’s interest in transformative moves along these lines. Cavell
inherited from Wittgenstein and Austin an account of the ethical stakes of
speech that goes hand in hand with a view of the primacy of pragmatics—
an account that he continued to critically refine and rehabilitate through-
out his career. Among the notable early works of Cavell’s that deserve
mention in this connection are Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of
Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), and The Claim of
Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1979). The vision of OLP that Cavell develops in these
works and elsewhere strongly influenced a number of high-profile readers of
Wittgenstein, including Cora Diamond, John McDowell, and Hilary Putnam.
34. The resurgence of interest in the idea of ethical perception is associated most
prominently with the work of Iris Murdoch and John McDowell. For one
especially clear articulation, see John McDowell, “Virtue and Reason,” The
Monist 62:3 (1979), pp. 331–50.
35. Although the enterprise of “reformed epistemology,” which is strongly
associated with the work of Alvin Plantinga (see, for example, “Is Belief in
God Properly Basic?,” Noûs 15:1 [1981], pp. 41–51), is often represented as
a revolutionary move within philosophical accounts of religious belief, it
represents at most a minor variation on traditional foundationalist episte-
mologies. For a philosophically more radical, OLP-inspired non-foundational-
ist approach to religious belief, see the writings of, among others, Cora
Diamond (in particular, “Riddles and Anselm’s Riddle,” in The Realistic
Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind [Cambridge: MIT Press,
1991], pp. 267–90), Stanley Hauerwas (in particular, his Working with
Words: On Learning to Speak Christian [Eugene, OR: Cascade Books,
2011]), Stephen Mulhall (in particular, his The Great Riddle: Wittgenstein
and Nonsense, Theology and Philosophy [Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2015]), and Rowan Williams (in particular, his The Edge of Words: God
and the Habits of Language [London: Bloomsbury, 2014]).
36. See, in particular, Stanley Cavell, “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,”
in Must We Mean What We Say?, pp. 73–96, and Michael Fried’s trilogy on
French painting: Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in
the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Courbet’s
Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); and Manet’s
Modernism: Or, the Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996).

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37. In this connection, see, in particular, Pierre Bourdieu, “Critique of Theoretical

Reason,” pt. 1 of The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1990), pp. 23–142.
38. It would not be unreasonable to turn in this connection to the inheritances
and uses of Austin in Jürgen Habermas, Reason and the Rationalization
of Society, vol. 1 of The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas
McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), pp. 95–115. However, Habermas’
inheritance of Austin incorporates the basic limitations of Searle’s inter-
pretation discussed above. More helpful places to look for discussion of the
pertinence of OLP to the practice of social criticism include Peter Winch,
“Philosophical Bearings,” chap. 1 of The Idea of a Social Science and Its
Relation to Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 1–37; and Crary,
“Wittgenstein Goes to Frankfurt.” For a related account of the centrality of
the critique of instrumental reason for critical theory, see J.M. Bernstein,
“The Idea of Instrumental Reason,” in The Routledge Companion to the
Frankfurt School, ed. Peter Gordon, Espen Hammer, and Axel Honneth
(London: Routledge, 2018).
39. In this regard, see, in particular, Herbert Marcuse, “The Closing of the
Universe of Discourse,” chap. 4 of One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the
Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp.
87–123, esp. 89–91, 98–103. Far from registering the promise of OLP,
Marcuse in fact dedicates the seventh chapter of this work (“The Triumph of
Positive Thinking,” [pp. 174–203]) to trying to show that “linguistic philoso-
phy” is, as he puts it, “destructive of philosophic thought, and of critical
thought as such” (p. 181).
40. J.L. Austin, “A Plea for Excuses,” in Philosophical Papers, 3rd ed., ed. J.O.
Urmson and G.J. Warnock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 202.

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