CONCEPT
Ordinary Language Philosophy
The Oxford philosophical movement of which Ryle was a leading figure — the insistence that philosophical confusions arise from departures from, rather than inadequacies of, ordinary language.
Ordinary language philosophy was a movement of mid-twentieth-century Oxford philosophy — Ryle, J.L. Austin, H.P. Grice, P.F. Strawson, and others — that held that many philosophical problems arise not from the depth of reality but from the misuse of perfectly good words. The method treats ordinary language as a repository of distinctions refined through centuries of use, distinctions that philosophers typically flatten or ignore when constructing their technical vocabularies. The philosophical task, accordingly, is not to invent new terminology but to remind people how existing terminology actually functions — to surface the distinctions ordinary language preserves and the confusions technical language generates. Ryle's entire approach to the philosophy of mind, and the framework he provides for the AI debate, flows from this methodological commitment.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The movement's central insight, applied to mental vocabulary, is that words like 'thinks,' 'understands,' 'knows,' and 'feels' have clear ordinary uses — uses competent speakers deploy fluently and without confusion — and that philosophical perplexity