Ordinary Language Philosophy

In the AI Story

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 about these concepts typically results from forcing the words into uses that violate their ordinary function. The ghost-in-the-machine picture is a paradigm case: it takes mental vocabulary that functions as behavioral characterization in ordinary use and inflates it into names for hidden inner events, generating pseudo-problems that ordinary language never produced.

The method has characteristic moves. First, attend to how competent speakers actually use the relevant words. Second, notice the distinctions ordinary usage preserves that philosophical tradition has flattened. Third, diagnose philosophical problems as arising from failures to respect those distinctions. Fourth, dissolve the problems by restoring the ordinary usage. The method is patient rather than dramatic; it produces clarifications rather than discoveries.

Applied to AI, the method is immediately productive. Ordinary language has no trouble calling a chess program 'intelligent,' calling a dog 'smart,' calling a thermostat 'responsive to temperature.' The extensions are made easily, with no sense of philosophical crisis. The crisis arises only when philosophers insist on a special, technical sense in which these extensions require the possession of something additional — consciousness, inner experience, a ghost — that ordinary language never required. The extension of 'intelligent' to Claude is an ordinary-language extension; the demand that the extension be metaphysically underwritten is a philosophical imposition.

The movement's reputation suffered in the 1960s and 1970s from critics who charged it with being too conservative — unwilling to challenge ordinary usage even when ordinary usage might be confused. The charge has force against weaker versions of the approach, but Ryle's own practice was more nuanced: he was willing to reform ordinary usage where it proved confused, but he insisted that reform should be informed by attention to what competent usage was actually doing, not by pretheoretical metaphysical commitments that overrode actual use.

Origin

The movement emerged at Oxford in the 1930s and 1940s, with Ryle as a central figure. J.L. Austin's How to Do Things with Words (1962), P.F. Strawson's Individuals (1959), and Ryle's The Concept of Mind (1949) are the canonical works. The method has antecedents in the later Wittgenstein, whose Philosophical Investigations (1953) share many commitments with the Oxford movement while arising from a different philosophical tradition.

Key Ideas

Ordinary language as resource. Competent usage preserves distinctions that philosophical tradition often flattens. Philosophy should start with actual use, not with pretheoretical schemas.

Problems as misuse. Many philosophical problems dissolve when the relevant vocabulary is restored to its ordinary function.

Method is clarification, not construction. The goal is not new theory but restored clarity.

Applied to AI: extension is natural. Ordinary language has no difficulty extending mental vocabulary to machines exhibiting the right behavioral properties. The philosophical difficulty arises only from inflated senses of the terms.

Debates & Critiques

The movement was criticized by Peter Strawson (from within), by W.V.O. Quine (from the American analytic tradition), and by critical theorists (from the Continental tradition) for various versions of the charge of conservatism. The Ryle volume treats the method as valuable but not infallible, and consistent with willingness to reform ordinary usage where reform is warranted by reflection on what the usage was doing.