H. P. Grice, "Post-War Oxford Philosophy"

ordinary language philosophy, a loosely structured philosophical movement holding that the significance of concepts, including those central to traditional philosophy – e.g., the concepts of truth and knowledge – is fixed by linguistic practice. Philosophers, then, must be attuned to the actual uses of words associated with these concepts. The movement enjoyed considerable prominence chiefly among English-speaking philosophers between the mid-1940s and the early 1960s. It was initially inspired by the work of Wittgenstein, and later by John Wisdom, Gilbert Ryle, Norman Malcolm, and J. L. Austin, though its roots go back at least to Moore and arguably to Socrates. Ordinary language philosophers do not mean to suggest that, to discover what truth is, we are to poll our fellow speakers or consult dictionaries. Rather, we are to ask how the word ‘truth’ functions in everyday, nonphilosophical settings. A philosopher whose theory of truth is at odds with ordinary usage has simply misidentified the concept. Philosophical error, ironically, was thought by Wittgenstein to arise from our “bewitchment” by language. When engaging in philosophy, we may easily be misled by superficial linguistic similarities. We suppose minds to be special sorts of entity, for instance, in part because of grammatical parallels between ‘mind’ and ‘body’. When we fail to discover any entity that might plausibly count as a mind, we conclude that minds must be nonphysical entities. The cure requires that we remind ourselves how ‘mind’ and its cognates are actually used by ordinary speakers.