What's Right about Ordinary Language Method?

"There might be extraordinary facts, even about our everyday experience, which plain men and plain language overlook" (J.L. Austin, "The Meaning of a Word," 69).
One of the most common objections to understanding philosophical problems by comparing them with ordinary ways of speaking is that not all of our ordinary ways of speaking are correct. We may have language games that need to change, because they're based on empirical or ethical mistakes (blaming animals, for example; or talking of some people as if they are less human than others). I very much doubt any ordinary language philosopher would have claimed that how we do speak is always how we should speak; but it is not obvious why. The answer, I suspect, will also explain the way the appeal to ordinary language is supposed to work.

How do we discover that it's wrong to blame animals? It doesn't work, primarily. It causes unhappiness and fails to facilitate anything positive, other than the expression of anger. If it's a language-game (is it, even? we pick it up from other people, but it's practiced on non-speakers), it doesn't do much. It might as well be a "wheel turning idly."

The most important concept in the PI has long seemed to me to be the "very general facts of nature" that form the background to our language-games. If certain very general facts of nature were otherwise, our language games would be different too. That is, "the way we speak" does not exist in a vacuum. It depends on much else. Thus "the way we speak" cannot be the only evidence we consider. What, then, are "very general facts of nature?" Physical facts, certainly, but also the reasons for which we speak (the kinds of aims we have--grounded in physical facts).

But that is all, so to speak, from a third-personal point of view. How does it look from the inside?

The way we should speak depends on a great deal. It depends upon what we're talking about, and what the best description of the case is, given our knowledge, and purposes. The fact that we do sometimes blame animals thus does not imply that we should, given other facts to which we may appeal. It's not the appropriate response. Finding the best description of a strange case, a misunderstanding, or a clash of concepts involves finding the best, most appropriate response. To do this, we must be open to other ways of considering the case in question. For this purpose, many other language-games all have to be functioning too; we must accept sensory evidence, understand and consider competing theories, and empathize. We cannot step outside of language even in bringing this evidence to bear on what we say.

The activity of doing philosophy, in my own practice, is an attempt to find the best description of things; however, the 'things' I want described, and the descriptions I find more salient are those which are "closer to home." I'm no Quinean because I do not give primacy to the same conceptual schemes. To do so would be to abandon my grounds. Our language is crucial to the evidence we already have for things--to what we are committed to; we can't simply remove it, as Quine imagines we can, to see the world as (Humeanly) only behavior and "stimulations of the nerve endings." That may be an appealing minimalist picture, but once we've done that we're no longer talking about ourselves. That picture is wrong because that is not how we are. (Kant was right about this.) Philosophy needs to start in the middle of things, or else it will not address philosophical problems, which arise in us there; throwing out the distinction-richness of the language we ordinarily help ourselves to is a way of not listening to or answering the person asking the question. There is, then, a given; but it is not as simple as sense-data. It is the body of language we acquire and the distinctions we learn to make within, and through it.

I do hold that philosophical problems, to the extent that they are properly philosophical, arise from conflicts among concepts. Some of these conflicts are superficial, and can be undone. (And the wonderful thing about Wittgenstein's method of dissolution, at least in theory, is that it works from the inside. The way it works, in the ideal, is that you find that you are committed to these ordinary ways of speaking, and discover for yourself that the problem arises from a confusion. You discover commitments you already had--not unlike a kind of recollection.) Some of these conflicts are, I think, not at all superficial, and cannot be undone (in this category fall all philosophical problems describable as "conflicts of perspective (1st v. 3rd)). But they can be best described, and perhaps the best description will work some kind of knot-untangling magic; I doubt it, but we will be braver and less idle if we try. Not least because the countless philosophers out there not working in these frameworks keep describing things with abysmal impoverishedness.