The ordinary and the experimental: Cook Wilson and Austin on method in philosophy

ABSTRACT

To what extent was ordinary language philosophy a precursor to experimental philosophy? Since the conditions on pursuit of either project are at best unclear, and at worst protean, the general question is hard to address. I focus instead on particular cases, seeking to uncover some central aspects of J. L. Austin’s and John Cook Wilson’s ordinary language based approach to philosophical method. I make a start at addressing three questions. First, what distinguishes their approach from other more traditional approaches? Second, is their approach a form of experimental philosophy? Third, given their aims, should it have been? I offer the following preliminary answers. First, their approach distinctively emphasizes attention to what we should say when. Second, their approach is closer to contemporary experimental mathematics than it is to some prominent forms of contemporary experimental philosophy. Third, some purported grounds for pursuing their aims by way of surveying what individual speakers would say when are not compelling.

KEYWORDS:

• Austin
• Cook Wilson
• ordinary language philosophy
• experimental philosophy

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Michael Beaney, Stephen Butterfill, John Collins, Thomas Crowther, Naomi Eilan, Eugen Fischer, Nat Hansen, Mark Kalderon, Joshua Knobe, Hemdat Lerman, Rory Madden, Mike Martin, Josephine Salverda, Matthew Soteriou, Charles Travis, David Wiggins, and three anonymous reviewers.

Notes

1 My discussion will be highly selective. For further discussion of Cook Wilson’s and Austin’s methods, see Birken-Bertsch, ‘Austin’s Method’; Hacker, ‘The Linguistic Turn in Analytic Philosophy’; Hanfling, Philosophy and Ordinary Language, 26–37; Longworth, ‘John Langshaw Austin’; Lyas, ed., Philosophy and Linguistics; Marion, ‘Oxford Realism: Knowledge and Perception I’, ‘Oxford Realism: Knowledge and Perception II’; Travis and Kalderon, ‘Oxford Realism’; Urmson, ‘Austin, John Langshaw’, ‘A Symposium on Austin’s Methods I’; Warnock, G. J. L. Austin, 1–10.

2 For more detailed discussion of, and references to, Naess’ work, see e.g. Chapman, ‘Arne Naess and Empirical Semantics’ and ‘The Experimental and the Empirical’; Murphy, ‘Experimental Philosophy 1935–1965’.

3 See e.g. Weinberg, Nichols, and Stich, ‘Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions’; Hansen, ‘Contemporary Ordinary Language Philosophy’; Hansen and Chemla, ‘Linguistic Experiments and Ordinary Language Philosophy’.

4 See e.g. Gustafsson, ‘Perfect Pitch and Austinian Examples’; Horvath and Wiegmann, ‘Intuitive Expertise and Intuitions about Knowledge’; Kauppinen, ‘The Rise and Fall of Experimental Philosophy’; Williamson, ‘Philosophical Expertise and the Burden of Proof’.

5 See e.g. Oliver and Smiley, Plural Logic. For sympathetic models of the ways in which facts about correct applicability can depend on collective activities, see e.g. Burge, ‘Individualism and the Mental’; Putnam, ‘The Meaning of ‘Meaning’’; Wiggins, ‘Natural Languages as Social Objects’; Williamson, The Philosophy of Philosophy, 122–7.