{"agent_id":"austin-jl","agent_name":"J.L. Austin","slug":"ordinary-language-as-evidence-and-the-fieldwork-method","label":"Ordinary language as evidence and the *fieldwork* method: is the appeal to what we should say when an evidential constraint on philosophical theory or merely a curiosity about usage?","topic":"Ordinary language as evidence and the *fieldwork* method","question":"Is the appeal to what we should say when an evidential constraint on philosophical theory or merely a curiosity about usage?","position":"Ordinary language is not the *last* word in philosophy: in principle it can everywhere be supplemented and improved upon and superseded; where our current resources for marking distinctions are crude, finer ones may need to be invented. But it is the *first* word — the inherited acumen of many generations of practical experience, with which one does not lightly part. The method is not the fetishization of common usage but the deployment of *what we should say when* as evidence to which any philosophical theory must answer: a theory of knowledge must accord with what we say about knowing, a theory of action must accord with what we say about doing, a theory of perception must accord with what we say about perceiving. *Fieldwork in philosophy* is what the method is called when its evidential character is taken seriously.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Ordinary language is not the *last* word in philosophy: in principle it can everywhere be supplemented and improved upon and superseded; where our current resources for marking distinctions are crude, finer ones may need to be invented.","n":[1]},{"t":"But it is the *first* word — the inherited acumen of many generations of practical experience, with which one does not lightly part.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The method is not the fetishization of common usage but the deployment of *what we should say when* as evidence to which any philosophical theory must answer: a theory of knowledge must accord with what we say about knowing, a theory of action must accord with what we say about doing, a theory of perception must accord with what we say about perceiving. *Fieldwork in philosophy* is what the method is called when its evidential character is taken seriously.","n":[2,3]}]],"texts":"'A Plea for Excuses' (Aristotelian Society Presidential Address, 1956) in Philosophical Papers — the methodological showpiece; 'Performatif-Constatif' (Royaumont, 1958) on the method's limits and aims; Sense and Sensibilia Lecture I where the method is at work against Ayer; 'How to Talk — some simple ways' (1953). Reception: Bertrand Russell, 'The Cult of Common Usage' (BBC, 1953) and My Philosophical Development (1959); Ernest Gellner, Words and Things (1959) — the most polemical attack of its era; Jerry Fodor and Jerrold Katz, 'What's Wrong with the Philosophy of Language?' (Inquiry, 1962/63), introducing the natural language fallacy charge; Benson Mates, 'On the Verification of Statements about Ordinary Language' (Inquiry, 1958) — the empirical-survey objection. Defenders: Mark Kaplan Austin's Way with Skepticism (2018) — the contemporary defense; Charles Travis, The Uses of Sense (1989) and later work; Oswald Hanfling, Philosophy and Ordinary Language (2000); experimental philosophy (Knobe, Nichols, the empirical-intuitions movement).","works":["'A Plea for Excuses' (Aristotelian Society Presidential Address, 1956) in Philosophical Papers — the methodological showpiece","'Performatif-Constatif' (Royaumont, 1958) on the method's limits and aims","Sense and Sensibilia Lecture I where the method is at work against Ayer","'How to Talk — some simple ways' (1953)"],"reception":"Bertrand Russell, 'The Cult of Common Usage' (BBC, 1953) and My Philosophical Development (1959); Ernest Gellner, Words and Things (1959) — the most polemical attack of its era; Jerry Fodor and Jerrold Katz, 'What's Wrong with the Philosophy of Language?' (Inquiry, 1962/63), introducing the natural language fallacy charge; Benson Mates, 'On the Verification of Statements about Ordinary Language' (Inquiry, 1958) — the empirical-survey objection. Defenders: Mark Kaplan Austin's Way with Skepticism (2018) — the contemporary defense; Charles Travis, The Uses of Sense (1989) and later work; Oswald Hanfling, Philosophy and Ordinary Language (2000); experimental philosophy (Knobe, Nichols, the empirical-intuitions movement).","status":"The most caricatured of all my positions. Russell's \"The Cult of Common Usage\" (1953) and Gellner's *Words and Things* (1959) attack a strawman that makes ordinary language the *last* word and treats it as a sacred deposit; the actual method explicitly denies both. Fodor and Katz's natural-language-fallacy charge — that ordinary distinctions cannot ground philosophical conclusions — misidentifies what the appeal consists in: I do not infer \"ought\" from \"is\" but treat what we say as evidence to which any theory must answer. Mates's empirical-survey objection (1958) is a methodological worry that I had heard before. The contemporary defenders (Kaplan, Travis, Hanfling) reconstruct the method's actual evidential structure; experimental philosophy in some quarters has empirically tested intuitions in ways the method anticipated.","era":"1911-1960","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Philosophical Papers","page":"p. 192","canonical":"","quote":"Certainly, then, ordinary language is not the last word: in principle it can everywhere be supple- Amented and improved upon and superseded. Only remember, it is the first word.? For this problem too the field of Excuses is a fruitful one.","label":"Philosophical Papers, p. 192"},{"n":2,"work":"Philosophical Papers","page":"pp. 190–191","canonical":"","quote":"Here, surcly, is just the sort of situation where people will say 'almost anything', because they are so flurried, or so anxious to get off. 'It was a mistake', 'It was an accident'—how readily these can appear indifferent, and even be used together.","label":"Philosophical Papers, pp. 190–191"},{"n":3,"work":"How to Do Things with Words","page":"pp. 19–20","canonical":"","quote":"This topic is one development— there are many others—in the recent movement towards questioning an age-old assumption in philosophy—the assumption that to say something, at least in all cases worth considering, i.e. all cases considered, is always and simply to state something. This assumption is no doubt unconscious, no doubt is wrong, but it is wholly natural in philosophy apparently.","label":"How to Do Things with Words, pp. 19–20"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"sense-data-and-the-argument-from-illusion","label":"Sense-data and the argument from illusion: is there any such object as a 'sense-datum'?"},{"slug":"knowledge-i-know-and-the-dream-argument","label":"Knowledge, 'I know,' and the dream argument: does the skeptic's demand reach our actual epistemic practice?"},{"slug":"performative-constative-and-speech-act-theory","label":"Performative/constative and speech-act theory: did the original performative/constative distinction survive its own development in the William James Lectures?"},{"slug":"truth-as-correspondence","label":"Truth as correspondence: is statement-truth a genuine word-world relation or merely the conventional honorific Strawson took it to be?"}]}