ordinary language philosophy

Penultimate draft. Final version will be published in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology, T. Gendler, J. Hawthorne, and H. Cappelen (eds.). Please do not quote without permission.

Ordinary Language Philosophy

Avner Baz

1. Ordinary Language Philosophy, and Its Contemporary

Relevance

‘Ordinary language philosophy’ (henceforth OLP) refers to a

general philosophical approach—or more correctly to a family

of variously related approaches—that may be situated as

follows with respect to its historical protagonists. Ludwig

Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin mark the two poles of a sort

of magnetic field that may serve to define the approach.

Other philosophers whose work may reasonably be said to

exemplify OLP—Gilbert Ryle, Peter Strawson, Norman Malcolm,

Elizabeth Anscombe and D. Z. Phillips, among others—could be

located somewhere in the field, variously situated with

respect to Wittgenstein and to Austin. Then there are other

philosophers—G. E. Moore, John Wisdom, Richard Hare, and

more recently Philippa Foot, Bernard Williams, Stanley

Cavell, Cora Diamond, and Charles Travis, among others—whose

1

Penultimate draft. Final version will be published in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology, T. Gendler, J. Hawthorne, and H. Cappelen (eds.). Please do not quote without permission. relation to the field, while important for an understanding

of their work, is more complex. As I note below, OLP may

also be seen as having been anticipated by the Socrates of

the early Platonic dialogues and by Kant.1 The aim of this

article, however, is not to present the work of any of the

above philosophers, but rather to present, clarify, defend,

and say something about the contemporary relevance of an

approach to the understanding and dissolution of at least

very many traditional philosophical difficulties that draws

on some of their work.

Naturally, there are many points of contact between

this article and Paul Horwich’s contribution to this volume,

which focuses on the later work of Wittgenstein. There is

considerable agreement between Horwich’s Wittgenstein and my

OLP. There are also some important differences. The main

points of agreements, as well as the main differences, will

be noted in due course.

OLP, as understood in this article, rests on the idea

that many (though by no means all) traditional philosophical

2

Penultimate draft. Final version will be published in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology, T. Gendler, J. Hawthorne, and H. Cappelen (eds.). Please do not quote without permission. difficulties arise when we take our words to express

thoughts, or to otherwise carry commitments or implications—

of the sort, most importantly, that have been taken to

generate traditional philosophical difficulties concerning

truth, knowledge, meaning, or what have you—in virtue of

something called ‘their meaning’, and irrespective of how we

may reasonably be found to mean them, under the

circumstances and given our and their history. In relying on

the meaning of his words to identify his subject matter well

enough and to ensure the sense or intelligibility of what he

says, OLP argues, the traditional philosopher2 expects

something of his words that—given the work we ordinarily and

normally do by means of them and the conditions under which

it may successfully be done—should not be expected of them.

He thereby saddles himself with difficulties that derive

whatever force they seem to have from that very expectation.

Upon encountering a stretch of philosophical discourse

that she suspects of being ultimately nonsensical,3 or only

fit for making sense in ways that would not sustain the

3

Penultimate draft. Final version will be published in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology, T. Gendler, J. Hawthorne, and H. Cappelen (eds.). Please do not quote without permission. philosophical concern supposedly under discussion, one thing

the ordinary language philosopher (OLPer) characteristically

does is to appeal to the ordinary and normal use of key

words in that stretch of discourse. Contrary to recurrent

allegations, the aim of the appeal is not to prove, all by

itself, that the stretch of discourse makes no sense; for,

as I will note below, no such proofs can be had. Rather, the

appeal is meant to weaken the hold of the conviction that

the philosophical stretch of discourse does and indeed must

make sense, simply because it consists of familiar words

that are put together syntactically correctly. The appeal is

also intended to invite those who take that stretch of

philosophical discourse to make clear sense to ask

themselves what that sense might be, and whether, given the

sense or senses it could reasonably be found to have, it

really does succeed in expressing a genuine philosophical

question or difficulty, or is otherwise fit to do the

philosophical work that its author needs or wants it to do.

4


I should immediately note that there is no better way

of clarifying the nature of OLP, and of defending it, than

to show how it works—that is, show it at work. Unfortunately,

however, and for reasons that will become clearer below, it

is hard if not impossible to give a brief illustration of the

practice of OLP and what it can yield. The value of OLP is a

function of the philosophical difficulties it enables us to

put to rest: the more pervasive, far reaching, and

persistent the difficulty, the greater the value of

dissolving it. Simply pointing out local and easily correctable

failures on the part of particular philosophers to make

clear sense with their words, or to make the sense they

evidently need to make given their broader purposes, would

be of little interest, if not merely annoying. But precisely

to the extent that the philosophical difficulty is

pervasive, far reaching, and persistent, a satisfying OLP

dissolution of it would be no simple matter. Later on I will

emphasize that the practice of OLP is continuous with our

efforts outside philosophy to make sense of other people’s

5

Penultimate draft. Final version will be published in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology, T. Gendler, J. Hawthorne, and H. Cappelen (eds.). Please do not quote without permission. and our own words; and just as outside philosophy we cannot

rightfully dismiss someone else’s apparently sensible words

as failing to make clear sense unless we first make an

effort to see what she might have been trying to say, or

needed to say given her broader intentions, so must an OLP

diagnosis be guided and informed by an appreciation of the

philosophical ambitions, presuppositions, and methodological

commitments that have given rise to the difficulty. For this

reason, and regretfully, I will not attempt in this article

an illustration of the practice of OLP, but will only refer

the reader to other texts, others’ as well as my own, that

illustrate it.

In the history of Western philosophy, the most important

predecessor of OLP is Immanuel Kant, especially in the

‘Transcendental Dialectic’ of the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant

there argues that when ‘empiricists’ and ‘rationalists’ give

contrasting answers to questions such as ‘Does the world

have a beginning in time?’ or ‘Is the world made of

6

Penultimate draft. Final version will be published in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology, T. Gendler, J. Hawthorne, and H. Cappelen (eds.). Please do not quote without permission. absolutely simple and non-divisible parts?’, both sides are

attempting to answer a question that rests on a

misunderstanding. The competing answers are therefore

neither correct nor incorrect, but rather are ‘lacking in

sense’, as Kant puts it (1998, A485/B513). Furthermore, at

the root of such traditional ‘antinomies’ lies the

assumption, or fantasy, that our ‘categories’ and concepts

of experience apply to the world ‘as it is in itself’—that

is, as it is apart from ‘the progression of experience’, and

apart from the ‘transcendental’ conditions of that

experience (cf. Kant 1998, A479/B507 and A493/B521). As a

result, Kant says, we think we are succeeding in ‘employing’

our words when we attempt to raise and answer questions such

as the above, when we actually are not (Kant 1998,

A247/B304). This anticipates Wittgenstein’s saying that

philosophical problems arise when ‘Language goes on holiday’

(Wittgenstein 1963 (hereafter ‘PI’), 38) or is ‘like an

engine idling’ (PI, 132).

7


Similarly to Kant, OLPers have also found that at the

root of any number of traditional philosophical difficulties

lies not this or that mistaken answer, or set of mistaken

answers, to some perfectly legitimate and intelligible

question, but rather, precisely, the question itself, and

the assumption that, as raised in the philosophical context

(either explicitly or tacitly), it makes clear sense and has

a correct answer (see Wittgenstein, 1958, 169; Austin 1964,

4; and Ryle 2000, 22). For both the Kant of the

Transcendental Dialectic and the OLPer, what philosophical

difficulty calls for in such cases is diagnosis that would

make the parties give up their original question as only

seemingly intelligible and correctly answerable, as opposed

to arbitration that would find which answers to it are

correct, and which ones are not (see Kant 1998, A423/B451).

For such a diagnosis to be successful it must be informed by

a thorough understanding of the presuppositions, processes,

and considerations that have brought the philosophical

question or difficulty to its present form.

8


At a high enough level of abstraction, the OLPer agrees

with Kant that the philosophical idleness results from the

philosopher’s attempt to use words apart from certain

conditions. Kant likens those sense-conditions to the air

resistance that makes it possible for birds to fly, and

likens the philosopher to a bird who thinks she could fly

(even better) in a vacuum (1998, A5/B8). Wittgenstein likens

those conditions to the friction that makes walking

possible, and likens the philosopher to someone who thinks

he could walk (even better) on slippery ice (PI, 107).

An important difference between Kant and the OLPer is

that the former thought it possible to spell out fully and

once and for all the conditions for the intelligible

employment of each of our philosophically troublesome words,

or concepts, whereas the latter thinks that the plasticity,

open-endedness, and multi-functionality of language,

together with the complexity and ongoing evolution of the

human form of life, make that impossible. Though useful

heuristics and methods could be articulated and exemplified,

9

Penultimate draft. Final version will be published in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology, T. Gendler, J. Hawthorne, and H. Cappelen (eds.). Please do not quote without permission. there is no recipe for what a successful OLP diagnosis of

some stretch of philosophical discourse would look like.

Each diagnosis must be specifically tailored to the stretch

of discourse under consideration, and must begin with an

attempt to recover the theoretical commitments, as well as

the theoretical ambition, that guide and inform the work

responded to.

In attempting to show that, and how exactly, some

philosopher has failed to make clear sense with his words,

or failed to make the sense he evidently wanted or needed to

make, the OLPer must therefore be philosophically informed;

but she ultimately relies on nothing more than what we all

must rely on when, in the everyday, we try to figure out

what sense, if any, someone has made with her words. She

relies, namely, on her familiarity with the normal and

ordinary uses of the words; on her sense of their potential,

when special need arises—philosophical or other—to mean more

than, or just differently from, what they normally and

ordinarily mean; and on her appreciation of the speaker’s or

10

Penultimate draft. Final version will be published in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology, T. Gendler, J. Hawthorne, and H. Cappelen (eds.). Please do not quote without permission. thinker’s (philosophical, personal, practical, moral,

spiritual…) situation. In other words, the OLPer has no more

solid ground for her proposed diagnoses of philosophical

difficulties than our more or less shared sense of what

makes (what) sense, and under what conditions. But neither

do we stand on firmer ground when, outside philosophy, we

speak to, and sometimes for, others, and respond to what

they say. Here too Kant is relevant, for, in his Critique of the

Power of Judgment, he argues that the mutual communicability

and intelligibility even of empirical judgments ultimately

rest, not on concepts or rules, but on a ‘common sense

(Sensus Communis)’ that comes to the fore in aesthetic

claims.4

To see the contemporary relevance of OLP, one only needs to

consider the recent debates concerning what is known as the

method of cases—the method, namely, of theorizing on the basis

of the ‘application’ of terms to theoretically significant

cases. Let ‘X’ stand for some philosophically interesting

11

Penultimate draft. Final version will be published in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology, T. Gendler, J. Hawthorne, and H. Cappelen (eds.). Please do not quote without permission. subject such as knowledge, justification, moral

permissibility, causation, necessary truth, intentionality,

belief (change of belief), linguistic reference, and so on.

As a way either of supporting or motivating some theory of X

(or some related subject), or of undermining some theory of

X, one central thing analytic philosophers have done is

construct (or else simply invoke) cases designed to bring

out, either by themselves or in conjunction with other

cases, significant features of X; and then they have invited

themselves and others to answer questions of the form ‘Is

this a case of X?’, or of the form ‘Is this a case of X or

of Y?’ (where Y is supposed to interestingly contrast with

X5). Call any question of this general form, when asked as a

way of testing some theory of X, ‘the theorist’s question’.

The general working hypothesis has been that the theorist’s

question has a correct answer and that good theories of X

should fit with the ‘correct’ answers to the (relevant)

theorist’s questions.

12


In recent years, the method of cases has been put under

considerable skeptical pressure. One skeptical worry, which

originates from Stephen Stich (1988), is that different

people might, and do as a matter of empirical fact, disagree

with each other in their answers to the theorist’s

questions; and it is not clear why, or with what right,

analytic philosophers should give special weight to what may

merely be their answers. Another worry, which originates from

Robert Cummins (1998), is that there is no way to calibrate

the answers we (find ourselves inclined to) give to the

theorist’s questions—no way of ascertaining that they

successfully, let alone reliably, track whatever it is they

are supposed to track. These skeptical worries have been

instrumental in motivating the recent movement of

‘experimental philosophy’, and have in turn arguably

received some support from the findings of experimental

philosophers. It is important to note, however, that

analytic philosophers did not need to await those findings

in order to have good reason to worry about the soundness of

13

Penultimate draft. Final version will be published in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology, T. Gendler, J. Hawthorne, and H. Cappelen (eds.). Please do not quote without permission. the method of cases as commonly practiced. For, as Ernest

Sosa has recently acknowledged, analytic philosophers have

fundamentally disagreed (and have known themselves to

fundamentally disagree) among themselves in their answers to

many of the theorist’s questions (2011, 461). Moreover, even

where there has been broad agreement among them on the

correct answers to some questions, those answers have tended

to be ‘unsystematic’, as Gendler and Hawthorne have noted

(2005).

In modern Western philosophy in general and in

contemporary Analytic philosophy in particular, reliance on

answers to versions of the theorist’s question has been

central and pervasive. Just how central and pervasive that

reliance has been will become evident once it is noted that

it may also be found in works that do not appear to deploy

the method of cases in its paradigmatic form. Thus, for

example, when Grice, in the course of expounding his causal

theory of perception, and presumably while looking at the

palm of his hand says, ‘It looks pink to me’ (1989, 234)—

14

Penultimate draft. Final version will be published in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology, T. Gendler, J. Hawthorne, and H. Cappelen (eds.). Please do not quote without permission. taking himself to have thereby succeeded in identifying a

particular experience or sense-datum that when properly

caused by the presence of the palm of his hand is supposed

to constitute, on his theory, his seeing that the palm of his

hand is pink—he is, in effect, giving an answer to a version

of the theorist’s question. Every time a philosopher takes

it that some cases just are, or are not, cases of X—

knowledge, causation, moral permissibility, voluntary

action, it looking to one that something is pink, or what

have you—irrespective of whatever might lead someone to

count those cases as cases of X, and irrespective of the point

or function of such counting and of the conditions under which

the counting may felicitously be carried out, she is

relying, in effect, on some particular answer to what I’m

calling a theorist’s question. The soundness of much

philosophical work is at stake, therefore, in the recent

debates between the champions of the method of cases and

those who have been skeptical about it.

15


From the perspective of OLP, the fundamental problem,

once again, lies not with the particular answers we (find

ourselves inclined to) give to the theorist’s questions but

rather with the assumption, shared by all parties to the

ongoing debates concerning the method of cases, that the

questions themselves are in order—in the simple sense that,

as raised by the theorist, they have correct answers6—and

that, as competent speakers, it ought to be possible for us

at least to understand those questions, even if not

necessarily answer them correctly. The assumption, in other

words, is that the meanings of the theorist’s words and how

those words are combined (together with the case as

described by the theorist’s) suffice for fixing the

theorist’s question with a clear enough sense (and a correct

answer). So the assumption shared by all parties to the

recent debates concerning the method of cases is a version

of the assumption that, at the beginning of this article, I

identified on behalf of OLP as lying at the very root of any

number of traditional philosophical difficulties. I will

16

Penultimate draft. Final version will be published in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology, T. Gendler, J. Hawthorne, and H. Cappelen (eds.). Please do not quote without permission. call it ‘the shared assumption’ to register the fact that it

has been made, not only by proponents of the method of

cases, but also by those who have been skeptical of it.

As I note below, the representational-referential and

atomistic-compositional conception of language that

underwrites the shared assumption, and which tends to be

taken for granted in the debates concerning the method of

cases, could be challenged empirically. Needless to say,

empirical theories are underdetermined by their data, which

means that no amount of data could prove that prevailing

conception of language false, and thereby prove false the

shared assumption. I believe it could be shown, however,

that the conception has actually been held on the basis of

no empirical evidence, and that the evidence we do have

actually points in the direction of a Wittgensteinian,

pragmatist-holistic conception of language—a conception on

which the shared assumption is false.7

Another way of questioning the shared assumption would

be to practice some OLP. One way of doing that would be on a

17

Penultimate draft. Final version will be published in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology, T. Gendler, J. Hawthorne, and H. Cappelen (eds.). Please do not quote without permission. case-by-case basis: take some version of the theorist’s

question and ask how it might reasonably be understood if

raised outside philosophy, in the course of everyday

experience, with respect to a case such as the one described

by the philosopher. One thing that could then emerge is

that, depending on the circumstances in which it arises,

there are any number of different senses the similarly

worded but non-merely-theoretical question could have—

different ways the theorist’s words would, or could,

reasonably be understood, depending on the context in which

they are uttered or considered.8 That would show that, pace

the shared assumption, the words (and case) by themselves do

not suffice for fixing the theorist’s question with a

determinate sense, and a correct answer. In other words, it

would show that the theorist has failed to raise a clear

question. That would go some way toward explaining why

competent speakers, who by every reasonable criterion mean

the word(s) in question in the same way and share the

relevant concepts, may nonetheless find themselves

18

Penultimate draft. Final version will be published in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology, T. Gendler, J. Hawthorne, and H. Cappelen (eds.). Please do not quote without permission. disagreeing in their answers to the theorist’s question, and

why their answers tend to be unsystematic. By themselves,

the theorist’s words and case fail to provide his audience

with sufficient orientation—the kind of orientation that is

ordinarily and normally provided by a suitable context.

In Baz (2012a and 2012b), for example, I consider a

fairly broad range of contexts of everyday, non-theoretical

encounters with an actual Gettier case, and I invite the

reader to see that no question about that case that would

naturally arise in any of those contexts would be the

theorist’s intended question—the question, that is, that has

elicited the Gettier intuition in many (but not all) people.

The theorist’s question may be couched in the same words in

which everyday, non-theoretical questions are couched; but

what it comes to—what is required for “understanding” it and

answering it “correctly”—is altogether unlike what the

similarly-worded questions that arise naturally in the

course of everyday experience come to. On the basis of those

OLP reminders, I then argue that whatever the theorist’s

19

Penultimate draft. Final version will be published in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology, T. Gendler, J. Hawthorne, and H. Cappelen (eds.). Please do not quote without permission. question invites us to do, it is not something that we

regularly have to do as part of our everyday employment of

our words; and I argue that it is therefore unclear what, if

anything, is revealed by the answers we (find ourselves

inclined to) give to that question.

Another way of questioning the shared assumption by way

of OLP would be to tackle the conception(s) of language that

might be thought to support it. This is what I take

Wittgenstein to be doing in his rule-following remarks (and

in much of the rest of the Investigations). If the meaning of a

word is thought of as something like a rule that determines

in advance its sense or proper understanding, or the

contribution it makes to the overall sense of utterances in

which it features—and it seems to me that those who take the

theorist’s question to have a determinate sense and a

correct answer must so think of the meanings of the words

that make it up—then Wittgenstein’s remarks invite us to see

that those who thus think of the meanings of words expect of

their words, or of their meanings, something they cannot

20

Penultimate draft. Final version will be published in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology, T. Gendler, J. Hawthorne, and H. Cappelen (eds.). Please do not quote without permission. provide. Indeed, what Wittgenstein’s remarks show is that we

do not really know what it could possibly mean for our

words, or their meanings, to determine all by themselves

what contribution they (may) make to the overall sense or

proper understanding of utterances in every context, let

alone apart from any particular context. So we do not know

what it could possibly mean for the shared assumption to be

true.

2. Elucidating Key Points, Averting Misunderstandings

Having given the above rough characterization of OLP (as

presented and defended in this paper), I now turn to

emphasize and/or elucidate a number of points that are

crucial to a proper understanding of it. Some of the most

common objections to OLP rest on a failure to appreciate or

understand one or more of these points. Alternatively, some

of those objections may be valid, but only when raised

against versions of OLP different from the one presented and

defended here. I have ordered the issues, not by importance,

21

Penultimate draft. Final version will be published in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology, T. Gendler, J. Hawthorne, and H. Cappelen (eds.). Please do not quote without permission. but rather in such a way that, as much as possible, those

that come before prepare the stage for those that come

after.

1. It has often been argued against (this or that version

of) OLP that it focuses merely on words, as contrasted

with the things or worldly phenomena that philosophers

have traditionally tried to become clearer about—

knowledge, freedom, truth, meaning, justice, and so on

(see Horwich, 19). And in recent years, analytic

philosophers such as Scott Soames (2003), Ernest Sosa

(2007), Timothy Williamson (2007 and forthcoming), and

Jason Stanley (2008) have made considerable efforts to

undo the so-called ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy and

to convince us that, pace OLP as they understand it, it

is not true that philosophical problems are all at

bottom linguistic problems. What philosophers have

mostly been interested in, they have insisted, are

things and their natures, not words and their meanings. Thus,

for example, Williamson has recently contended that,

22


pace OLP as he understands it, ‘the epistemologists’

underlying object is knowing itself, not the verb ‘to

know’ or the concept of knowing’ (Williamson

forthcoming). This critique of OLP is doubly misguided.

First, OLP’s appeal to the ordinary and normal use of

philosophically troublesome words is an invitation to

remind ourselves of our linguistic practices, and of the

humanly significant situations and worldly conditions in which

philosophically troublesome words normally and

ordinarily do their work. Far from focusing merely on

words and neglecting the ‘extra-linguistic’ world, OLP

seeks to lead us back, not just to the world we speak

of, but also, and primarily, to the world we speak in.9

And second, to the extent that some particular OLP

diagnosis is successful, it shows that it is actually

the traditional philosopher who has ultimately offered

us nothing but words—‘air-structures’, as Wittgenstein

famously puts it (PI, 118). Moreover, all too often it

is precisely the idea that it should be possible for us

23


to study philosophically interesting “objects” such as

knowledge, truth, understanding, and so on, directly—that

is, not by way of studying ordinary and normal use of

the words by means of which we refer to (express,

invoke, appeal to, claim…) those “objects”—that leads

us to philosophical emptiness. As I will note below,

this philosophically fateful idea rests, in turn, on a

conception of language that is both philosophically and

empirically challengeable.

2. OLP, as I have presented it, may seem purely negative,

or anyway purely critical, providing no positive

understanding of its own of anything, its value being

wholly a function of the pervasiveness, persistence,

and depth of the philosophical difficulties it enables

us to put to rest (to the extent that it does). There

is some truth in this. OLP, as I note below, puts

forward no theses or theories (see PI, 109 and 128). It is

essential to it that it teaches us nothing new. The

understanding it offers is not of that kind. At the same

24


time, however, it offers us something whose value goes

beyond whatever philosophical headaches it enables us

to alleviate. In appealing, in the face of

philosophical difficulties, to our sense of what makes

(what) sense and under what conditions, it reminds us

of aspects of our life and world: things that we must

at some level already know—for they are part of what we

know in knowing how to use competently the words under

consideration, and to respond competently to other

people’s use of them—but which we have not been able to

see clearly, or notice, in part because theoretical

commitments and ambitions have obscured our vision of

them, and in part precisely because of their great

familiarity (see PI, 129). We need to be brought to re-

turn to those aspects and features of our life with

words in order to see them clearly.

3. I said that the OLPer characteristically appeals to the

ordinary and normal use of the philosophically

troublesome word that is under consideration, as a way

25


of becoming clearer about its meaning and thereby

finding out what, if anything, the philosopher could

mean by it. All too often, however, detractors of OLP

have taken the question of use to be the essentially

empirical (statistical) question of what words people

tend to utter under certain (types of) objectively

defined circumstances.10 One obvious problem with the

OLPer’s appeal to ordinary and normal use, thus

understood, is that it seems woefully overly

generalized—relying as it does on nothing more than the

OLPer’s own linguistic tendencies (assuming she can

even get those right from her armchair). Another

apparent problem, which I discuss in #11 below, is that

the question of use, understood as an empirical question,

seems to be very different from the question of sense,

so it is hard to see how one could go directly, as the

OLPer allegedly does, from answers to the first

question to answers to the second.

26


This understanding of the OLPer’s ‘use’ is a

serious misunderstanding, and the two problems

mentioned above are only pseudo-problems. The relevant

notion of ‘use’ here is not empirical but, in a sense,

normative. It refers to a certain kind of human

achievement—however humble and everyday—one that

contrasts not with mentioning the words, but with

letting them idle, or failing to do any (real) work with

them.11 And this means that whether certain uttered

words are actually being used on the occasion of their

utterance, inside or outside philosophy, and if so how,

is never a straightforward empirical matter (which does

not mean that empirical data could have no bearing on

that question). The OLPer’s appeal to use is best

understood, not as an assertion of empirical fact that is

put forth on the basis of very slim evidence, but

rather as an invitation to her audience, and first and

foremost to the traditional philosopher himself, to see

whether they share her sense of what makes (what) sense

27


and under what conditions.12 As Kant suggests, and for

reasons elaborated below, the question of sense is, at

bottom, akin to paradigmatic aesthetic questions.13 At the

same time, however, since both the traditional

philosopher and the OLPer are presumably competent

employers of the words in question who, outside

philosophy, would presumably be able to communicate

with each other smoothly and effectively by means of

those words, there is good reason to suppose that they

do agree, at least to a considerable degree, in their

sense of what sense can be made by means of those

words, and under what conditions.

4. The OLPer’s characteristic appeal is not, ultimately,

to anything aptly called ‘rules’ (of use or usage, of

sense or meaning, or of anything else); and the

philosopher is not, ultimately, charged with a

violation of rules (Contra Horwich 2012, 184; and

contra Baker and Hacker’s (1980, 1985) influential

reading of Wittgenstein). On the understanding of

28


language that informs the practice of OLP as I

understand it, our use of words ‘is not everywhere

circumscribed by rules’, as Wittgenstein puts it (PI,

68); and even this way of putting things is really too

weak and potentially misleading, because, as noted

above, the upshot of Wittgenstein’s remarks on ‘rule-

following’ is that we do not really know what it could

possibly mean for our use of words to be everywhere

circumscribed by rules—in such a way that creative and

yet mutually intelligible extensions of their use would

be neither possible nor sometimes called for, and truth

and falsity, as well as sense and nonsense, would not

ultimately depend on nothing more (nor less) solid than

our ‘agreement in form of life’ or ‘in judgments’ (PI,

241 and 242). For this reason, the claim that our use

of words is not everywhere circumscribed by rules is

not a theoretical claim, for it is not the negation of a

real, intelligible alternative (more on this below). As

Stanley Cavell has argued in his presentation of

29


Wittgenstein’s ‘vision of language’, an individual who

did not possess, to some degree, the ability to

‘project words’ more or less creatively into new

contexts would never become a competent speaker of a

natural language (1979). Cavell has also argued,

following Wittgenstein, that our ability to communicate

effectively by means of language rests on nothing more

(nor less) solid than ‘our sharing routes of interest

and feeling, modes of response, senses of humor and of

significance and of fulfillment, of what is outrageous,

of what is similar to what else, what a rebuke, what

forgiveness, of when an utterance is an assertion, when

an appeal, when an explanation—all the whirl of

organism Wittgenstein calls “forms of life”’ (1969,

52). Since language is plastic and always, in

principle, open for more or less creative extensions,

and since it is ultimately grounded in our sense of

what makes (what) sense, rules are at most more or less

useful generalizations that hold, at best, only for the

30


most part, and for now. (Such generalizations, I would

also argue, are all that contemporary semantic

theorizing could plausibly claim to discover; and it is

no wonder that it is virtually always possible to come

up with counterexamples to any semantic rule the

theorist proposes (as Horwich notes, P. 4)).

5. Since language is plastic and not everywhere

circumscribed by rules, the mere fact that the

philosopher appears to be using his words differently

from how we ordinarily and normally use them does not

by itself show that he is not making sense, or not

making the sense that he evidently wants or needs to be

making. The philosopher could be making new sense with

his words. Whether or not he has done so successfully

is something that needs to be made out (contra Horwich,

20); but the following points must be borne in mind:

a. Typically, the philosopher does not take or present

himself as making new sense with his words, or as

meaning something else by them than what we ordinarily

31


and normally mean by them. In proposing an account of

knowledge, truth, meaning, and so on, the philosopher

typically takes himself to be offering an account of

what we normally and ordinarily call ‘knowledge’,

‘truth’, ‘meaning’, and so on. As Cappelen has recently

put it, when philosophers are interested in knowledge,

for example, ‘they are interested in the phenomenon

ordinary speakers of English talk about when they say

things like “John knows that Samantha is in Paris”’

(PWI, 27).

b. If the philosopher did (successfully) try to make

new sense with his words or mean them differently from

how we normally and ordinarily mean them outside

philosophy, he would invite upon himself the question

of relevance: why should we care about whatever it is

that the philosopher means by ‘knowledge’, or ‘truth’,

or ‘meaning’, and so on? (I do not say that the

philosopher could not possibly have a good answer to

32


the question of relevance; I only say that he would owe

us one.)

c. What the philosopher cannot legitimately or

coherently do—and what he all too often is in effect

trying to do—is take and present himself as meaning by

his words what we normally and ordinarily mean by them

outside philosophy, while evidently uttering them apart

from any of the contexts in which they normally and

ordinarily are used (see PI, 117). For again, how words

may be meant is a matter of how they may reasonably be

taken (to have been meant), under the circumstances and

given their and their utterer’s history; and the

philosopher cannot enact those sense-conditions by

fiat, or by a particular concentration of his mind.

6. The previous point applies to the OLPer just as much as

it applies to the philosopher(s) she criticizes. The

OLPer does not, or anyway should not, take herself to

be immune to the danger—to which all speakers are

vulnerable—of getting lost with one’s words.

33


7. Though OLP takes it that certain tendencies and

aspirations characteristic of traditional philosophy

naturally lead us to get lost with our words, it does

not claim that all philosophy (whatever that might refer

to) is nonsense, and therefore is not self-undermining

(compare Horwich, 18). OLP (as here understood and

defended) does not aim—surely hopelessly—to bring all

philosophizing to an end; its aim—and herein lies a

deep affinity between it and certain forms of

existentialism—is to get the philosopher (in each of

us) to remember that he or she is not absolved of the

conditions of sense, and cannot intelligibly speak, or

mean his or her words, eternally and from nowhere, so

to speak—altogether outside of time and place.

8. It has often been said, by both detractors and

proponents of OLP, that it typically charges the

traditional philosopher with the production of nonsense

(or meaninglessness) (see Williamson 2013, e10). This

common idea is not exactly wrong; and it is true that

34


Wittgenstein tends to present himself as aiming to

expose philosophically induced nonsense (Unsinn) (cf.

PI, 464 and 524). I have come to think, however, that

the OLPer’s use of ‘nonsense’ to name her target is

problematic, and potentially misleading. The failure to

make clear sense with one’s words, or to make the sense

one evidently wishes or needs to make given one’s

theoretical ambitions and commitments, can take any

number of forms. There are indefinitely many ways of

getting lost with our words. For this reason, as I

said, OLP’s diagnoses—though informed by a certain

broad understanding of the forces that lead

philosophers to get lost with their words—need to be

specifically tailored to the work, or works, they

respond to. And this means that the charge of

‘nonsense’ is likely to come either too early or too

late: until she has managed to produce a successful

diagnosis, the OLPer has not entitled herself to

dismissing some stretch of philosophical discourse as

35


‘nonsensical’; insofar as she has produced a successful

diagnosis, calling the diagnosed work(s) ‘nonsensical’

would not be likely to capture well what it has shown.

Moreover, the blanket charge of ‘nonsense’ would be apt

to antagonize the philosopher(s) to whom, as I note

below, the diagnosis should first and foremost be

addressed.14

9. Since there are no rules that could, by themselves,

decide what sense, if any, some stretch of human

discourse makes, the final court of appeal is always,

ultimately, competent speakers’ sense of what makes

(what) sense. We—that is, all competent speakers of the

language—are, in principle, equal authorities when it

comes to sense. The OLPer’s aim must therefore be to

offer the sort of diagnosis that would, ideally, be

accepted by the author(s) of the work(s) diagnosed.15

In this and other respects, OLP’s diagnoses are similar

to the interventions of the Socrates of the early

Platonic dialogues. At least on one (Kierkegaardian)

36


reading of those dialogues, Socrates has successfully

made his point when he has gotten his interlocutors to

acknowledge that they don’t know what they have in mind,

because their words—the very words with which they have

attempted to justify fateful actions or decisions, or

to account for what they themselves claim to be most

important—‘go around and refuse to stay put’ for them,

as Euthyphro puts it to Socrates (Plato 1975, 11).

I said that the OLPer’s diagnosis should ideally be

accepted by its target, because there are obviously

great psychological forces that make it unlikely that

the philosopher him- or herself would accept the

diagnosis, however clear, sensitive, and accurate it

might be. Note, however, that in everyday discourse,

getting someone to see, and acknowledge, that he has

not (yet) said anything clear, or that what he said can

only reasonably be understood in ways that do not fit

with his or her broader intentions and commitments, is

a common occurrence. In this way, the practice of OLP

37


is continuous with everyday practice, and rests on the

same conditions.16

10. Analogously to the realm of aesthetics, the fact

that we must ultimately fall back on our sense of what

makes (what) sense does not mean that anything goes in

the realm of linguistic sense and that there is no room

in that realm for rational considerations, and failure.

More specifically, both inside and outside philosophy

the apparent sense or intelligibility of a certain

stretch of discourse, and its author’s original sense

that it makes clear sense (see Williamson forthcoming),

are not by themselves good evidence that it does make

clear sense; for those may be accounted for by the fact

that the words themselves are (typically) perfectly

familiar and are put together syntactically correctly.

Furthermore, in some cases, the philosopher’s words are

such that we could easily enough imagine contexts in

which they would make sense; and it’s just that the

philosopher evidently (and typically fully consciously)

38


utters them and expects them to make clear sense apart

from any of those contexts (see PI, 117, and

Wittgenstein 1969, remark 10). Moreover, as both Kant

and Wittgenstein have stressed, the apparent sense of

some stretch of philosophical discourse is often

sustained by pictures—of the soul or mind as a gaseous

substance separable from and hidden inside a person’s

body, for example, or of knowledge as a super-strong

connection between a mind and a fact, or of the meaning

of a word as rails that stretch to infinity and

determine its sense or proper use in all possible

contexts, or of the world as a whole as an object that

may come in and out of existence at a certain point in

time, and so on. What the OLPer’s diagnoses (when

successful) reveal is that pictures may create the

illusion of sense, but cannot ensure sense (cf. Kant

1998, A485/B513 and PI, 422-5). So it would not do,

once Kant, for example, has exposed the problematic

nature of the questions that have generated the

39


antinomies, for the empiricist and the rationalist

simply to respond that the questions are apparently

intelligible and make sense to them. They would need,

at the very least, to find ways of legitimately

rejecting Kant’s transcendental idealism—in light of

which those questions are rendered problematic. And

they’ll also need to account for the fact that they

have given contrasting answers to those questions and

that it’s none too clear how the apparent disagreement

between them could possibly be settled.

11. A common allegation against OLP is that its

procedures fundamentally ignore the distinction between

‘semantics’ and ‘pragmatics’. The OLPer notes, it is

commonly alleged, that some particular stretch of

philosophical discourse is, or seems, or sounds, odd,

unnatural, nothing like the sort of thing that might

naturally be said outside philosophy, in the course of

everyday discourse; and from this she (allegedly)

concludes that the philosopher’s words make no sense,

40


or that he is not making sense by means of them. But,

the complaint continues, as Grice (1989) and Searle

(1999) have taught us to recognize, the oddness or

seeming unnaturalness of the philosophical stretch of

discourse is a poor basis for dismissing it as

nonsensical; for it may be that the philosopher is

saying something that makes perfect sense, something

that may well even be true, and it’s only the speech-act

of uttering it that would be odd or unnatural or misleading

or otherwise problematic outside philosophy, or apart from

particular circumstances that evidently do not hold in

the philosopher’s context.

This line of objection to OLP, which one hears

everywhere in one version or another (most recently in

Williamson forthcoming) misconstrues it, and begs the

question against it. Both Grice and Searle give a false

and misleading account of the point of departure of

OLP. Both suggest that the ordinary language

philosopher begins by ‘noticing’ or ‘observing’ that a

41


particular form of words that the philosopher has

produced would be ‘odd’ or ‘inappropriate’ or ‘bizarre’

to utter under normal circumstances, or apart from some

special circumstances (Grice 1989, 3 and 235; Searle

1999, 141-2). Grice and Searle would have us think that

what would and would not be appropriate to say under,

or apart from, this or that set of circumstances is all

the ordinary language philosopher has got to go on in

her criticism of the philosopher’s words. And then they

offer their counter-explanation of the ordinary

language philosopher’s alleged data: What the

philosopher says is perfectly clear and, in particular,

is either true or false (valid or invalid, sound or

unsound); it’s just that actually saying it apart from

suitable circumstances—where, again, it is assumed that

there is no question about the identity of the it that

would be said, the ‘proposition’ or ‘thought’ that

would be ‘expressed’—would somehow be inappropriate or

misleading or otherwise conversationally infelicitous.

42


To support their counter-explanation, they remind us

that the utterance of any English sentence—even a

sentence as simple and (presumably) impossible not to

understand as ‘This pillar-box is red’ (Grice 1989,

235) or ‘He has five fingers on his left hand’ (Searle

1999, 143)—would be odd if made in circumstances in

which we could find no point for it. Even so, they

insist, it would still be clear what the utterer was

saying, even if not why he said it; and what he would

say could very well still be true. In fact, its being

obviously or trivially true may be precisely the reason

why we find saying it odd.

All of this might have been pertinent for an

assessment of OLP, if the ordinary language philosopher

really began where Grice and Searle say she begins. But

she doesn’t. She doesn’t merely find the philosopher’s

stretch of discourse odd, or bizarre, or out of place

in ordinary contexts, and she certainly does not find

it obviously or trivially true. Rather, she finds that,

43


as produced by the philosopher, it is lacking in clear

sense, or only fit for being made sense of in ways that

would actually undermine the philosopher’s project. And

insofar as she is able to show this, the Gricean

machinery of conversational ‘implicature’ and Searle’s

‘assertion fallacy’ are both wholly beside the point.

‘The Issue’, Travis has argued against Grice, ‘is

one of making sense; not one of what we wouldn’t say’

(1991: 241). Travis then goes on to show, masterfully

and convincingly it seems to me, that none of the

English words or locutions that Grice himself is

relying on in presenting his theory of saying, meaning,

and ‘implicature’ (precisely the theory that was

supposed to allow us to legitimately set aside the

objections that OLPers have raised against traditional

philosophizing), and in presenting his ‘causal theory

of perception’, is fit to do the theoretical work Grice

evidently needs it to do, given his theoretical

commitments and ambitions.

44


12. The practice of OLP is informed by a certain

understanding of the nature of (certain kinds of)

philosophical difficulties, but it is not based on

anything aptly called ‘a theory’ (of language, or

meaning, or anything else). Contra Williamson (2013,

e10), offering the kind of diagnosis that would ideally

get the producer of a stretch of discourse, or at least

his audience, to see that he has not (yet) succeeded in

saying something clear, or that he does not really know

what he is saying or thinking, need not rely on any

‘assumptions about the nature of meaning’. That we can

sometimes get lost with our words, and that appeals to

the ordinary and normal use of our words can help us

find our way again, or find that we have no clear way,

is part of normal practice, part of what any theory of

language would need to explain. The “assumption” that

the traditional philosopher is not immune to the risk

faced by all speakers of getting lost with their words

is hardly theoretical; and neither is the idea that

45


relying on the meanings of one’s words to ensure the

sense of what one is saying, while at the same time

uttering them apart from any of the contexts in which

they normally and ordinarily do their works—as

philosophers have been prone to do—increases that risk

significantly.

13. Nor, and here I am in full agreement with Horwich,

is Wittgenstein offering a theory of meaning when he

famously suggests that ‘for a large class of cases—

though not for all—in which we employ the word

“meaning”, one could explain it thus: the meaning of a

word is its use in the language’ (PI 43). And since he

is not offering a theory, he is not, preposterously,

offering one ‘on almost no evidence’ (Williamson 2013,

e8). As Williamson himself has usefully reminded us,

the ability to use a word competently in a wide enough

range of contexts, and to respond competently to other

people’s uses of it, is our ordinary criterion for ‘knowing

the meaning’ of that word (Williamson 2007, 97, and

46


2005, 11-12). And this, again, means that the OLPer’s

invitation to remind ourselves of how the

philosophically troublesome word is ordinarily and

normally used, as a way of becoming clearer about what

may be said by means of it, rests on no substantive

theoretical commitments. By contrast, the traditional

philosopher’s assumption that the sense of some stretch

of philosophical discourse is, in principle, ensured by

whatever it is that the philosopher’s words carry with

them from one occasion of use to another—call it ‘their

meanings’—is a substantive theoretical assumption that

may be challenged, both philosophically and

empirically.

14. Though the practice of OLP rests on no substantive

theoretical presuppositions, empirical studies and

observations concerning language use and acquisitions

could play a role in the attempt to defend the practice

and to weaken the hold of the theoretical commitments

that have tended to inform both the assumption that the

47


traditional philosopher is—even must be—making clear

sense with his words and the resistance to OLP’s

diagnostic interventions. Wittgenstein famously urges

the philosopher not to think—about what must be true of

all of the things we call ‘games’, or ‘languages’, and

more broadly about what must be involved in the

acquisition and use of language in general and

philosophically troublesome words in particular—but

rather to look and see (PI 66).17 I believe it can be shown

that though contemporary Analytic philosophers tend to

present themselves as open and attentive to the

findings of empirical science, they routinely rely on

representational-referential (as opposed to broadly

pragmatist) and atomistic-compositional (as opposed to

broadly holistic) assumptions concerning language use

and acquisition—not only in their rejection of OLP but

also in their presentation and defense of their own

practice—that are actually supported by no empirical

evidence.18 Coming back to point 1 above, the “objects”

48


(“things”, “items”) to which philosophically

troublesome words such as ‘know’, ‘cause’, ‘mean’,

‘pain’, and so on, are supposed to refer, and which are

supposed to be theoretically separable from the

meanings of those words (or from the concepts they

embody)—as those meanings (or concepts) manifest

themselves in our ordinary and normal use of those

words—those “objects” are, at best, posits of what may

turn out to be a bad theory of language. At worst, they

are nothing more than shadows cast by the ways we talk,

to use Huw Price’s apt image (2011, 319).19

49

1 Kierkegaard, in his therapeutic treatment of various confused attempts to express

moral, philosophical, and religious positions, is another important precursor of

OLP.

2 The term ‘traditional philosopher’ will be used in this paper more or less

technically, to refer to whoever may be shown to have gotten him or herself into

philosophical trouble by forming or otherwise committing him or herself to the

above expectation. I do not mean to imply that all traditional philosophy is

characterized by the above predicament and stands in need of OLP intervention. I

will throughout refer to the traditional philosopher as a ‘he’, because, for any

number of reasons—some lamentable, others perhaps not—the tendencies and

predicament characteristic of that philosopher have overwhelmingly manifested

themselves in men much more than in women.

3 The stretch of philosophical discourse need not be put forward assertively by the

philosopher. Sometimes it is uttered by the protagonist(s) of what is meant to be

an example of a stretch of ordinary (i.e., not philosophically motivated) discourse

—an example that is supposed to support the philosopher’s argument. In Baz 2012a, I

discuss several such examples (or really “examples”, for in many cases it is very

hard to imagine anyone who is not philosophically motivated uttering the strings of

words that the philosopher has put in the mouths of his protagonists).

4 I explore this point of deep affinity between Kant’s third Critique and OLP in Baz

2015b.

5 As for example merely believing that such and such presumably relates to knowing that

such and such, or changing one’s belief that such and such presumably relates to still

believing that such and such but in a different way.

6 Even if only relative to the content of someone’s or some community’s concept of

X (see Goldman 2007, 15). The assumption that the theorist’s questions are, in

principle, clear enough to be answered correctly or incorrectly has been made even

by the strongest critics of the method of cases, not to mention its defenders. In

pressing his ‘calibration’ objection to the method, Cummins, for example, never

doubts that our answers to the theorist’s questions may or may not be ‘accurate’

(1998, 124). And Jonathan Weinberg, who among the experimentalists is arguably the

most skeptical of the method of cases, has recently spoken, in a co-written paper,

of the theorist’s question as inviting us to ‘track philosophical truths’ (Weinberg

et al. 2010, 332 and 338). The philosophical truths may be relative, or context-

sensitive (Ibid, 332); but they are nonetheless truths, which means that the

theorist’s question is taken to have a correct answer (even if only relatively and

context-sensitively). Weinberg’s skepticism concerns our ability, and specifically

that of philosophers, to track those ‘truths’ reliably. It does not concern the

existence of such truths or the sense of the questions they are supposed to answer.

See also Weinberg 2007, which is premised on the assumption that intuitive answers

to the theorist’s questions are true or false, correct or incorrect. On the other

side of the field, those who have responded to Weinberg on behalf of armchair

philosophizing have all presupposed—as armchair philosophers themselves have all

presupposed—that answers to the theorist’s questions are either true or false,

correct or incorrect, and may therefore be assessed in terms of their reliability

(see, for example, Williamson 2007, Jackson 2011, Ichikawa 2012, and Nagel 2012,

and Cappelen 2012).

7 I argue for this in Baz 2015a.

8 Compare Travis 1991, 250.

9 Horwich’s response in this volume to the charge that Wittgenstein’s work focuses

on language rather than reality strikes me as still mistakenly beholden to a

representationalist-referential (even if also deflationist) conception of language

and linguistic meaning. When he contends that philosophers, on Wittgenstein’s view,

are not really mistaken about language but rather are mistaken ‘about the world

itself’, which he then glosses in terms of the ‘objects’ and ‘properties’ our words

refer to (p. 19), he fails to take to heart, it seems to me, Wittgenstein’s

questioning of the ‘Augustinian’ assumption that the meaning of words—in

particular, philosophically troublesome words such as ‘know’, ‘true’, and ‘cause’—

is best understood on the model of ‘object and designation’ (PI, 293), his urging

us to recognize the variety (and complexity) of ways in which words are used (see

PI, 182), and his proposal that at least certain types of traditional philosophical

difficulties will not go away until we ‘make a radical break with the idea that

language always functions in one way, always serves the same purpose: to convey

thoughts—which may be about houses, pains, good and evil, or anything else you

please’ (PI, 304).

10 A very clear example of this is Soames’ understanding of ‘use’ in his critique

of OLP (cf. Soames 2003, 129).

11 The Austinian inflection of Wittgenstein’s concern with what he calls ‘use’ is

the emphasis, in Austin 1999, on what we do with our words, and Austin’s reminders

to the effect that there are conditions for doing one thing or another with one’s

words. You can no more just decide, or bring it about just by willing, that your

utterance will constitute, for example, a claim, than you could just decide or bring

it about by willing that your saying ‘I’m sorry’ with no one to hear would

constitute an apology.

12 This understanding of the force of the philosophical appeal to ordinary language

is elaborated in the opening pages of Cavell (1979).

13 See Cavell (1969, 73-96). I pursue this link between Kant’s account of beauty

and the practice of OLP in Baz (2015b).

14 An exemplary OLP text in this respect is Stanley Cavell’s ‘Knowing and

Acknowledging’ (in Cavell 1969). Responding to a particular form of debate between a

skeptic and an anti-skeptic about other minds, Cavell nowhere charges either of the

two parties with the production of sheer nonsense. His terms of criticism are far

more specific than that.

15 Compare Cavell: ‘[A] test of his [the OLPer’s] criticism must be whether those

to whom it is directed accept its truth, since they are as authoritative as he is

in evaluating the data upon which it will be based… But what it means is not that

the critic and his opposition must come to agree about certain propositions which

until now they have disagreed about…What this critic wants, or needs, is a

possession of data and descriptions and diagnoses so clear and common that apart

from them neither agreement nor disagreement would be possible’ (1969, 241).

16 Interestingly, recent attempts to defend the philosophical ‘method of cases’ in

its traditional form—that is, theorizing on the basis of the ‘application’ of terms

to ‘cases’—have rested on the claim that that practice is continuous with the

everyday, nonphilosophical employment of our words (see Williamson 2007, and

Cappelen 2012). For reasons stated in section 1, I think this claim to continuity is

mistaken.

17 One thing Wittgenstein says we’ll see if we look without theoretical prejudice

is that among the various things we call or refer to by a common name such as

‘game’ or ‘language’ there holds a ‘family resemblance’; and this as against the

prevailing philosophical assumption that there must be something in common to all

of the things we call by the same word, which (if we are competent) makes us call or

refer to them by that word. This claim of Wittgenstein’s has received significant

empirical support (see Rosch & Mervis 1975, Rosch 1978). In Baz (2015a) I propose,

on the basis of empirical studies of first language acquisition, that the idea of

‘family resemblance’ may be extended in a non-representationalist direction, to

describe not just the relation among the different things referred to by the same

word but also more broadly the relation among the different functions of

philosophically troublesome words such as ‘know’ and ‘cause’.

18 I argue for this in detail, on the basis of empirical studies of first language

acquisition, in Baz 2015a.

19 The recurrent idea that philosophers should study philosophically interesting

“objects” directly, rather than by way of studying our concepts of those “objects”—

as those concepts manifest themselves in our use of the corresponding words—is

essentially the same as the position Price (2011) calls ‘object naturalism’. About

object naturalism Price says that it ‘rests on substantial theoretical assumptions

about what we humans do with language—roughly, the [representationalist] assumption

that substantial “word-world” semantic relations are part of the best scientific

account of our use of the relevant terms’ (2011, 190). Price argues, however, that

‘by the naturalist’s own lights, the [representationalist’s] proto-theory ought to

count as an hypothesis about what it is right to say about language itself, from a

naturalistic standpoint. If it turned out to be a bad hypothesis—if better science

showed that the proto-theory was a poor theory—then the motivation for the

Naturalist’s version of the matching game [of words and worldly items] would be

undermined’ (2011, 5; see also 209; see also Price 2013, 4, 14, and 25).

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