Summary: Gilbert Ryle is always a bit difficult to summarize, but here's my attempt at it (with lots of block-quoting - sorry). The article is an examination of arguments that turn on "references to what we can and cannot say" (108), and in particular, with the dispute over whether these sorts of arguments are legitimate. He does this by examining the phrase "the use of ordinary language."
1. "Ordinary Language." Ryle carefully distinguishes "the use of ordinary language" from "ordinary linguistic usage" and "the ordinary use of the expression '...' ". In "the use of ordinary language" the word 'ordinary' is in contrast with things like 'esoteric', 'technical', 'poetical', 'archaic', etc. It indicates the vernacular or common language. In "the ordinary use of the expression," however, 'ordinary' is contrasted with 'non-stock' or 'non-standard'. If a term is very technical, laypeople will not know its 'ordinary' use; if it is a conversational term, most people will know its 'ordinary' uses (and many of its non-standard uses, too, if it has any). This sort of 'ordinary' is "philosophically colourless" (110); when we use it, all we are doing is making it easier for others to get the reference, and disputes about which uses are the standard uses are not philosophically interesting. When a specialist of any sort is looking at the ordinary use of a given expression, he is not looking at its colloquial use, but at its special use.
2. "Use." (This is a good section, so I'll blockquote quite a bit.) Ryle notes that the operative word in the phrase "the ordianry use of the expression" is 'use', not 'expression':
Hume's question was not about the word 'cause'; it was about the use of 'cause'. It was just as much about the use of 'Ursache'. For the use of 'cause' is the same as the use of 'Ursache', though 'cause' is not the same word as 'Ursache'. Hume's question was not a question about a bit of the English language in any way in which it was not a question about a bit of the German language. (112)
He then goes on to note,
Putting the stress on the word 'use' helps to bring out the important fact that the enquiry is an enquiry not into the other features or properties of the word or coin or pair of boots, but only into what is done with it, or with anything else with which we do the same thing. That is why it is so misleading to classify philosophical questions as linguistic questions--or as non-linguistic ones.
It is, I think, only in fairly recent years that philosophers have picked up the trick of talking about the use of expressions, and even made a virtue of so talking. Our forefathers, at one time, talked instead of the concepts or ideas corresponding to expressions. This was in many ways a very convenient idiom, and one which in most situations we do well to retain. It had the drawback, though, that it encouraged people to start Platonic or Lockean hares aboutthe status and provenance of these concepts or ideas. (112-113)
He continues this brief historical discussion a bit more to suggest why philosophers started talking about uses of expressions, then notes that one of the great merits fof this idiom is that it allows us to talk about misuse.
3. "Use" and "Utility." There are problems with the idiom, however; one of which is that people can read 'use' as 'utility' or 'usefulness', and conclude that the use of an expression is what it is useful for. This can sometimes be profitable, but there is a fundamental difference between 'use' (vs. uselessness) and 'use' (vs. misuse). "Questions about the use of an expression are often, though not always, questions about the way to operate with it; not questions about what the employer of it needs it for" (115). The What-for question can be asked; but usually the answer is obvious.
4. "Use" and "Usage." "Much more insidious than this confusion," Ryle says, "is the confusion between a 'use', i.e., a way of operating with something, and a 'usage'" (115). This confusion, which Ryle attributes to "lots of philosophers," is a howler, since a usage is "a custom, practice, fashion or vogue"; there is no such thing as a misusage. Investigation of usage is philological; learning a usage is learning about historical or "sociological generalities." Learning a use, however, is learning how to do something. To avoid confusions like these, Ryle suggests using the cognates of 'employ' instead.
Ryle finishes his discussion of "the use of the expression" by pointing out that we can ask whether a person knows how to use a certain word, but not whether a person knows how to use a certain sentence. We can, of course, talk about the use or misuse of sentences when those sentences have "congealed" into a single phrase, but this is something different. (Ryle doesn't go into the issue; I presume it is due to the fact that we can in certain situations treat phrases or even sentences as words; but this is different from the ordinary way sentences are involved in our language.) In a typically Rylean analogy, he suggests that words are to ingredients of a pie somewhat like sentences are to pies; a cook can misuse ingredients of a pie, but cannot in this way misuse the pie itself. We can have dictionaries of words, but not dictionaries of sentences; this is not merely because of the size a sentence-dictionary would have to be, but because sentences, uncongealed into word-like phrases, are just not the sort of thing of which one could have a dictionary. The 'meaning or use of a word', therefore, is radically different from the 'meaning or use of a sentence'.
Having looked at these issues, Ryle then returns to the subject of philosophy and ordinary language:
The vogue of the phrase 'the use of ordinary language' seems to suggest to some people the idea that there exists a philosophical doctrine according to which (a) all philosophical enquiries are concerned with vernacular; and (b) in consequence, all philosophical discussions ought to be couched entierly in vernacular dictions. The inference is fallacious, though its conclusion has some truth in it. (121)
Merely from the fact that someone is writing about wit it does not follow that they should be writing wittily; just as it does not follow from the fact that someone is writing about words of Celtic origin that their point will be better expressed if it is phrased entirely in words of Celtic origin. It is true that slavery to jargon is bad writing in any case, although jargon has its uses; but "there is no a priori or peculiar obligation laid upon philosophers from talking esoterically," despite there being "a general obligation upon all thinkers and writers to try to think and writeboth as powerfully and as plainly as possible" (122).
He then goes on to say "two philosophically contentious things":
(a) There is a special reason for philosophers to jettison regularly the technical terms of their predecessors, beyond the reasons it can be helpful for any specialist to do so: "There is no peculiar field of knowledge or adeptness in which philosophers ex officio make themselves the experts--except of course the business of philosophising itself" (124).
(b) This is best put in Ryle's own words:
The appeal to what we do and do not say, or can and cannot say, is often stoutly resisted by the protagonists of one special doctrien, and stoutly pressed by tis antagonists. This doctrine is the doctrine that philosophical disputes can and should be settled by formalising the warring theses....
Of those to whom this, the formaliser's dream, appears a mere dream (I am one of them), some maintain that the logic of everyday statements and even the logic of teh statemetns of scientists, lawyers, historians and bridge-players cannot in principle be adequately represented by the formulae of formal logic. The so-called logical constants do indeed have, partly by deliberate prescription, their scheduled logical powers; but the non-formal expressions both of everyday discourse and of technical discourse have their own unscheduled logical powers, and these are not reducible without remainder to those of the carefully wired marionettes of formal logic. (124-125)
Ryle then delivers his verdict on the dispute opening the paper:
Well, then, has philosophy got something to do with the use of expressions or hasn't it? To ask this is simply to ask whether conceptual discussions, i.e., discussions about the concept of, say, voluntariness, infinitesimals, number or cause, come under the heading of philosophical discussions. Of course they do. They always have done, and they have not stopped doing so now.
He does note that formulating the discussion in these terms is only helpful in certain contexts; it's a long-winded description of what's being done, and more importantly, "preoccupation with questions about methods tends to distract us from prosecuting the methods themselves" (126). There are, however, compensating advantages, since it helps us distinguish what we're doing from what other people are doing, e.g., it helps remind us, when looking at what it means to perceive something, that we are not engaging in the psychology of perception.
I'll give my rough evaluation of this a bit later (prob. in the comments).
