The Maverick Philosopher has had a series of posts on ordinary language philosophy. I'm in full sympathy with his position. It just reminded me, however, that some time ago I summarized Gilbert Ryle's article, "Ordinary Language," on this weblog, because I thought that it presented an interestingly different take on ordinary language philosophy than I had previously come across. The post originally also had an evaluation of Ryle's argument, but (for some reason) I put it in the comments. Since I have Haloscan Basic, the comments are long gone. I also must apologize for the many typos in the post.
I think Ryle's approach would lead to ordinary language philosophy meeting up in some ways with the sort of philosophical approach to which Vallicella is contrasting it. (Of course, there would still be legitimate questions. For example, is Ryle's characterization an idealized version of ordinary language philosophy, a sort of dream of what it might be or become; or was it a realized project, something ordinary language philosophers were actually and systematically doing? And in what ways does ordinary language philosophy, understood in this way, also suffer from limitations?)
For some reason I remember Ryle saying in this article that the phrase 'ordinary language' in 'ordinary language philosophy' meant not 'standard language' but 'language set in order'. This would be a fascinating take, if so; but as I can't find any hint of it in the summary, there's a good chance I'm misremembering.
