Ordinary language philosophy, also known as British linguistic philosophy or Oxford School, is a school of analytic philosophy that originated in the 1930’s and developed in Great Britain (Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976), J. L. Austin (1911-1960), John Wisdom (1904-1993), Margaret MacDonald (1907-1956)). It has influenced philosophers in north America (Max Black (1909-1988), Normal Malcolm (1911-1990)). Australia, and the Scandinavian countries. The underlying thought of this philosophical movement is to denounce the traditional view that philosophy’s task is to present an integrated view of the reality (or the world), and to regard traditional philosophical problems as pseudo-problems that arise as a result of the disorienting influence of language on thought.
However, unlike the adherents of the philosophy of logical
analysis — another variety of analytic philosophy, the ordinary language philosophers consider that the task of the philosophical analysis is not to reform language in accordance with some logical norm, but rather to provide a detailed analysis of the actual use of natural spoken language with the aim of eliminating the misunderstandings which arise as a result of the incorrect usage of language. In particular, according to ordinary language philosophy, such an analysis leads to a clarification of the causes underlying the formulation of philosophical problems; these problems supposedly result from the incorrect application of ordinary word usage. In other words, in contrast to all kinds of tendencies toward the unification of language, they emphasized the diversity of linguistic phenomena and of the methods of using linguistic expressions.
Inspired by the later Wittgenstein's use theory of meaning, the primary concern of ordinary language philosophers is with the question: How else are concepts to be elucidated if not through meticulous attention to the usage of words through which they are expressed? They believed that close attention to the concepts and distinctions that have become embodied in the language is the beginning, if not the end, of philosophy, whilst airy recommendations about how we should think about something frequently fall short of the skill and delicacy with which we do think about.
Owing to the rejection of preoccupation with technicalities in philosophical research, that is, a preoccupation with the use of a specialized conceptual apparatus, and upholding the purity of natural language usage, ordinary language philosophers resolutely oppose scientism in philosophy, especially the scientism of the logical positivists. However, later development of the ordinary language philosophy has proved valuable in the analysis of the logical structure of ordinary language (linguistically) and the study of its semantic possibilities (with regard to the philosophy of language.)