This book recounts the history of the “ordinary language epistemology” (OLE) movement. Beyond capturing the key moments of OLE’s origins and subsequent misinterpretation, it argues for the abiding significance of this approach to contemporary epistemology.
What do we mean when we talk of knowledge? If you compare what philosophers have said about knowledge, you might notice that our most familiar uses of knowledge expressions—phrases such as “know what I mean?”, “you should know better”, “before you know it”—appear nowhere in epistemological analyses. But what if our messy, variegated, and mundane uses of knowledge language reveal something significant about what we understand knowledge to be? In the mid-20th century, members of the “ordinary language philosophy” movement attempted to reorient the study of epistemology around the stakes and conditions of our ways of expressing knowledge to one another in various concrete, ordinary contexts. This book provides novel readings of the key texts from the OLE tradition, including the works of Gilbert Ryle, J.L. Austin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and H.P. Grice. It then revisits fateful misappropriations of OLE in strains of analytic epistemology and critical theory. Finally, the book shows how OLE provides a liberatory methodology for contemporary social epistemology. It argues that we need to abandon the sideways-on approach to conceiving of epistemic discourse that still holds sway. Instead, we must ask what we mean when we talk of knowledge with one another and the ways in which social power malforms the production and reception of such expressions.
Unenthralling Knowledge will appeal to researchers and graduate students working in epistemology, philosophy of language, and the history of analytic philosophy.