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Linguistic corpora and ordinary language: on the dispute between Ryle and Austin about the use of 'voluntary', 'involuntary', 'voluntarily', and 'involuntarily'

Zahorec, M., Bishop, R., Hansen, N. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5074-1075, Schwenkler, J. and Sytsma, J. (2023) Linguistic corpora and ordinary language: on the dispute between Ryle and Austin about the use of 'voluntary', 'involuntary', 'voluntarily', and 'involuntarily'. In: Bordonaba-Plou, D. (ed.) Experimental Philosophy of Language: Perspectives, Methods and Prospects. Logic, Argumentation and Reasoning (33). Springer, Cham, pp. 121-149. ISBN 9783031289071

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To link to this item DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-28908-8_7

Abstract/Summary

The fact that Gilbert Ryle and J.L. Austin seem to disagree about the ordinary use of words such as ‘voluntary’, ‘involuntary’, ‘voluntarily’, and ‘involuntarily’ has been taken to cast doubt on the methods of ordinary language philosophy. As Benson Mates puts the worry, ‘if agreement about usage cannot be reached within so restricted a sample as the class of Oxford Professors of Philosophy, what are the prospects when the sample is enlarged?’ (Mates 1958, p. 165). In this chapter, we evaluate Mates’s criticism alongside Ryle’s and Austin’s specific claims about the ordinary use of these words, assessing these claims against actual examples of ordinary use drawn from the British National Corpus (BNC). Our evaluation consists in applying a combination of methods: first aggregating judgments about a large set of samples drawn from the corpus, and then using a clustering algorithm to uncover connections between different types of use. In applying these methods, we show where and to what extent Ryle’s and Austin’s accounts of the use of the target terms are accurate as well as where they miss important aspects of ordinary use, and we demonstrate the usefulness of this new combination of methods. At the heart of our approach is a commitment to the idea that systematically looking at actual uses of expressions is an essential component of any approach to ordinary language philosophy.

Item Type:Book or Report Section
Refereed:Yes
Divisions:Interdisciplinary Research Centres (IDRCs) > Centre for Cognition Research (CCR)
Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Humanities > Philosophy
ID Code:107207
Publisher:Springer

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