Ordinary Language and Life-World Philosophies: Toward the Next Generation in Philosophy and Psychiatry

Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

—Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, Number 11

Karl marx’s distinction between interpreting the world and changing it points by extension to the state of contemporary philosophy and psychiatry. The 1990s resurgence of interdisciplinary work in this area was driven equally by phenomenological scholarship and by initiatives in analytic philosophy. The former reflected the focus in phenomenology on ‘what it is like’ to experience a given mental symptom with the aim of reconstructing (in Husserl’s, 1938/1970, phrase) the life-worlds of people experiencing mental disorders, while the latter reflected directly or indirectly the influence of J. L. Austin and others from the mid-twentieth century ‘Oxford School’ of ordinary language philosophy. Much of this early work was, in the terms of Marx’s distinction, interpretive in nature. That is to say, both the phenomenological life-world and the analytical ordinary language programs amounted to what Austin (1956/7, p. 25) called ‘field work’ in philosophy. As such, they involved exploring the conceptual challenges presented by mental health through observations of the ordinary (or unreflective) experiences and uses of language of those concerned.

Two of us (K. W. M. F. and J. Z. S.) carried out work in ordinary language philosophy of this interpretive kind over this period, respectively on concepts of disorder (Fulford, 1989) and on psychiatric diagnostic concepts (Sadler, 2005). Two of us (G. S. and J. Z. S.), working in phenomenology, contributed to the reshaping of psychiatric nosology by reconstructing the pre-reflexive formal structures of the life-worlds of people experiencing mental health issues, describing clinical diagnostic process (Sadler & Hulgus, 1991; Sadler, 1992) and the implicit values operating in them (Stanghellini, 1997). For all three of us, consistently with Marx’s notion of interpretive philosophy, our primary aim at that time was not to change the concepts with which we were concerned. It was rather to make explicit and bring to attention elements of their meanings of which those experiencing or using them were either unaware or actively rejecting. This was Austinian field work in action. Our aim was to make our target elements of meaning explicit not by discursive argument but by demonstrating their actual (and essential) presence in ordinary (unreflective) language use.

However, ordinary language and life-world field work of this interpretive (we might perhaps call it rather ‘demonstrative’) kind was for Austin and Husserl at least, never an end in itself. This point is clearly explicit in the way Husserl’s pupils developed the concept of ‘life-world’ (Schutz & Luckmann, 1973, 1989). Regarding Austin, one of his pupils, and later literary executor, G. J. Warnock, reports him introducing ordinary language philosophy in a seminar as one way of possibly ‘making a start’ with some kinds of philosophical problems (Warnock, 1989, p. 5). Here, Marx’ notion of change-making (as distinct from interpretive) uses of philosophy comes helpfully into play. For if much of the early work in philosophy and psychiatry was about getting started, the field as it has matured has moved increasingly towards impact – and impact means changing things.

Austin, again, had much to say that is relevant as to how in philosophy and psychiatry we might go about changing things. On methods, in particular, Austin’s model of teamwork in philosophy (Warnock, 1989, pp. 9–10), nicely describes the state of contemporary philosophy and psychiatry. The original working model of the field was one of teamwork based on mutual respect between philosophers and practitioners (‘practitioner’ meaning anyone, service user or service provider, with practical experience of mental health issues). This is why the operative conjunction in the name of the discipline is rightly ‘and’ rather than ‘of.’ Then, as the field has developed, we have seen traditional opponents, analytic philosophy and phenomenology, working increasingly together in partnership. Austin would not perhaps have been surprised by this: he described ordinary language philosophy...