Ordinary language aesthetics under review: a reply to its critics

Recent critiques of ordinary language aesthetics have gathered force. Some accuse the tradition of quietism — of failing to deliver the normative verdicts aesthetic theory has historically promised. Others argue that an appeal to linguistic use cannot settle borderline cases or keep pace with the resources that psychology and evolutionary theory have brought to taste. A more politically attuned objection holds that the lexicon of ordinary speech smuggles in unjustified preferences, masking the social construction of beauty and ugliness. Each critique touches a live nerve in the tradition associated with Wittgenstein, Cavell, Sibley, and their successors.

The mischaracterisation matters, because ordinary language aesthetics has become quietly influential in literary scholarship and the philosophy of art taught at Australian institutions from the Australian National University in Canberra to the University of Melbourne. To respond responsibly, we need to see what the method actually involves, and where it has been unfairly reduced by its more impatient critics.

What the critiques actually target

The fairest objections grant that the early promises of an ordinary language approach were sometimes overstated. Cavell's reading of Wittgensteinian criteria risked being taken as a substitute for substantive aesthetic argument, and Frances Ferguson's late-1980s essay warned that what looks like ordinary talk can be jargon with a friendly face. These are worries worth acknowledging in any restatement.

Less fair are critiques that treat ordinary language aesthetics as an empiricist sociology of taste. The critic assumes that looking at ordinary usage means counting up what most people say and deriving a verdict on what is beautiful. To work as Cavell, Passmore, and the early Sibley envisaged, one attends to what can be said and what cannot — to the limits of sense that ordinary usage quietly traces.

The grasp that everyday speech has on aesthetic life

Wittgenstein's remarks on rules and the diffusion of concepts remain the constant reference. The lesson is not that ordinary speakers have correct theories of art, but that they possess a finely discriminated vocabulary of response. "Kitsch," "derivative," "stale," "haunting," "earnest," "sentimental" — these terms do real work, and they name distinctions that a refined phenomenology recognises but that a general theory rarely captures.

Frank Sibley's 1959 paper on aesthetic concepts made the point early: when a critic says that a passage is "tense" or "balanced" or "sincere," she is not giving a coded description of measurable properties, but drawing on a vocabulary that only functions within aesthetic exchange. Even the Commonwealth Copyright Act 1968 partly draws its sense of "derivative" and "substantial" from the same texture.

Misreading use as mere custom

Critics often slide from "ordinary language" into "common parlance" or "current idiom." These are not the same. Ordinary language, for the Cavellian tradition, is the medium within which our practices are articulated; it is not a democratic average. Wittgenstein's question — "what we do with words" — is prior to any census of usage, and so too is the Cavellian question about the conditions under which a remark counts at all.

The Australian colloquial style — laconic, fond of understatement, with phrases like "it sat well enough" or "the book did the job" — presents the lesson in a local accent. To call such remarks a failure of response is to mistake idiom for incapacity.

Particulars from an Australian setting

An Australian setting sharpens these distinctions. The Central Desert painting traditions, the literary journals still read in Adelaide and Brisbane, the independent cinemas of Sydney and Melbourne, the study of poets from Judith Wright onwards — each draws on a vocabulary with its own inflections. A response to a painting by Emily Kame Kngwarreye or a novel by Michelle de Kretser returns, almost without choice, to the inherited resources of ordinary response.

Critics who insist that ordinary usage is parochial often look more provincial than the practices they criticise. The Australian Research Council's recent funding rounds have favoured careful, hermeneutic work in the humanities — a sign that the appetite for attentive reading persists among scholars and students across the country.

Against the drive toward a single system

A persistent objection holds that ordinary language method must give way to a comprehensive theory of aesthetic value. The reply is not that such a theory is impossible in principle, but that its pursuit tends to misrepresent the phenomena. Wittgenstein's scattered remarks on music, architecture, and colour are not preliminary sketches of a system; they are reminders that the phenomena are unsystematic, and that the demand for unity distorts them.

Australian philosophers in this lineage, working between Sydney and Melbourne, have often stressed that the burden lies with the systematic theorist to accommodate the diversity of response, not with the interpreter to simplify for unity's sake. John Passmore's writing on the varieties of aesthetic experience remains a touchstone in that local conversation.

Reading literature, attending to words

Literary study has always been the strongest ally of this approach. To describe what a writer does, one must attend to idiom, cadence, and the force of word choice in context. In Australian curricula and scholarly writing, the rhetoric of close reading remained central even when more theoretical programmes were in fashion. Cavell's reading of Thoreau shows how attentiveness to text generates philosophical insight without leaving the field of the works considered.

The same is possible across the contemporary scene, from undergraduate work on Joan Didion in Sydney to dissertation projects on climate fiction in Perth. Critics using OLA-inspired methods rarely need to step outside the works' language to ask the largest philosophical questions.

Carrying the conversation forward

A measured response to the critiques should begin by redescribing the method they target, then grant the objections with real bite. The quietism worry has some force: a tradition that limits itself to describing our responses can seem to leave the standards of those responses untouched. Yet the alternative — silencing ordinary speech so theory can speak cleanly — strips aesthetic philosophy of the material it has to work with.

What is needed is patient engagement with the method on its own terms, and fewer caricatures of it. The resources available in ordinary usage remain incompletely mapped.

Practices worth adopting in further work

• Return to Cavell and Sibley in their original contexts, and resist the standard summary of their method.
• Treat Australian usage as more than an example: as a working idiom that tests received philosophical vocabulary.
• Look for cases where ordinary response refuses to fit evolutionary or cognitive accounts of taste.
• Read across disciplinary lines: literature, philosophy of mind, and cultural criticism each hold a piece of the puzzle.
• Bring work to panels at the Australasian Association of Philosophy meetings where these issues can be pressed in person.

The tradition deserves a more careful hearing. Readers wishing to engage are warmly invited to send responses, conference reports, or short replies to the editorial team at OLP & Literary Studies Online for publication in the months ahead.