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Don’t Ask, Look!
Linguistic Corpora in Philosophical Analyses
Roland Bluhm
Ordinary Language Philosophy has largely fallen out of favour, and with it the belief in the
primary importance of analyses of ordinary language for philosophical purposes. Still, in
their various endeavours, philosophers not only from analytic but also from other backgrounds
refer to the use and meaning of terms of interest in ordinary parlance. In doing so,
they most commonly appeal to their own linguistic intuitions. Often, the appeal to individual
intuitions is supplemented by reference to dictionaries. In recent times, Internet search engine
queries for expressions of interest have become quite popular. Apparently, philosophers
attempt to surpass the limits of their own linguistic intuitions by appealing to experts or to
factual uses of language. I argue that this attempt is commendable but that its execution is
wanting. Instead of appealing to dictionaries or Internet queries, philosophers should employ
computer-based linguistic corpora in order to confirm or falsify hypotheses about the
factual use of language. This approach also has some advantages over methods employed by
experimental philosophers. If the importance of ordinary language is stressed, the use of linguistic
corpora is hardly avoidable.
1. Introduction
In linguistics, or, more particularly, in lexicography, using text corpora is a well-established
practice. The Oxford English Dictionary, to take the most famous example, was based on an
enormous corpus of paper slips with excerpted quotations. Today, the text corpora used in
linguistics are usually computer-based, and at least some are freely accessible on the Internet.
Surprisingly, they seem to have been disregarded by philosophers, even those that profess an
interest in ordinary language.
Over the last couple of years, I have made extensive use of such corpora, mostly in my research
on hope. 1 But although I have used corpora for some time, I have only recently begun
to describe explicitly their use in philosophy. The purpose of this paper is to take on this
challenge and to recommend the use of linguistic text corpora for philosophical purposes—or,
in a slogan, to advertise Computerised Ordinary Language Philosophy.
I will begin, in sections 1 to 3, by spelling out my reasons for advocating the use of corpora in
philosophy. I will introduce a very simple model of linguistic analysis (for philosophical purposes).
This model allows me to point out the roles of intuition in such analyses and to highlight
the benefits of using corpora in philosophy. In section 4, I will then discuss some other
options, namely the use of Internet queries and questionnaires. I will round off my account
(in section 5) with a qualified plea for using corpora in philosophy. 2
1
Cf. Bluhm 2012.
2
I would like to thank my audiences at SOPHA 2012 and GAP.8 for valuable feedback; I thank Peter
Hacker especially for a lively discussion of my presentation. As such things go, I very stubbornly insist
on my main points, but I have profited greatly from his critique.