ABSTRACT
In the middle of this century so-called ‘ordinary-language philosophers’ – most prominently Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Austin and Peter Strawson – put forward a new, ‘pragmatic’ picture of language which stood in sharp contrast to the picture that had been dominant since the beginnings of analytic philosophy. Half a century later it is fair to say that the old picture which ordinary-language philosophers were opposing has been to a large extent restored to its position of dominance. To be sure, bits and pieces of the new picture had to be incorporated, and a number of pragmatic phenomena acknowledged and accounted for. But the old picture was not abandoned, as ordinary-language philosophers had urged; it was elaborated rather than eliminated.
