“Thinking, Language, and Concepts” (N. Forsberg) in The Murdochian Mind eds. Silvia Caprioglio Panizza and Mark Hopwood (London: Routledge, 2022) 1 Thinking, Language, and Concepts Niklas Forsberg Introduction In 2012, I presented a paper at the 6 th International Iris Murdoch Conference 1 called ‘The Good and the Ordinary: Iris Murdoch and the Flight from the Ordinary’. One of the central points I tried to convey in that paper was that one cannot really understand Murdoch’s philosophy as a whole without attending carefully to her thoughts about language, and that if and when one does so, one will see that, in a profound sense, Murdoch may actually be described as an ‘ordinary language philosopher’ (given, of course, that one understands ‘ordinary language philosophy’ in the right way). Both these claims were, not surprisingly, met with some resistance – the latter one more so than the first. Not many people think of Murdoch as a philosopher of language, and it is true that at no point would she have argued that ‘language’ is her main object of study. Furthermore, the received view of what ‘ordinary language philosophy’ stands for (as a dogmatic philosophy of language that relies on ‘common usage’ as a standard of correctness) is both pervasive and deemed unquestionable. 2 On top of that, Murdoch has a couple of remarks that indicates some rather strong reservations against that tradition of thought. What I will show in this paper in relation to the label ‘ordinary language philosophy’, is that Murdoch was quite right when voicing her reservations, but wrong about what ‘ordinary language philosophy’ means, or should mean anyway. In other words, her worries were good, but her own thinking aligns well with that tradition (rightly construed). The label ‘ordinary language philosophy’ is, of course, not really important, and there’s a point at which I will say ‘Say what you please, so long as it does not prevent you from seeing how things are’ (Wittgenstein, 2009a, p. §79). There are some aspect here, however, that cannot be 1 Held at Kingston University, London. 2 For a more extensive studies and important reevaluations of the ordinary language tradition see Crary, 2007; Baz, 2012; Laugier, 2013; Forsberg, 2018, 2021.