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Geoffrey Charles John Midgley (Ilford, Essex, 14 June 1921 –Newcastle, 16 April 1997) was aBritish philosopher.
Midgley had won a classical scholarship to Oxford, but served four years as a radar engineer in the RAF during theSecond World War.After the war he completed thePPE course atNew College, Oxford and studied underIsaiah Berlin andGilbert Ryle. Since 1949 he worked at the Department of Philosophy,Newcastle University, as lecturer and senior lecturer (1949-1986), and as head of department (1982-1986). In 1950 he married a fellow philosopher,Mary Scrutton, with whom he raised three sons (Tom, David and Martin).
Midgley, influenced byWittgenstein andJ.L. Austin, did some groundbreaking[according to whom?] work in the fields ofdeontic logic,philosophy of language andspeech act theory. He published two seminal papers (in 1955 and 1959) on the concept of alinguistic rule. The concept ofconstitutive rules finds its origin inWittgenstein andRawls,[1] and has been elaborated by Midgley,[2]Max Black,[3]G.H. von Wright,[4]David Shwayder[5] andJohn Searle.[6] In their treatment of the distinction betweenregulative rules andconstitutive rules Midgley and Searle are on the same page.[7]
Whereasregulative rules are prescriptions that regulate a pre-existing activity (whose existence is logically independent of the rules),constitutive rules constitute an activity the existence of which is logically dependent on the rules. For example: traffic rules areregulative rules that prescribe certain behaviour in order to regulate the traffic. Without these rules however, the traffic would not cease to be. In contrast: the rules of chess areconstitutive rules that constitute the game. Without these rules chess would not exist, since the game is logically dependent on the rules.