Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

While the traditional view was that in order to understand language and our linguistic practices we must explain meaning, the 'pragmatic turn' emerging within the writings of various philosohpers of the second half of the twentieth century caused a basic change of the perspective: the tendency is to concentrate directly on explaining the linguistic practices and leave the need for explaining meaning to emerge (or, as the case may be, not to emerge) subsequently.

It culminates in the writings of Jacques Derrida, where the rejection of psychologism and of the traditional conception of meaning is interconnected with the author's case against what he calls the "metaphysics of the presence" and "logocentrism", which inevitably leads to a very eccentric kind of philosophizing (of course, a center is no longer recognized .

The pragmatic turn Notice the shift of focus brought about by the Wittgensteinian view: we abandon the assumption that explaining meaning must necessarily precede investigating our linguistic conduct; now we concentrate directly on explaining the conduct and leave the need for explaining meaning to emerge subsequently – or, as the case may be, not to emerge.

The same would be the case, for that matter, if meanings were conceived as elements of the real or of a Platonist world christened by expressions.

Moreover, despite appearances, the situation does not differ substantially even in the case of (iii).

It might seem that in this case we may be able to pick up some relevant 'content of consciousness' independently of any linguistic articulation; however, it is hard to see how we could identify contentful mental entities save by way of language; we cannot describe the mental entity 'beyond' the sentence 'Every farmer owns a donkey' save by saying that it is the thought (or idea, or whatever) that every farmer owns a donkey, or the thought that for every x, if x is a farmer, then x owns a donkey etc. What is worse, even if we could give an independent 8 9 See Chomsky (1967).

The fact that the structures which linguistic theories ascribe to an expression are not really to be found on the expression itself has forced many linguists to acquire the conviction that what they are studying are - ultimately - not expressions, but rather mental objects which the This is, of course, only an anecdotic hint at the case made against mentalism by Frege, Wittgenstein and others.

Note that this would not be the case if (3) were the picture of the meaning of the analyzed sentence.

In any case, talk about meaning is in the clear sense talk about types, not about tokens; and semantics is - in this sense - inevitably realistic.

Accordingly, whereas we not infrequently have ideas or notions in which some falsity is contained, this can only be the case with such as are to some extent confused and obscure, and in this proceed from nothing (participate of negation), that is, exist in us thus confused because we are not wholly perfect.