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.

I argue that after this turn we should explain the peculiar kinds of 'meaningfulness' that characterizes our expressions in terms of what Sellars called "pattern governed behavior".

Tendencies arose to explain mind in terms of language, rather than vice versa (viz. the celebrated linguistic turn).

Although some philosophers still wanted to account for meaning in terms of an apparently unexplainable faculty of human mind, many others strived either to discard the concept of meaning completely, or at least to explain it in an utterly non-mentalist way. Does this mean that meanings are destined to end up in the naturalist mill constructed to produce a unified scientific theory of the whole universe?

Thus, while the mentalist conception of meaning led to the atomist view of language ('we find out meanings of individual words and thereby explain language and its workings'), the interactive conception leads instead to the holistic view ('we must capture the workings of language and meanings will come out as spin-offs').

Over and above this, he concludes that as we are not involving ourselves with any such esoteric stuff as pieces of mind, but only with the motions of parts of the material, tangible world, there is no reason to assume that to study, analyze and explain linguistic conduct necessitates any other tools or concepts than those which we already use to study, analyze and explain the rest of the world.

Well, the prime task of the theory is to explain our language games.

A simple example: linguists sometimes like to explain words like necessary simply by referring to possible worlds, whose real nature they take as something they need not bother very much about, because it is explained by philosophers.

In what sense do we explain the analyzed sentence?

In recent years Carnap has tended to explain analyticity by appeal to what he calls state-descriptions.