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.

Furthermore, I argue that the turn should not make us discard meanings, but only to reappraise them: to see them as the roles of expressions vis-à-vis the rules that govern our language games.

Hence, with a certain oversimplification, we can say that meaning was traditionally usually conceived of as a chunk of a mind-stuff glued to a word and animating it. This mentalist notion of meaning, tallying as it does with the common sense view of language, kept its intellectual appeal well into the twentieth century and, in some philosophical circles, it is still taken as almost self-evident.

Thus, in his influential book John Searle (1983) claims that "the philosophy of language is a branch of the philosophy of mind" (ibid.

The harbingers were especially two scholars of rather different interests: the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1931), seeking a foundation for linguistics and arriving at his structuralist theory of language; and the logician Gottlob Frege (1892a), struggling to fortify the foundations of mathematics and consequently divorcing semantics from psychology and wedding it to mathematics instead1.

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

But suppose the word 'beetle' had a use in these people's language?

The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty.

What Wittgenstein is urging here is that as our linguistic games are essentially cooperative, intersubjective enterprises, they cannot rest on anything that is purely subjective. If meaning were impeccably hidden within one's mind, then its presence or absence, from the viewpoint of the language game, would be bound to be irrelevant.

If people attach something to a word within their minds, then this is a fact of their individual psychologies, not capable of establishing the different fact that the word actually means something within their language.