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.

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

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.

Or should we rather conclude that the whole issue of meaning, including all our intuitions mentioned above, is illusory and that the only real matter are human linguistic transactions which can be accounted for analogously to how we describe all other kinds of transactions going on within our world.

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.

And it is important to see that the indeterminacy of individual meanings is not an indeterminacy of semantics: semantics is a matter of the ability of our linguistic tools to serve as various kinds of vehicles of various language games, and though such an ability is vague in the sense that it is usually not a yes-no 6 matter, it is not indeterminate (indeed it is not even clear what it would mean to call it so).

Quine's verdict is thus that we should account for human linguistic conduct without a roundabout via meanings.

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.

Human linguistic behavior is, to be sure, more complicated than the behavior of, say, bees, but this difference seems to be quantitative, rather than qualitative. With respect to the mentalistic conception (here in the Brentanian and Searlian form of basing meaning on intention), Quine (1960, p.

There is nothing to study save linguistic behavior, for once we pay due attention to the way in which meanings spread, we can see that nothing is in the meaning that was not earlier in behavior.