Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

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

Despite this, the philosophy of the twentieth century was marked by an unprecedented attacks upon this way of thinking about meaning.

I have ever remained firm in my original resolution to suppose no other principle than that of which I have recently availed myself in demonstrating the existence of God and of the soul, and to accept as true nothing that did not appear to me more clear and certain than the demonstrations of the geometers had formerly appeared; and yet I venture to state that not only have I found means to satisfy myself in a short time on all the principal difficulties which are usually treated of in philosophy, but I have also observed certain laws established in nature by God in such a manner, and of which he has impressed on our minds such notions, that after we have reflected sufficiently upon these, we cannot doubt that they are accurately observed in all that exists or takes place in the world and farther, by considering the concatenation of these laws, it appears to me that I have discovered many truths more useful and more important than all I had before learned, or even had expected to learn.

During the first half of the present century a number of outstanding philosophers realized that language theory could profitably be viewed as far more than merely a means of studying one among the many human faculties, or merely sharpening the tool we use to philosophize - they realized that there is a sense in which philosophy of language comprises (almost) the whole of philosophy.

This simple turn seemed to have tremendous consequences for philosophy.

The propositions of philosophy are not factual, but linguistic in character - that is, they do not describe the behaviour of physical, or even mental, objects; they express definitions, or the formal consequences of definitions.

Therefore, the proponents of the linguistic turn argue, philosophy can be nothing more and nothing else than a certain kind of analysis of language, "the pursuit of meaning", as Schlick (1932) puts it. Metaphysics is thus aufgehoben - it is exposed as a worthless enterprise stemming from the failure to understand the true role of language; it boils down to expressing one's "life feeling" (Carnap, 1931).

How linguists became philosophers I've puzzled for a long time about what the difference is between certain kinds of philosophy and certain kinds of linguistics and finally decided that the main difference lies in whether you're embarrassed about not knowing about a paper in 'Linguistic Inquiry' or the 'Journal of Philosophy' Bach (1985, p.

And it was only several decades after the linguistic turn of philosophy that something which could be called the model-theoretic turn of semantics occured: many of the linguists who tried to get hold of meaning in an explicit way have come to appreciate the usefulness of Tarskian logical semantics and model theory.

This way of approaching the problem of meaning appeared to be particularly promising to the purposes of philosophy; and, in fact, this turn was to a large extent inspired by the heirs of the linguistic turn (especially by Carnap, 1957).