Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: Thirtieth-Anniversary Edition (Princeton Classics)

by Richard Rorty

There are two sources for the discipline presently called “philosophy of language.” One is the cluster of problems pointed out by Frege and discussed, for example, by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus and by Carnap in Meaning and Necessity. These are problems about how to systematize our notions of meaning and reference in such a way as to take advantage of quantificational logic, preserve our intuitions about modality, and generally produce a clear and intuitively satisfying picture of the way in which notions like “truth,” “meaning,” “necessity,” and “name” fit together. I shall call this set of problems the subject matter of “pure” philosophy of language—a discipline which has no epistemological parti pris, nor, indeed, any relevance to most of the traditional concerns of modern philosophy. An ancestry can be traced for some of Frege’s problems in Parmenides, Plato’s Sophist, and some other ancient and medieval writings, but they are issues which rarely intersect with other textbook “problems of philosophy.”1 The second source for contemporary philosophy of language is explicitly epistemological. The source of this “impure” philosophy of language is the attempt to retain Kant’s picture of philosophy as providing a permanent ahistorical framework for inquiry in the form of a theory of knowledge. The “linguistic turn,” as I have said in chapter four, started as the attempt to produce a nonpsychologistic empiricism by rephrasing philosophical questions as questions of “logic.”...

December 1, 2020. Page 259.