Linguistic Turn - On The Linguistic Turn

On The Linguistic Turn

In the tradition of analytical philosophy, according to Michael Dummett the linguistic movement first took shape in Gottlob Frege's 1884 work The Foundations on Arithmetic, specifically paragraph 62 where Frege explores the identity of a numerical proposition . This concern for the logic of propositions and their relationship to "facts" was later taken up by the notable analytical philosopher Bertrand Russell in "On Denoting", and played a weighty role in his early work in Logical Atomism.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, an associate of Russell, was one of the progenitors of the linguistic turn. This follows from his ideas that philosophical problems arise from a misunderstanding of the logic of language in his earlier work, and his remarks on language games in his later work. His later work significantly departs from the common tenets of analytical philosophy and might be viewed as having some resonance in the poststructuralist tradition.

In the 1970s the humanities recognized the importance of language as a structuring agent. Decisive for the linguistic turn in the humanities were the works of yet another tradition, namely the structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure and the ensuing movement of poststructuralism. Influential theorists include Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. The power of language, more specifically of certain rhetorical tropes, in historical discourse was explored by Hayden White. The fact that language is not a transparent medium of thought had been stressed by a very different form of philosophy of language which originated in the works of Johann Georg Hamann and Wilhelm von Humboldt.

These various movements often lead to the notion that language 'constitutes' reality, a position contrary to intuition and to most of the Western tradition of philosophy. The traditional view (what Derrida called the 'metaphysical' core of Western thought) saw words as functioning like labels attached to concepts. According to this view, there is something like 'the real chair', which exists in some external reality and corresponds roughly with a concept in human thought called "Chair" to which the linguistic word "chair" refers. However, the founder of structuralism, Ferdinand de Saussure, held that definitions of concepts cannot exist independently from a linguistic system defined by difference, or, to put it differently, that a concept of something cannot exist without being named. Thus differences between meanings structure our perception; there is no real chair except insofar as we are manipulating symbolic systems. We would not even be able to recognise a chair as a chair without simultaneously recognising that a chair is not everything else - in other words a chair is defined as being a specific collection of characteristics which are themselves defined in certain ways, and so on, and all of this within the symbolic system of language. Thus, everything we think of as 'reality' is really a convention of naming and characterising, a convention which is itself called 'language'. Indeed, anything outside of language is by definition inconceivable (having no name and no meaning) and therefore cannot intrude upon or enter into human reality, at least not without immediately being seized and articulated by language.

Opposing this interpretation would be the concept of philosophical realism, that the world is knowable as it really is, as propounded by philosophers like Henry Babcock Veatch.