Rorty's Linguistic Turn
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Paul Rastall, a Linguistic Philosophy of Language, Lewiston, Queenston
Linguistica ONLINE. Published: July 10, 2009 http://www.phil.muni.cz/linguistica/art/mulder/mul-001.pdf ISSN 1801-5336 PAUL RASTALL: A LINGUISTIC PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE, LAMPETER – LEWISTON, 2000[*] review article by Jan W. F. Mulder (University of St. Andrews, UK) Introductory note by Aleš Bičan In 2006 I happened to have a short e-mail conversation with Jan Mulder. I asked him for off-prints of his articles, as some of them were rather hard to find. He was so generous to send me, by regular post, a huge packet of them. It took me some time to realize that some of the included writings had never been published. One of them was a manuscript (type- script) of a discussion of a book by Paul Rastall, a former student of his, which was pub- lished in 2000 by The Edwin Press. I naturally contacted Paul Rastall and asked him about the article. He was not aware of it but supported my idea of having it published in Linguis- tica ONLINE. He consequently spoke to Mulder who welcomed the idea and granted the permission. The article below is thus published for the first time. It should be noted, how- ever, that Jan Mulder has not seen its final form. The text is reproduced here as it appears in the manuscript. I have only corrected a few typographical errors here and there. The only significant change is the inclusion of a list of references. Mulder refers to a number of works, but bibliographical information is not pro- vided. I have tried to list all that are mentioned in the article. -
CRITICAL NOTICE Why We Need Ordinary Language Philosophy
CRITICAL NOTICE Why We Need Ordinary Language Philosophy Sandra Laugier, Translated by Daniela Ginsberg, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2013, pp. 168, £ 24.50. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-47054-2 (cloth). Reviewed by Derek A. McDougall Originally published in French in the year 2000, the English version of Sandra Laugier’s short book of 10 Chapters plus an Introduction and Conclusion, has a 7 page Preface, 9 pages of Notes, a brief Bibliography and 121 pages of actual text. The reading of Wittgenstein and Austin that she provides is distinctly Cavellian in character. Indeed, Stanley Cavell in a dust-cover quote, remarks that her work is already influential in France and Italy, exciting as it does a new interest in ‘language conceived not only as a cognitive capacity but also as used, and meant, as part of our form of life’. Cavell goes on to say that this new translation is not merely welcome but indispensable, and has at least the capacity to alter prevailing views about the philosophy of language, so affecting what we have come to think of as the ‘analytic-continental divide’. Toril Moi of Duke Uni., in another dust-cover quote, states that Laugier’s reading of Wittgenstein-Austin-Cavell shows how their claim that ‘to speak about language is to speak about the world is an antimetaphysical revolution in philosophy that tranforms our understanding of epistemology and ethics.’ She concludes with the thought that anyone who wishes to understand what ‘ordinary language philosophy’ means today should read this book. This is a large claim to make, and anyone who is inclined to read Wittgenstein and Austin strictly in their own terms, and with their own avowed intentions - where discernible - steadily in view, is almost bound to conclude that it is simply not true. -
The Pragmatic Turn in Philosophy
Introduction n recent years the classical authors of Anglo-Saxon pragmatism have gar- Inered a renewed importance in international philosophical circles. In the aftermath of the linguistic turn, philosophers such as Charles S. Peirce, William James, George H. Mead, Ferdinand C. S. Schiller, and John Dewey are being reread alongside, for example, recent postmodern and deconstructivist thought as alternatives to a traditional orientation toward the concerns of a represen- tationalist epistemology. In the context of contemporary continental thought, the work of Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Gilles Deleuze comprises just a few examples of a culturewide assault on a metaphysical worldview premised on what Michel Foucault called the empirico-transcendental doublet, and presents a wealth of potential exchange with the pragmatist critique of representationalism. In both cases, aspects of pragmatist thought are being used to add flexibility to the conceptual tools of modern philoso- phy, in order to promote a style of philosophizing more apt to dealing with the problems of everyday life. The hope for a pragmatic “renewing of phi- losophy” (Putnam) evidenced in these trends has led to an analytic reexami- nation of some of the fundamental positions in modern continental thought as well, and to a recognition of previously unacknowledged or underappreciated pragmatic elements in thinkers like Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. Within the current analytic discussions, a wide spectrum of differing and at times completely heterogeneous forms of neopragmatism can be distinguished, which for heuristic purposes can be grouped into two general categories according to the type of discursive strategy employed. The first of these consists in a conscious inflation of the concept of pragmatism in order to establish it as widely as possible within the disciplinary discourse of philosophy. -
Philosophy of Language in the Twentieth Century Jason Stanley Rutgers University
Philosophy of Language in the Twentieth Century Jason Stanley Rutgers University In the Twentieth Century, Logic and Philosophy of Language are two of the few areas of philosophy in which philosophers made indisputable progress. For example, even now many of the foremost living ethicists present their theories as somewhat more explicit versions of the ideas of Kant, Mill, or Aristotle. In contrast, it would be patently absurd for a contemporary philosopher of language or logician to think of herself as working in the shadow of any figure who died before the Twentieth Century began. Advances in these disciplines make even the most unaccomplished of its practitioners vastly more sophisticated than Kant. There were previous periods in which the problems of language and logic were studied extensively (e.g. the medieval period). But from the perspective of the progress made in the last 120 years, previous work is at most a source of interesting data or occasional insight. All systematic theorizing about content that meets contemporary standards of rigor has been done subsequently. The advances Philosophy of Language has made in the Twentieth Century are of course the result of the remarkable progress made in logic. Few other philosophical disciplines gained as much from the developments in logic as the Philosophy of Language. In the course of presenting the first formal system in the Begriffsscrift , Gottlob Frege developed a formal language. Subsequently, logicians provided rigorous semantics for formal languages, in order to define truth in a model, and thereby characterize logical consequence. Such rigor was required in order to enable logicians to carry out semantic proofs about formal systems in a formal system, thereby providing semantics with the same benefits as increased formalization had provided for other branches of mathematics. -
Discuss. Ludwig Wittgenstein's “Tractatus Logico Philosophicus
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Discuss. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico Philosophicus,” published in 1921, was a pivotal work of the early 20th Century’s ‘linguistic turn’- a time in which the importance of language was being investigated across many academic disciplines. The aim of Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus” is “to draw limit to thought”;1 he argues that for something to exist in the world- either imagined or physical- it must be possible to think of it.2 Therefore, the use of language to express thought is a means to map the boundaries of reality. The interaction between language and thought that Wittgenstein advocated was later labelled ‘linguistic relativism’, following the work of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf. However, two key aspects of Wittgenstein’s theory: that language is capable of both limiting the thoughts we can have and influencing the nature of these thoughts, will be scrutinised below to demonstrate how the interaction between language and thoughts is substantially more minimal than Wittgenstein suggested. In addition, the ever-changing “limits” of both language and the world, alongside the problem of meaning, will be investigated in order to show how the world limits language, rather than vice versa. George Orwell’s dystopian classic “1984”, poses questions concerning the nature of a language “designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought” through the “reduction of vocabulary.”3 As Wittgenstein argues, for something to potentially exist in the world, it must be within the range of thought, which he believes to be reflected through the range of language. -
2.2 Glock Et Al
Journal for the History of Book Symposium: Analytical Philosophy Hans-Johann Glock, What is Analytic Philosophy? Volume 2, Number 2 Introduction Hans-Johann Glock..................... 1 Editor in Chief Mark Textor, King’s College London Commentaries Guest Editor Leila Haaparanta......................... 2 Mirja Hartimo, University of Helsinki Christopher Pincock....................6 Editorial Board Panu Raatikainen........................11 Juliet Floyd, Boston University Graham Stevens.......................... 28 Greg Frost-Arnold, Hobart and William Smith Colleges Ryan Hickerson, University of Western Oregon Replies Henry Jackman, York University Hans-Johann Glock..................... 36 Sandra Lapointe, McMaster University Chris Pincock, Ohio State University Richard Zach, University of Calgary Production Editor Ryan Hickerson Editorial Assistant Daniel Harris, CUNY Graduate Center Design Douglas Patterson and Daniel Harris ©2013 The Authors What is Analytic Philosophy? shall not be able to respond to all of the noteworthy criticisms and questions of my commentators. I have divided my responses ac- Hans-Johann Glock cording to commentator rather than topic, while also indicating some connections between their ideas where appropriate. Let me start by thanking the Journal for the History of Analytical Phi- losophy for offering me this opportunity to discuss my book What is Analytical Philosophy? (Cambridge, 2008). I am also very grateful Hans-Johann Glock for the valuable feedback from the contributors. And I thank both University of Zurich the journal and the contributors for their patience in waiting for [email protected] my replies. I was pleased to discover that all of my commentators express a certain sympathy with the central contention of my book, namely that analytic philosophy is an intellectual movement of the twentieth-century (with roots in the nineteenth and offshoots in the twenty-first), held together by family-resemblances on the one hand, ties of historical influence on the other. -
The History of Formal Semantics, Going Beyond What I Know First-Hand
!"#$"##% Introduction ! “Semantics” can mean many different things, since there are many ways to be interested in “meaning”. One 20th century debate: how much common ground across logic, philosophy, and linguistics? The History of ! Formal semantics, which says “much!”, has been shaped over the last 40+ years by fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration among linguists, Formal Semantics philosophers, and logicians. ! In this talk I’ll reflect mainly on the development of formal semantics and to a lesser extent on formal pragmatics in linguistics and philosophy starting in the 1960’s. Barbara H. Partee ! I’ll describe some of the innovations and “big ideas” that have shaped the MGU, May 14, 2011 development of formal semantics and its relation to syntax and to (= Lecture 13, Formal Semantics Spec-kurs) pragmatics, and draw connections with foundational issues in linguistic theory, philosophy, and cognitive science. May 2011 MGU 2 Introduction “Semantics” can mean many different things ! I’m not trained as a historian of linguistics (yet) or of philosophy; what I know best comes from my experience as a graduate student of Chomsky’s ! “Semantics” used to mean quite different things to linguists in syntax at M.I.T. (1961-65), then as a junior colleague of Montague’s at and philosophers, not surprisingly, since different fields have UCLA starting in 1965, and then, after his untimely death in 1971, as one different central concerns. of a number of linguists and philosophers working to bring Montague’s " Philosophers of language have long been concerned with truth and semantics and Chomskyan syntax together, an effort that Chomsky reference, with logic, with how compositionality works, with how himself was deeply skeptical about. -
Wittgenstein and the Linguistic Turn
Wittgenstein and the Linguistic Turn RICHARD RORTY, STANFORD 1. There are profound differences of opinion among contemporary philoso- phers both about whether Wittgenstein is worth reading and about what one can learn from him. They parallel disagreements about whether, and in what sense, philosophical problems are problems of language. In this pa- per, I shall describe three views of Wittgenstein, corresponding to three ways of thinking about the so-called “linguistic turn in philosophy”. Doing so will help me defend two claims for which I have argued in the past. First: there is no interesting sense in which philosophical problems are problems of language. Second: the linguistic turn was useful nevertheless, for it turned philosophers’ attention from the topic of experience towards that of linguistic behavior. That shift helped break the hold of empiri- cism—and, more broadly, of representationalism. Contemporary philosophers who call themselves “naturalists” typically see little value in Wittgenstein’s work. For them, the central topic of phi- losophy is what Phillip Pettit calls, in Sellarsian language, the clash be- tween “the manifest image” and “the scientific image”. The manifest image incorporates what Pettit calls “the ideas that come with our spontaneous, everyday practices, such as the ideas we naturally have about freedom and consciousness, causation and law, value and duty”. The scientific image, he says, “challenges us to look for where in that world there can be room for phenomena that remain as vivid as ever in the manifest image: con- sciousness, freedom, responsibility, goodness, virtue and the like.”1. Nothing in Wittgenstein’s writings is of any help with what Pettit calls problems about the “place” of these phenomena in a world of physical par- ticles. -
A New Role for Linguistic Philosophy in Education with an Application to the Field of Learning Disability
Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 1977 A New Role for Linguistic Philosophy in Education with an Application to the Field of Learning Disability Robert Clinkert Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the Education Commons Recommended Citation Clinkert, Robert, "A New Role for Linguistic Philosophy in Education with an Application to the Field of Learning Disability" (1977). Dissertations. 1519. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/1519 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 1977 Robert Clinkert A NEW ROLE FOR LINGUISTIC PHILOSOPHY IN EDUCATION WITH AN APPLICATION TO THE FIELD OF LEARNING DISABILITY by Robert John Clinkert A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Loyola University of Chicago in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 1977 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author wishes to gratefully acknowledge Professor Walter Krolikowski of Loyola University for rekindling in him an interest in linguistic philosophy and for demonstrating the value of linguistic analysis in education. The author wishes to especially acknowledge Professor fil:lward Maziarz of Loyola University for illuminating the road to a reconcili ation among the three Wittgensteins and between the two godheads. It was Professor Maziarz who taught the author that philosophy must be done dialogically, between the self and the other.· 'Jhe author was introduced to empiricism by Professor Anlold Levison at Chicago Circle. -
(Eds.) Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Information
Alois Pichler, Herbert Hrachovec (Eds.) Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Information Publications of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society. New Series Volume 6 Alois Pichler • Herbert Hrachovec (Eds.) Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Information Proceedings of the 30. International Ludwig Wittgenstein Symposium Kirchberg am Wechsel, Austria 2007 Volume 1 Bibliographic information published by Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at http://dnb.ddb.de Gedruckt mit Förderung des Bundesministeriums für Wissenschaft und Forschung in Wien und der Kulturabteilung der NÖ Landesregierung North and South America by Transaction Books Rutgers University Piscataway, NJ 08854-8042 [email protected] United Kingdom, Ire, Iceland, Turkey, Malta, Portugal by Gazelle Books Services Limited White Cross Mills Hightown LANCASTER, LA1 4XS [email protected] Livraison pour la France et la Belgique: Librairie Philosophique J.Vrin 6, place de la Sorbonne ; F-75005 PARIS Tel. +33 (0)1 43 54 03 47 ; Fax +33 (0)1 43 54 48 18 www.vrin.fr 2008 ontos verlag P.O. Box 15 41, D-63133 Heusenstamm www.ontosverlag.com ISBN 978-3-86838-001-9 2008 No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in retrieval systems or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use of the purchaser of the work Printed on acid-free paper ISO-Norm 970-6 FSC-certified (Forest Stewardship Council) This hardcover binding meets the International Library standard Printed in Germany by buch bücher dd ag Table of Contents Preface Alois Pichler and Herbert Hrachovec . -
Gustav Bergmann (1906 – 1987) During the Years 1946 – 1958
Review of: Bergmann, Gustav, Collected Works Vol. I Daniel von Wachter Homepage of the author: http://von-wachter.de Email: replace “ABC” in [email protected] by “von-wachter” Address: Dr. Dr. Daniel von Wachter, Institut für Philosophie, Universität München, PF 42, D-80539 München, Germany. This is a preprint version of: Wachter, Daniel von. 2006. "Review of: Bergmann, Gustav, Collected Works Vol. I." In Cambridge and Vienna. Frank P. Ramsey and the Vienna Circle (Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook, vol. 12), edited by M. C. Galavotti. Berlin, 219-222. This document is available at http://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de. (Format A5; print 2 pages per sheet) Logical Positivism, the Linguistic Turn, and the Reconstruction of the Questions of Ontology Bergmann, Gustav, Collected Works Vol. I: Selected Papers I, edited by E. Tegtmeier, Frankfurt/Lancaster: Ontos-Verlag, 2003. ISBN 3-937202-17- X, pp. 350, hardcover € 99,00 (€ 67,00 subscription). 1 This volume makes available 17 papers published by Gustav Bergmann (1906 – 1987) during the years 1946 – 1958. The edition of Bergmann’s works in three volumes by the publisher “Ontos-Verlag” (www.ontos- verlag.de) is now complete. Volume II contains papers from 1960 – 1981, volume III contains Bergmann’s book Realism from 1967. Bergmann was born in Vienna (Austria) in 1906. When he received his doctorate in mathematics from the University of Vienna in 1928, he had already been invited to join the Vienna Circle, where he was especially influenced by Schlick, Waismann, and Carnap. He went to Berlin to work as an assistant to Albert Einstein and then returned to Vienna. -
Linguistic Turn and Gendering Language in the Cambridge Advanced Learner’S Dictionary
English Language Teaching; Vol. 9, No. 10; 2016 ISSN 1916-4742 E-ISSN 1916-4750 Published by Canadian Center of Science and Education Linguistic Turn and Gendering Language in the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary Diah A. Arimbi1 & Deny A. Kwary1 1 English Department, Faculty of Humanities, Universitas Airlangga, Indonesia Correspondence: Deny A. Kwary, Faculty of Humanities, Universitas Airlangga, Jl. Dharmawangsa Dalam Selatan, Surabaya - 60286, Indonesia. E-mail: [email protected] Received: August 15, 2016 Accepted: September 19, 2016 Online Published: September 21, 2016 doi: 10.5539/elt.v9n10p166 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/elt.v9n10p166 Abstract Language constructs how humans perceive things. Since language is a human construction, it tends to be biased as it is mainly men’s construction. Using gender perspectives, this paper attempts to discuss the imbalance in gender representations found in the examples given in an English learner’s dictionary, that is, the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, 3rd Edition. A learner’s dictionary is chosen because it is where one can find and learn the meaning of words. The results show that linguistically speaking, English is still a highly patriarchal and gendering language where men are portrayed better than women. Women tend to be subjugated under men’s domination. Sexism and patriarchy still overshadow the meanings of words characterizing men and women. This means that men are still considered to be dominating women, despite the fact that the feminist movement has been going more than thirty years. Consequently, English language teachers should balance the gender bias by providing addtional materials that are gender neutral.