linguistic turn


The linguistic turn was a major development in Western philosophy during the 20th century, the most important characteristic of which is the focusing of philosophy and the other humanities primarily on the relationship between philosophy and language.Ludwig Wittgenstein can be considered one of the ancestors 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. Very different intellectual movements were associated with the term "linguistic turn". It became popular with the anthology The Linguistic Turn. Essays in Philosophical Method which Richard Rorty edited in 1967. According to Rorty, who later disassociated himself from the linguistic turn and analytic philosophy generally, the phrase "the linguistic turn" originated with the Austrian philosopher Gustav Bergmann.(1)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.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 view that language 'constitutes' reality is 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 differences between words, or, to put it differently, that a concept of something cannot exist without being named. Thus differences between word-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 inconcievable (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.The power of language, more specifically of certain rhetorical tropes, in historical discourse was explored by Hayden White.

Opponents

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.

See also

• Aretaic turn
• Iconic turn
• Cultural turn
• Cognition
• Iconicity
• Indexicality
• Rhetoric
• Semeiotic
• Semiotics

Notes

1. Rorty, 'Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Reification of Language' in Essays on Heidegger and Others

References

• Rorty, Richard. 'Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Reification of Language.' Essays on Heidegger and Others. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
• Clark, Elizabeth A. (2004), History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
• Toews, John E. (1987), "Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experience", The American Historical Review 92/4, 879–907.
• White, Hayden (1973), Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD.

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