1 - An issue about language

Summary

How to understand language? This is a pre-occupation going back to the very beginning of our intellectual tradition. What is the relation of language to other signs? to signs in general? Are linguistic signs arbitrary or motivated? What is it that signs and words have when they have meaning? These are very old questions. Language is an old topic in Western philosophy, but its importance has grown. It is not a major issue among the ancients. It begins to take on greater importance in the seventeenth century, with Hobbes and Locke. And then in the twentieth century it has become close to obsessional. All major philosophers have their theories of language: Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Davidson, and all manner of “deconstructionists” have made language central to their philosophical reflection.

In what we can call the modern period, from the seventeenth century, there has been a continual debate, with philosophers reacting to and feeding off each other, about the nature of language. I think we can cast light on this debate if we identify two grand types of theory. I will call the first an “enframing” theory. By this I mean that the attempt is made to understand language within the framework of a picture of human life, behaviour, purposes, or mental functioning, which is itself described and defined without reference to language.