Showing papers on "Linguistic turn published in 1996"

The myth of social action

Abstract: 1. Introduction 2. Action reported missing in action theory 3. Action and social action 4. Action versus social action 5. The rise of social situationalism 6. The argument by denial 7. Accounts and actions 8. The argument by exclusion 9. The argument by incorporation 10. The 'learning everything from others' thesis 11. The communicative act paradigm 12. The linguistic turn for the worse 13. The myth of social action 14. The obstacle which is social situationalism 15. Bringing action back in.

Nomadism with a difference: Deleuze's legacy in a feminist perspective

Abstract: In the complex landscape of poststructuralist philosophies of difference, Deleuze’s thought strikes a uniquely positive note. His theory of nomadic subjectivity stresses the affirmative structure of the subject and therefore distances Deleuze from the more nihilistic or relativistic edge of contemporary philosophy. Deleuze’s thought offers more than a reflection on the contemporary configurations of power and on the forms of resistance available in the postindustrial regime of the global economy. Even more than his “frere ennemi” Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze re-inscribes the reflection on the politics of the subject within an aesthetic and ethical framework centred on affirmation, that is to say, on the affectivity and the positivity of the subject’s desires. I find it important to stress this point now that the long and in some way impossible task of living with Deleuze’s ‘anti-Oedipal’ legacy is upon us. I see a real danger that the complex and highly articulate structure of Deleuze’s redefinition of subjectivity becomes split between, on the one hand, a more “socio-economic” angle, which inscribes the French master alongside other leading thinkers of the “post-industrial” or “post-fordist” economic system, and on the other, a more “aesthetic” aspect, which inscribes Deleuze in a continuum with the cultural and literary generation who invented “the linguistic turn”. This would be in my eyes a reductive reception of Deleuze’s work and one which would spectacularly miss the point of his complex re-articulation of subjectivity as an assembled singularity of forces. As I have often pointed out,1 Deleuze strikes a unique position also as a careful reader of the problem of the ‘becoming-woman’ of philosophy, a question which he inscribes at the heart of the philosophy of modernity. From Nietzsche to the contemporary variations on the theme of Woman as the philosophical Other, the “feminine” side of philosophy has emerged as the site of crucial questions which challenge the classical conceptions of subjectivity and threaten its humanistic foundations. Deleuze faces up to this challenge, without paying lip service to feminism or pretending to be a “feminist”, let alone a “feminine” philosopher, but rather by raising the question of the becoming-woman at the heart of his conceptual structure. In

Language and Relation: . . . that there is language

Abstract: The most recent version of the "linguistic turn," the revolution in language theory shaped by Saussure's structural linguistics and realized in a sweeping revision of investigations throughout the humanities and social sciences, has rushed past the most basic "fact": that there is language. What has been lost? Almost everything of what Heidegger tried to approach under the name of "ontology" until the word proved too laden by common misapprehension to be of use. Most immediately, this is everything of language that exceeds the order of signification, together with the subject's engagement with this "excess" that is the (non)ground of history and the material site of all relationality, beginning with that unthought that is widely termed "culture." Language and Relation returns to this site in close readings of meditations on language by Martin Heidegger, Luce Irigaray, Paul Celan, Walter Benjamin, and Maurice Blanchot. It seeks to move with these authors beyond the order of signification and toward the an-archic grounds of relation (of all relations between self and other, and of relation in general), exploring the possibility for a strong link between issues in modern philosophy of language and contemporary socio-political concerns.

The Ontology of the Analytic Tradition and Its Origins : Realism and Identity in Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and Quine

Abstract: The analytic movement advertised its 'linguistic turn' as a radical break from the two-thousand-year-old substance tradition. But this is an illusion. On the fundamental level of ontology, there is enough reformulation and presupposition of traditional 'no entity without identity' themes to analogize Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and Quine to Aristotle as paradigmatic of modified realism. Thus the pace of ontology is glacial. Frege and Russell, not Wittgenstein and Quine, emerge as the true analytic progenitors of 'no entity without identity,' offering between them at least twenty-nine private language arguments and sixty-four 'no entity without identity' theories.

The Meaning of the Hermeneutic Tradition in Contemporary Philosophy

Abstract: In his Notes on Philosophy, which he began writing in 1796, Friedrich Schlegel asserts that ‘The fact that one person understands the other is philosophically incomprehensible, but it is certainly magical.’ In the interim a large amount of philosophical effort has been expended on trying to refute Schlegel's first claim. The fact is, though, that what Michael Dummett calls a ‘fullblooded theory of meaning’ is now looking less and less like a really feasible philosophical enterprise, so Schlegel may have actually been right. Dummett maintains that a ‘full-blooded theory of meaning’ ‘must give an explicit account, not only of what anyone must know in order to know the meaning of any given expression, but of what constitutes having such knowledge’. However, as I shall try to show via aspects of the hermeneutic tradition, it is precisely this way of talking about meaning and understanding that renders them incomprehensible. The differences between approaching the issue of understanding from the hermeneutic tradition and approaching it from the analytical tradition can, I want to suggest, tell us something important about the state of philosophy today. My aim is eventually to suggest that we need to understand the analytical version of the ‘linguistic turn’ in modern philosophy as a perhaps rather questionable aspect of a much more important ‘hermeneutic turn’, whose implications are now becoming apparent in more and more diverse areas of contemporary philosophy.

Completing the linguistic turn

Abstract: Lecture des «Investigations philosophiques» de Wittgenstein a la lumiere de l'analyse structuraliste et poststructuraliste de la signification et de la reference developpee par A. Giddens. Soulevant la question du statut des theories du langage, l'A. montre que l'extension du probleme du jugement chez Wittgenstein aboutit a une definition sociale de la comprehension et des jeux de langage

The New Wittgensteinians and the End of Jurisprudence

Abstract: This article seeks to critically evaluate the new approach to jurisprudence and legal justification. In particular, one of the most significant contributions of the article is that it seeks to evaluate the new approach by, among other things, examining the history of the Wittgensteinian descriptive project in other areas of philosophy. The article focuses primarily on the work of Philip Bobbitt who has offered the leading example of this type of neo-Wittgensteinian approach. The arguments generated in the course of the article, however, may be applied against any neo-Wittgensteinian internalist approach to jurisprudence. Thus, the article seeks to provide a general critique of the neo-Wittgensteinian internalist project in law.Part II sets out a brief account of Wittgenstein's later approach to philosophy. It also explains that Wittgenstein influenced philosophers to take the linguistic turn. Thus, it describes the approaches of the ideal language philosophers and the ordinary language philosophers.Part II then locates Bobbitt's project within the Wittgensteinian tradition and sets out Bobbitt's basic descriptive approach to jurisprudence. Part II closes by contrasting internal with external approaches to jurisprudence. Part III sets out some alternatives to the internalist descriptive project. Part IV seeks to evaluate the neo-Wittgensteinian internalist descriptive approach to jurisprudence. The article concludes that the neo-Wittgensteinian project should be rejected.

De Kant a Peirce, cien años después: a través de K.O. Apel

Abstract: Karl-Otto Apel reconstructs the "linguistic turn" of contemporary philosophy as the passage from Kant to Peirce a hundred years before. First he recovers the transcendental pragmatic of his youth, cleary distinguished from subsequent less trusthworthy translations. Later, Toward a Transformation of Philosophy shows the Kantian root of Peirce's thought. Apel's proposals are very controversial.

Linguistic Relativity in French, English, and German Philosophy

Abstract: In our century philosophy has indeed taken a "linguistic turn," both in the AngloAmerican analytic tradition (in the work of Russell, Wittgenstein, and subsequent logicians), and in the Continental tradition, which has been deeply influenced by Saussurean "structuralism," as well as by Lacan's notion of language as a mirror of consciousness, and Heidegger's concept of language as the "house of being." Most philosophical discussion, however, has considered language as an essentially undifferentiated whole, treating, for example, such problems as the role of language in general in acquiring knowledge (Gadamer), the significance of metaphor in general in understanding (Ricoeur), the possibility of a universal ambiguity in language (Derrida), and so on. Apart from such studies as Quine's theory of untranslatability (which is, in any case, rather abstract) there has been surprisingly little attention paid by philosophers to the important question of differences between real language--what factors are involved in diachronic language change, why there should be hundreds of extant languages, etc. Even the linguists' eminently philosophy-oriented hypothesis of language-thought relativity (the theory that the grammars of different languages might cause their speakers to develop different world views), first investigated by Wilhelm von Humboldt in the early 1800's and further developed by prominent 20th century linguists (in America, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf; in Germany, Leo Weisgerber and Jost Trier), has not been treated in a significant way by recent philosophers. Certainly, though, the theory has profound import for philosophy, not least of all in philosophy's self-examination, as it attempts to determine causes for the variety of philosophic schools that have traditionally formed, not only from shared political ideologies, historical determinism, and perpetuation of respect for teachers and tradition, but also along linguistic lines. In the synthesis of environmental and genetic factors that create philosophic world views (and cultural views in general), syntactic and semantic differences between languages might constitute a larger ingredient than has generally been acknowledged. As Edward Sapir rather pointedly states in an essay written for H. L. Mencken's American Mercury in 1924: To a far greater extent than the philosopher has realized, he is likely to become the dupe of his speech-forms, which is equivalent to saying that the mould of his thought, which is typically a linguistic mould, is apt to be projected into his conception of the world. Thus innocent linguistic categories may take on the formidable appearance of cosmic absolutes. If only, therefore, to save himself from philosophic verbalism, it would be well for the philosopher to look critically to the linguistic foundations and limitations of his thoughts. (157) The current situation in linguistics has not been very much more favourable than that in academic philosophy to the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis." Dominated by Noam Chomsky's oft-revised attempts at a structuralist "universal generative grammar," linguists have likewise devoted comparatively slight attention to the theory of language-thought relativism; but Chomskyan and relativist theories are not necessarily mutually incompatible. Even Chomsky, who holds that human knowledge and understanding in language and thought "is not derived by induction.... Rather, it grows in the mind, on the basis of our biological nature, triggered by appropriate experience," admits that cognitive and linguistic understanding is "in a limited way shaped by experience that settles options left open by the innate structure of the mind" (Sophia Linguistica, p. 25).1 This "limited" shaping of languagethought by experience remains, however, undefined by Chomsky; presumably it is an amalgam of individual and group experience (including the linguistic); and intercultural world view differences, insofar as they are non-innate (i.e., non-genetic), must then, for the Chomskyan structuralists, be experientially shaped. …

Incommensurability: Can Comparative Religious Ethics Help?

Abstract: Although the fact of religious incommensurability cannot be gainsaid, the language of difference and commonality often gets in the way of true interreligious understanding. One way of avoiding this impasse is to emphasize the dynamic character of traditions, even as we use the language of difference and commonality as a bridge to dialogue. If comparative religious ethics recognizes this dynamic character of all religious traditions, it represents one of the most fruitful approaches to avoiding the dangers of overemphasizing incommensurability. The author ends with ten theses to encourage further discussion. The title of my article has a question mark at the end. That question mark opens up the issue of there being religious incommensurables or, at least, raises questions about what incommensurability means in this context. But I fear the question applies only to the bridging capacity of comparative religious ethics. The reality of religious incommensurables seems to be presupposed on the authority of postmodernists and postliberals, and this seems to mean that members of one religious tradition cannot understand those of another. The idea that comparative religious ethics might be a bridge suggests that the propounders of the question do not take the incommensurability as absolute. They think we may live in a common world and face common problems. By seeing how different traditions respond to common problems, we may be able to find points of contact with our own that will enable us to understand some features of an otherwise incommensurable way of thinking and being. The point, I think, is that action more obviously relates us to a common world than do ideas. There is a tension between the belief that there is a common world of any kind and the belief that the languages of the several traditions are incommensurable. The latter belief grows out of a tendency to follow the linguistic turn to the conclusion that language constitutes the horizon of human being in the world. In this view, words and phrases have their meaning only in relation to other parts of the language or to the linguistic Buddhist-Christian Studies 16 (1996). ? by University of Hawai'i Press. All rights reserved. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.203 on Thu, 20 Oct 2016 04:17:04 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

The New Wittgensteinians and the End of Jurisprudence

Abstract: This article seeks to critically evaluate the new approach to jurisprudence and legal justification. In particular, one of the most significant contributions of the article is that it seeks to evaluate the new approach by, among other things, examining the history of the Wittgensteinian descriptive project in other areas of philosophy. The article focuses primarily on the work of Philip Bobbitt who has offered the leading example of this type of neo-Wittgensteinian approach. The arguments generated in the course of the article, however, may be applied against any neo-Wittgensteinian internalist approach to jurisprudence. Thus, the article seeks to provide a general critique of the neo-Wittgensteinian internalist project in law.Part II sets out a brief account of Wittgenstein's later approach to philosophy. It also explains that Wittgenstein influenced philosophers to take the linguistic turn. Thus, it describes the approaches of the ideal language philosophers and the ordinary language philosophers.Part II then locates Bobbitt's project within the Wittgensteinian tradition and sets out Bobbitt's basic descriptive approach to jurisprudence. Part II closes by contrasting internal with external approaches to jurisprudence. Part III sets out some alternatives to the internalist descriptive project. Part IV seeks to evaluate the neo-Wittgensteinian internalist descriptive approach to jurisprudence. The article concludes that the neo-Wittgensteinian project should be rejected.

The Second Linguistic Turn: Chomsky and the Philosophy of Language

Abstract: The book is an inquiry into the presuppositions of the philosophy of language. To this effect, a distinction has been made between theory and its underlying presuppositions. The main thrust of this work is to critically examine these presuppositions so as to make a correct assessment of the theories/approaches that follow from them. Central to this inquiry is Noam Chomsky's theory of grammar. It has been used as a tool in the light of which the investigation has been carried out and it has also been projected as offering an alternative theoretical foundation to the philosophy of language.