Topics Philosophy

Question How does the panel explain the fact that philosophy seems to have become less and less about "truth" and more and more about the constructs of "language" - such that the discipline now appears to have a closer relationship with lawyers rather than scientists. When did it all go wrong?

Accepted:
November 7, 2005

Comments

Am I to explain why philosophy has become less concerned with "truth"? Or am I to explain why it seems to have become less concerned wtih "truth"? I think I can only try to explain the latter, as I don't think philosophy has become any less concerned with "truth".

It's true that philosophy (or at least certain parts of it) over the last hundred years or so have been greatly concerned with language. There are many different reasons for that focus. For a time, the idea that some philosophical puzzles are really the results of misunderstandings was popular, and so the attempt to resolves such misunderstandings by close attention to language was popular. There are still some people with such views, but not many. Some philosophers still put great stake in "conceptual analysis", the thought being that a better understanding of our concept of knowledge, causation, or what have you would throw light on philosophical problems, anyway, and careful attention to language is important in any such endeavor. And even if one does not accept that view, there are plenty of cases where careful attention to language is important, anyway. For example, it has become clear in the last few decades that many philosophical questions are tied up with questions involving subjunctive conditionals, and, while important work on subjunctive conditionals has been done, even now there are many open questions about how we should understand them.

Paying such careful attention to language, however, need not distance one from science. It's become an important part of the philosopher's toolbox, but it's just that: One tool. Moreover, there are many parts of philosophy that are deeply connected to science. That is true, obviously, of work in philosophy of physics and biology, but much work in philosophy of mind and philosophy of language, too, is profoundly inter-disciplinary.

There's another way to think about it. For a long time (between the 17th and 19th centuries) Western philosophy was concerned with the nature of knowledge, and that interest was prosecuted by inquiry into the nature of the relation between the mind and the world. That relation was generally taken in European philosophy to be one of REPRESENTATION: the mind was taken to represent things in the world, and questions about knowledge were often framed as questions about how those represenatations arise, what their relation is to representeds, and how we could be justified, or whether we could be justified, in claiming knowledge of the world in virtue of awareness of our representations. At the dawn of the 20th century, a number of European philosophers (Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Heidegger) noticed that language also represents the world, and that it mediates our interaction with objects of knowledge. This insight inspired a great deal of attention to language as a medium of representation. But this attention to language also revealed that language, in mediating our relation to the world does a great deal more than merely represent. Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Sellars and others demonstrated that we do a lot of different things with language, many of which are relevant to how we engage with the world and each other. This insight is then reflected upon thought, to show that our cognition is not merely representational. In any case, reflection on language, cognition and human life reveals that language inflects our thought, and that understanding what it is to be really human and to think like a human being is impossible without attention to what it is to use language and how a language using being thinks. Inasmuch as reflection on knowledge and what it is to lead a human life is central to philosophy, so is reflection on language.

That's Europe. But remember, philosophy is a global activity. In both Indian and Chinese philosophy the philosophy of language has been a central concern right from the beginning. Classical Indian philosphers, including those in Orthodox schools and those in the Buddhist and Jain traditions, remarked on the centrality of language to thought, to knowledge, to ethics and to human life, and addressed the nature of language and its relation to thought and to reality extensively. Taoist philosophy in China begins with the Daodeching's investigation into the problem posed by the instability of linguistic meaning.

So, I think nothing went wrong. If you are really interested in the deepest problems of philosophy, you can't ignore the philosophy of language.