Philosophy of Language and Linguistics. The Legacy of Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein

0427563 - FLÚ 2015 RIV DE eng M - Monography Chapter
Peregrin, Jaroslav
Logic and the Pursuit of Meaning.
Philosophy of Language and Linguistics. The Legacy of Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014, s. 193-212. Philosophical Analysis, 53. ISBN 978-3-11-034258-1
R&D Projects: GA ČR(CZ) GA13-21076S
Institutional support: RVO:67985955
Keywords : logic * meaning * linguistic turn * formal semantics
Subject RIV: AA - Philosophy ; Religion

The 'linguistic turn' of philosophy of the twentieth century led to the overestimation of the role of logic in the process understanding of meaning and in the consequent 'dissolution' of traditional philosophical problems. This is not to say that logic, in this respect, would be useless - on the contrary, it is very important; but we must understand that the role it can sensibly play is the Wittgensteinian role of helping us build simplified models of natural language (with all possibilities and limitations models have), not the Carnapian role of reducing meaning, without a remainder, to logico-mathematical construct. It this paper, I try to throw some new light on this situation in terms of distinguishing two perspectives that may be assumed to look at an expression: the expression-as-object perspective (looking at the relation between an expression and its meaning as a contingent, a posteriori matter) and the expression-as-medium perspective (looking at this relation as something necessary or a priori).
Permanent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0233304