2013-11-11
15 分钟This is philosophy bites with me, Nigel.
Warburton, and me, David Edmonds.
If you enjoy philosophy bites, please support us.
We're currently unfunded and all donations would be gratefully received.
For details, go to www.philosophybites.com.
Wittgenstein published only one book in his lifetime, the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus.
Shortly after it came out, he began to have second thoughts about some of its fundamental tenets, thoughts which eventually ended up in his philosophical investigations.
At this stage, he was teaching primary school children in southern Austria and becoming interested in how language was actually used rather than in its underlying logical form.
The distinguished philosopher Rom Harey, who's still teaching into his 9th decade and who divides his time between Oxford and Georgetown, says this marks a crucial phase in contemporary the linguistic turn.
Rom Hare, welcome to philosophy bites.
Thank you very much.
I'm glad to be here.
The topic we're going to focus on is the linguistic turn in philosophy.
Could you just begin by saying what the linguistic turn was and is?
Well, we have to go back to the beginning of the 20th century and the two great figures of that era, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Russell came up with a quite brilliant idea that most philosophical problems could be resolved by bringing to light the logical form of the propositions in which they were expressed, because this involved various assumptions that you could extract a logical form which represented the core of the proposition you were investigating, and that the words you were using retained some kind of stability in the course of the discussion.
Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, of course, bought into all this.
But very shortly after he finished work on that book, he particularly, in his efforts, I think, to teach the kids in Trottenbach, he came to the idea that ordinary language was full of possibilities for making philosophical errors.
And by revealing the kind of traps which a philosopher fell into in the use of ordinary language, not a farmer or an engineer, you could resolve those problems in a perhaps almost a final way.
So you're saying that the linguistic turn is essentially the turn away from looking for logical form, looking for this mathematical analysis of language towards almost a sociological account of how people are embedded in a world of using words in particular ways.