Philosophical Semantics

Abstract

It has always been thought that technical, reasoned philosophy is the comprehensive science of reality and brings under its special scrutiny such fundamental concepts as space, time, contingency, mind, causation, language. It has been said that the task of philosophy is to delineate “the generic traits” of reality; and even if its scope were less than this, the value placed on philosophy would fade away if it were thought incapable of yielding ontological information. The process of value-deflation has in fact set in, for the classical notion of philosophy has begun to wear thin. The philosophical tree of knowledge has so far borne only phantom fruit and created intractable disputation. A closer look at philosophy can no longer be dismissed or thought unnecessary. In the last fifty years, the work of G. E. Moore, the logical positivists, and Ludwig Wittgenstein has made it uncertain what a philosopher is talking about when he says that motion does not exist or that no two terms are really synonymous, although it is still natural to think that the first statement is about the occurrence of motion and the second about the existence of synonymy in a language.