The Language Framework: L OR L?

Abstract

The discovery that language can be used to talk about language, it may be said, qualifies as the most important innovation in the history of philosophy; certainly, at the very least, it serves to delineate the difference between the analytical approach reflected already by the Platonic dialogues, which history thus records as Socrates’ enduring contribution to philosophy, the speculative approach of the Milesian “nature” philosophers and even the persuasive approach of the Sophistic argumentative tradition. Its explicit invocation as a principle of analysis, of course, has been a practice which has flourished over the past 100 years or so, especially as a result of the formal methods facilitated by the development of symbolic logic as a device for the exploration of the structure of language, an approach whose ultimate potential, no doubt, has yet to be fully realized but whose possibilities of application were spectacularly illustrated by Whitehead and Russell [1910], [1912], [1913]. Indeed, some of the most noted works of contemporary philosophy, including Tarski’s semantical conception of truth and Carnap’s logical interpretation of probability, are investigations that would have been inconceivable without the resources provided by careful differentiation between object language and meta-language.