Introduction

Abstract

Language has become one of philosophy’s most important and pressing themes during this century. This preoccupation with language has its origins in the most diverse areas of philosophical inquiry. It has come from the theory of knowledge by way of a turn from the critique of reason to a critique of language; from logic as a consequence of its concern with artificial languages and the logical analysis of natural languages; and from anthropology by way of the emphasis on language as an accomplishment essential to the definition of man and through the discovery of correlations between linguistic form and man’s image of the world; from ethics because of its concern with the linguistic forms of ethical statements and the demarcation of the boundary between them and descriptive sentences.