哲學と言語

Abstract

Philosophers began to concentrate on problems of the logic of expression, or the meaning of expressions, towards the end of the last century, and the beginning of this. William James argued that some traditional metaphysical problems can be dissolved by adopting a pragmatic criterion of the meaning of concepts. During the first fifteen years of our century, the achievements of the New Realists in philosophy and of Einstein in physics forced a stricter consideration of the logic of language. The Realists presented proofs of the falsity of idealism, and relativity physics used strange concepts in a new way not clear to intuition yet clearly adequate. This opened the field of philosophy to the philosophy of language. The first theory was logical positivism, formulating the logic of science, but neglecting the non-scientific modes of expression. This neglect resulted naturally in the "emotivist" theory of poetic, religious, ethical, and metaphysical expressions, all of them non-scientific. Stevenson is associated with emotivism as its main proponent. The reaction to logical positivism and emotivism came in the 1930's. This took two main forms. One was existentialism, a form of irrationalism which rejected the scientific and the emotive modes of expression as less adequate than a paradoxical dialectic. The other part of the reaction was a very subtle sort of philosophy of language for which no generally satisfactory name can be found, begun by Wittgenstein in the same period. It avoids both extremes of existentialist irrationalism and that of scientism. This influence is now dominating the scene in British and American philosophy. It shows sympathy for and understanding of the various uses of language, scientific, ordinary, poetic, etc., without making any one of them primary at the expense of the others. In this way it respects what I call the phenomenological principle of initial neutrality. But it needs to be developed into a sort of descriptive metaphysics, to become philosophically adequate. This stage of development is already showing some signs of having begun.