Introducing the Hermeneutical Conceptions of Language into the Contemporary Philosophy of Language

Abstract

This paper is seeking for mutual basis for the two different traditions of philosophizing about the language: the already established analytical philosophy of language and the marginalized hermeneutical philosophy of language. Through an examination of their grounds, which I find in the explication of the linguistic turn in the philosophy, both of the traditions show comparable features which make them two traditions of an unified philosophical field. Such conclusion opposes to the widely spread claim which identifies analytical philosophy with the whole philosophy of language. Besides the fundamental similarities that justify introducing the neglected hermeneutical theories of language into the field of philosophy of language, I talk also about their idiosyncratic differences, which, following Charles Taylor, distinguish these traditions into a designative and an expressive one. The main gap between them emerges from the different accentuating of what should be the preferable function of language and therefore main research task of the philosophy of language. While the designative analytical theories view language more or less through the perspective of truth conditions in that they ask how language refers the world. The expressive theories rotate around a more general question about the inner relatedness of language and world in our having a world in that they ask how much language is there in our worldviews. While the former assume an epistemologically external relation between language and world, the later doubt that there can be a worldview without a language and therefore argue for an inner co-constitutional relation between world and language.