E-Book Overview
The linguistic turn in German philosophy was initiated in the eighteenth century in the work of Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Gottfried von Herder, and Wilhelm von Humboldt. It was further developed in this century by Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer extended its influence to contemporary philosophers such as Karl-Otto Apel and J?Habermas. This tradition focuses on the world-disclosing dimension of language, emphasizing its communicative over its cognitive function.Although this study is concerned primarily with the German tradition of linguistic philosophy, it is very much informed by the parallel linguistic turn in Anglo-American philosophy, especially the development of theories of direct reference. Cristina Lafont draws upon Hilary Putnam's work in particular to criticize the linguistic idealism and relativism of the German tradition, which she traces back to the assumption that meaning determines reference. Part I is a reconstruction of the linguistic turn in German philosophy from Hamann to Gadamer. Part II offers the deepest account to date of Habermas's approach to language. Part III shows how the shortcomings of German linguistic philosophy can be avoided by developing a consistent and more defensible version of Habermas' theory of communicative rationality.
E-Book Content
Preface to the English Edition An early version of this study on the linguistic turn in hermeneutic philosophy appeared in Spanish in 1993. Since that time, I have become aware of many issues that arise as a natural consequence of the original study. But the attempt to address these issues necessarily led beyond the framework of the initial project; accordingly, the remarks that follow are an attempt to show how a somewhat broader framework emerges from the original one. My original project was an analysis of the characteristic traits and problems of the linguistic turn in the German tradition of the philosophy of language.1 This turn can be regarded as having 1. With the characterization of this tradition as ‘‘German’’ I mean to distinguish it from the other main tradition of the philosophy of language in this century, which I will call ‘‘Anglo-American.’’ Admittedly, such labeling of traditions is always problematic, given the possible discrepancy between the nationality of an author and the effective history (Wirkungsgeschichte) of her work. The name ‘‘Anglo-American’’ may seem especially misleading for a tradition so deeply influenced by authors such as Frege, Carnap, and Wittgenstein. However, when we consider the effective history of the work of these thinkers, the label seems appropriate. At any rate, it appears less problematic than the attempt to subsume all of the diverse authors of a given tradition under the rubric of a single philosophical viewpoint. The difficulty of finding apt philosophical labels is especially clear in our own time, when the term ‘‘Anglo-American’’ has to include not only the analytic but also the postanalytic phase of this tradition. Equally so, the label ‘‘German’’ must cover not only the hermeneutic tradition (and its predecessors), but that of critical hermeneutics as well. x Preface to the English Edition originated in the so-called Hamann-Herder-Humboldt tradition,2 which received further development and radicalization by Heidegger, and which through Gadamer has extended its influence to contemporary authors such as Apel and Habermas. This German tradition exhibits specific features that distinguish it clearly from the Anglo-American philosophy of language. Perhaps its most important feature is the explicit attempt, found in all the authors of this tradition, to break with the assimilation of all functions of language to the cognitive function (language as a vehicle of knowledge) at the expense of its communicative function (language as a means of understanding). In other words, it