Analytic philosophy and language
pp. 194-244
in: , The enlightenment project in the analytic conversation, Berlin, Springer, 1998Abstract
The manner in which analytic philosophers have approached language reflects a particular epistemological agenda.1 Analytic philosophy is committed to a modern naturalist2 epistemology. Such an epistemology has a recurrent problem: to explain how, if knowledge is to be understood as the internal grasping of a wholly objective external structure (form), it is possible for a subject to abstract within experience the form of an object. The reason why this is a problem is that all modern attempts so far to explain the abstraction process as itself a natural (mechanistic) process have failed. Moreover, many attempts to explain the process seem to raise the specter of a subject (or human culture) that structures experience to such an extent that knowledge can no longer be understood as the internal mirroring of a wholly objective external form. In short, there are two things that modern naturalist epistemology has difficulty accomplishing: (a) presenting knowledge as itself a wholly natural process (thereby making its epistemology consistent and coherent with its metaphysics) 3and (b) avoiding appeal to a subject of any kind.4