Philosophy

For much of the twentieth century, English speaking philosophy reorganized itself around a single working assumption: that many traditional philosophical problems, about mind, knowledge, even existence itself, are best approached by first examining the language in which they are posed, since a confused question can produce an unanswerable problem that dissolves once its grammar is made precise. Gottlob Frege's work on sense and reference, Bertrand Russell's theory of descriptions and the early Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico Philosophicus supplied the technical tools, and the philosopher Richard Rorty later gave the movement its name, the linguistic turn, in a 1967 anthology collecting essays built on that shared method.

The turn changed what counted as doing philosophy well. A philosopher working this way did not typically argue directly about whether the world contains universals or whether the mind is identical to the brain, but analyzed the sentences in which such claims are made, asking what a sentence must mean for it to be true or false at all, a method the Vienna Circle's logical positivists pushed to its most severe conclusion, that a statement with no way of being verified is not false but meaningless. Later philosophers, including Wittgenstein himself in his own later work, argued the turn had over corrected, treating language as more uniform and rule bound than ordinary speech actually is, but the habit of examining a philosophical question's own wording before answering it outlived the movement that made it standard practice.