[...]... agreement, then there is no point in taking the linguistic tum at all In this introduction, I cannot stop to take up the question of whether Ideal Language philosophers can resolve the difficulty of testing "capable of being tran- 19 scribed in principle." Nor can I consider the usefulness, and the limitations, of Goodman's "map" analogy Either task, if it were properly done, would involve examining the actual... culture of the human race, for all of the different elements of human nature that help to build up the culture of a certain epoch or a nation mirror themselves in one way or another in the philosophy of that epoch or of that nation The history of philosophy can be studied from two distinct points of view The first point of view is that of the historian; the second one is that of the philosopher They will... knowing the meaning, and if I know the meaning of the proposition I shall at least know the beginning of some path that will lead to the discovery of the truth or falsity of the proposition even if I am unable to find it at present It is my opinion that the future of philosophy hinges on this distinction between the discovery of sense and the discovery of truth How do we decide what the sense of a... attain their meaning by the fact that the rules of their application in empirical science are given If we investigate not only the syntactical rules of mathematical language merely, but also the rules which relate to the appearance of mathematical symbols in synthetic propositions, we formulate thereby the meaning of mathematical concepts (e.g the meaning of the symbol "2" is fonnulated by establishing... functions) and concerning a certain property of completeness of the system of these laws (determinismindeterminism) The philosophical problems of the foundation of biology refer above all to the relation between biology and physics Here the following two problems are to be distinguished: 1 Can the concepts of biology be defined on the basis of the concepts of physics? (If yes, the language of biology is a... describing the modes of functioning of the unconstructed concepts? But this task is precisely the task of describing the logical behaviour of the linguistic expressions of natural languages; and may by itself achieve the sought-for resolution of the problems and difficulties rooted in the elusive, deceptive mode of functioning of uncanstructed concepts I should not want to deny that in the discharge of. .. a certain feeling of unfriendliness developing on the part of the philosopher toward the scientist and the scientist toward the philosopher This feeling arose when philosophy claimed to possess a nobler and better method of discovering truth than the scientific method of observation and experiment In Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century Schelling, Fichte, and Hegel believed that there... including persons who are language-users, agents and observers, has a history of changing relations to other things in its environment These truisms entail consequences in the theory of perception, the theory of mind, the theory of action We cannot claim an absolute and unconditional finality for these truisms, since the deduction of them is always a deduction within language as we know it But the. .. of view They have all the appearance of being extremely scientific books because they seem to use the scientific language However, the finding of meaning cannot be done in the same way as the finding of truth This difference will come out much more clearly in the future There is a good deal of truth in the way in which Schopenhauer (although his own thinking seems to me to be very imperfect indeed)... for philosophers to resist abandoning the hope that their discipline could be a science, an activity in which the principal criterion of success is simply accurate description of the facts Ever since Plato invented the subject, philosophy has been in a state of tension produced by the pull of the arts on one side and the pull of the sciences on the other The linguistic turn has not lessened this tension, . Z39.48-1984. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 1967, 1992 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 1992 Printed in the United. of the meaning of any word. Consider the following thesis. (1) A person who understands the meaning of the words "I am in pain" cannot utter these words with the intention of mak- ing. and the like; (b) other linguistic philosophers, as well as opponents of linguistic philoso- phy, arguing against these theses; (~) lin- guistic philosophers pointing with pnde to their own linguistic