But when I read the definitive documents of the middle of...

But when I read the definitive documents of the middle of the twentieth century (most of all, those of Quine and Wittgenstein) that were supposed to have actually proven this basis, I was surprised to find that they seemed to drive toward a quite different (indeed almost opposite) conclusion.

For far from establishing the possibility of basing an account of linguistic meaning in an account of praxis , they seemed to me to locate an essential gap or aporia between signs and their application in an ordinary human life, demonstrating an essential incommensurability of linguistic meaning with any theoretically describable structure of practice or action.

The skeptical or critical results that demonstrate this gap, it seemed to me as well, must have deep consequences for the form of our ordinary access to language’s structure, and hence for our understanding of the diverse and varied contexts and situations of human life wherein language is regularly at issue.

If the question of language has indeed been definitive for the analytic tradition, this definitiveness is nevertheless not immediately evident either in the prevalent methods of the tradition as it is currently practiced or in much of the historiography that has recently begun to recount their development.

As the methods of analytic philosophy have gained a position of unquestioned prominence in Anglo-American philosophy departments, the underlying motivations of its original project have often nevertheless been lost, hidden, or obscured within an ostensibly neutral set of practices of expository clarity and rational argumentation.

This obscuration arises, as we shall see, for essential reasons from the deep and nearly unresolvable ambiguities to which the philosophical critique of language is exposed as soon as it attempts to gain theoretical clarity about its own positive methodological basis. Nevertheless it amounts to an artificial and premature closure of a set of essential questions that have by no means either been answered or dissolved by positive theory.