The characteristic resource it marshals against this anxiety...

The characteristic resource it marshals against this anxiety is the life of the human being who speaks, understands, intends and thinks. One of the most significant projects of the analytic tradition in the twentieth century has been its attempt to envision and comprehend the structure of language.

From the first moments of the development of its characteristic modes of analysis, reflection, and inquiry, the analytic tradition has attempted to grasp language as a regular structure of signs accessible to rational elucidation. Wittgenstein’s analysis of the tendencies operative in Frege’s thought displays, particularly clearly, some of the constitutive tensions to which this attempt is prone.

As we shall see over the next several chapters, the analytic tradition’s search for a comprehensive description of the structure of language has also involved a complex consideration of the life of the human user of language. It has pictured this life, alternatively, as the self-consciousness of a subject of experience or as the shared life of a community of speakers, the mutuality that is seen as the foundation of any possibility of communication.

The implications of the analytic tradition’s joint envisioning of language and life are varied and far ranging; a historically based exploration can help to elucidate the broader legacy of the analytic tradition itself for contemporary critical thought and action.

In its diagnostic modality, this exploration looks toward the clarity of a life that no longer seeks its significance in the problematic attempt to master the relationship of signs to their meanings, but might find in the withdrawal of this relationship into abeyance the vanishing of the problem it represents.[^2] I.

Analytic philosophy’s engagement with language has been, on any account, longstanding, sustained, and determinative for both the tradition’s main methods and its most significant results. It is probably impossible to identify a single conception of the nature of language that underlies all of the tradition’s varied analytic, reflective, and critical projects.

Nevertheless, there is a distinctive set of interrelated theoretical and methodological commitments that have repeatedly made reference to “language” itself possible for many, if not most, of the projects of analytic philosophy throughout the twentieth century that have discussed it.