Introducing these commitments briefly may serve to...

Introducing these commitments briefly may serve to facilitate reflection on the nature of this reference and focus some of the questions that it raises. As I shall discuss it in this work, the structuralist picture of language consists in four interrelated central commitments and a fifth, less central one that often (though not always) goes along with the first four: Language as a whole can be understood as a system or structure of signs, words, propositions, sentences or other significant terms.

The logical, grammatical, or structural interrelations among these terms, as well as their ordinary use in speaking or writing, are wholly or partially constrained by a corpus of intelligible rules or regularities. These rules or regularities are describable and their description can account for the correct or normal use of terms in everyday interlocution.

On the basis of such a description, it is possible to determine the meaning or meaningfulness of terms or combinations of terms used on particular occasions.[^3] The rules or regularities that thus constrain the use of language are essentially public , intersubjective , and social in character.[^4] [^5] These interrelated theoretical commitments, naturally linked to one another in the vision of language that they determine, have had far-ranging methodological consequences from an early moment in the development of the tradition.

At its beginning, they provided the methodological basis for the projects of conceptual or logical analysis that characterized the tradition in its early stages, and indeed originally gave it its name.

For the practitioners of these early projects, the solution or dissolution of philosophical problems depends on the clarification and description of logical structure .[^6] Analysis of propositions, facts, or concepts into their structurally simpler elements serves to reveal the real or genuine form of these individual items or their systematic interrelationships, over against our ordinary tendencies to mistake or misconstrue these forms or relations.

The demonstration is, in particular cases, to be guided by an overarching elucidation of the structure of a set of systematically interrelated terms, whether these terms are conceived as elements of language (at first they were not), as objects of knowledge, or as individual concepts, thoughts, senses or meanings.