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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Philosophy and the Vision of Language (routledge Studies in Twentieth-century Philosophy) III. CRITICAL OUTCOMES Introductory: From the Aporia of Structure to the Critique of Practice The analytic tradition’s inquiry into the structure of language, throughout the course of its itinerary, has repeatedly taken up the question of the relationship of language to its everyday use, practice or employment.

This inquiry has not yielded any consistent or complete positive theory of this relationship. But its most significant implication might be its ability to continue, and re-inscribe, the traditional critique of reason on the indeterminate ground of the everyday relationship of language to the life of the being that speaks.

For with its ongoing consideration of the structure of language, the analytic tradition has, as we have seen, also sought to understand how language structures the possibilities of a human life.

In seeking a description of the rules and regularities that would determine the extent and nature of the possible meaningfulness of signs, and so fix the bounds of linguistic sense, it has also sought to elucidate what we can understand or appreciate in the words or utterances of another, what we can take as a reason for an action or an explanation of its sense, what we can see as a project to be shared or contested, a way of life to be endorsed or refused.[^273] The desire for the clarification of meaning that underlies this inquiry is an ordinary one, marked already in the most mundane requests for clarification, the most everyday questions of shared meaning.

But in its detailed development in the analytic tradition, its “object” is the same as that which philosophical thought has long sought to grasp as logos , the form of the meaning of words as well as the linguistic reason their everyday practice embodies.

Historical reflection on the itinerary of the tradition’s encounter with this problematic object suggests both a more comprehensive sense of the significance of its most innovative methods and a more exact placement of them in a broader geography of critical thought. The analytic tradition’s inquiry into language, in most of its historical forms, looks toward the completion of a comprehensive theoretical or descriptive understanding of the possibility of linguistic meaning.