Most often...

Most often, this takes the form of the search for a descriptive overview or systematic clarification of the rules or regularities conceived as constitutive of language and its possibilities of use. As we have seen over the last several chapters, however, this quest for understanding repeatedly succumbs to inherent ambiguities and instabilities, grounded in the essential ambiguities of the structuralist picture of language itself.

The quest is open to criticism on the basis of an expanded conception of the kinds of explanation, or intelligibility, we may wish from a theoretical “account” of language. But it is also clear that the ambiguities it evinces are already present, if only in a vague and inarticulate way, in the ordinary language that it aims to theorize.

As we have seen, in particular in relation to Quine, these ambiguities are indeed present as soon as language can speak of itself, as soon as there are words for its capacity to mean anything, and thus as soon as the meaning of words, their bearing on our lives, becomes a topic for human conversation at all.

Thus it is that, according to what might well be considered one of the most consistent results of the tradition, linguistic reason, in its everyday employment, poses certain questions that are unavoidable for it, but at the same time cannot be answered univocally by the elucidation of logical or grammatical structure.

The situation is closely reminiscent of that described by the famous first lines of the first edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason : Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, a prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.[^274] Indeed, as I shall argue in this final section, like the Kantian project which responds to a similar exigency of reason, the analytic inquiry can be seen as performing a complex critique of linguistic meaning itself on the ambiguous ground of its relationship to human life.

The critique effectively challenges the underlying ideological bases of some of the most prevalent social practices of modernity by revealing their complex relation to the forms of language and assumptions about meaning that support them.