And such was the audacity of his vision of language that he...

And such was the audacity of his vision of language that he could declare these problems universally resolved by their critique.[^276] At first, the critique of language meant the drawing of a critical line , within the totality of language itself, between the meaningful propositions of scientific or objective description and those that (though they might serve to express a mood or feeling) lacked meaning in this sense.

From the beginning, though, the critical practice that would delimit linguistic sense by clarifying the real or genuine forms of meaning encountered the question of the methodological basis of its own claim to enact this delimitation. Thus structuralism was faced with the further critical question of the ground of its own defining commitments.

And the philosophical reflection that took up this question as the question of linguistic signs to their ordinary use also took up the deeper critical inquiry to which it led. The results of this inquiry - in particular, as we have seen, those of the Sellars, Quine, and the later Wittgenstein - tended to problematize what we may assume about our ordinary relationship to “meaning” by calling into…