Studio of Fedele Fischetti
Yes, with Michael Dummett’s death the “linguistic turn” in analytic philosophy has come to an end.
Yes, the new dominant trend is the move towards neurosciences, which are used to deal with issues in philosophy of mind, (cognitive) linguistics, (cognitive) semantics, morality, etc.
(And, yes, I am more than happy that we will no longer have to do with the syntax of the English verb “to hear” or “to see” in order to analyse the epistemology of perception).
Nonetheless, saying that language is just misleading seems to me to be missing the fact that language is often the only gateway we have to our thought and that our thought is the only gateway we have to reality.
Please, do not reply that we have other objective gateways. All of them are deemed to be filtered through our cognitive structure and there is nothing we can know without knowing it. We can observe our brain at work while thinking about whether to undertake an action, but we will then tend to interpret these discoveries by connecting results in a causal way.
More in general, I am surprised that one can deal with the issue without taking into account, e.g., Heidegger’s position, as if the complex links between language, thought and reality had never been discussed and as if the knot could just be cut as it happened in Gordion.
Comments and discussions are welcome. Be sure you are making a point and contributing to the discussion.