The Concept of Language We Don’t Need

Abstract

The analysis of mainstream linguistics and philosophy of language, which I have presented in the form of six principles, as a background or foil against which to construct ‘another philosophy of language’, one that would enable me to understand both bad words and the productions of fous litteraires, suffers from one obvious defect: over-generalisation. I lump together schools of linguistics and philosophical positions between which there are serious, and sometimes unbridgeable, differences, and sharp polemics. The best I can claim for my six principles is that they are linked by Wittgenstein’s family resemblance: all the various trends in mainstream linguistics and philosophy of language will resort to one or several of them, hardly any to the six of them. So, in order to make my critique more convincing, I must look in some detail at one subsidiary of this main stream, with its own coherence and limitations. I hope that this will make the necessity of the construction of another philosophy of language clearer.