Various critiques of philosophy have focused on the failure of its practitioners to come to any sort of consensus. The thesis attempts to account for this phenomenon in recent philosophy of language by seeing Kripke, Quine, Austin, and Wittgenstein as taking as their data different aspects and descriptional levels of our linguistic practices. On this view, Kripke has made a positive philosophical contribution by finding localized structures in certain semantic areas . His essentialism, while def…
Read moreVarious critiques of philosophy have focused on the failure of its practitioners to come to any sort of consensus. The thesis attempts to account for this phenomenon in recent philosophy of language by seeing Kripke, Quine, Austin, and Wittgenstein as taking as their data different aspects and descriptional levels of our linguistic practices. On this view, Kripke has made a positive philosophical contribution by finding localized structures in certain semantic areas . His essentialism, while defensible, primarily shows us the lack of content in realist-antirealist controversies