Cognitive Turn and Linguistic Turn

Cognitive and Linguistic Turn

My first goal is to question a received view about the development of Analytical Philosophy. According to this received view Analytical Philosophy is born out of a Linguistic Turn establishing the study of language as the foundation of the discipline; this primacy of language is then overthrown by the return of the study of mind as philosophia prima through a second Cognitive Turn taken in the mid-sixties. My contention is that this picture is a gross oversimplification and that the Cognitive Turn should better be seen as an extension of the Linguistic one. Indeed, if the Cognitive Turn gives explicit logical priority to the study of mind over the study of language, one of its central features is to see the mind as a representational system offering no substantial difference with a linguistic one. However, no justification is offered for the fundamental assimilation of the nature of a mental representation with that of a linguistic symbol supporting this picture of the mind, although the idea that a system of mental representations is identical in structure with a system of linguistic symbols has been argued over and over. I try to demonstrate this point through a close critical examination of Fodor's paradigmatic notion of 'double reduction.' My second claim is that the widespread contemporary assimilation of a mental representation with a symbol of a linguistic kind is no more than a prejudice. Finally I indicate that this prejudice cannot survive a rigorous critical examination.

1. Introduction: linguistic symbol and mental representation

A good deal of that important branch of contemporary philosophy which goes by the loose term of Analytical Philosophy lives, in my opinion, with a distorted representation of its own past, and consequently, with an inaccurate appreciation of the nature of its own achievements.

As a matter of fact the belief is widely spread among analytical circles that the birth of Analytical Philosophy is the result of a Linguistic Turn taken by its founding figures G. Frege and B. Russell and then expanded into various directions by their notorious or less notorious followers. (1) To put it in a nutshell, the Linguistic Turn — of which historians give in fact conflicting accounts — (2) can be characterized by saying that it turned (better said, intended to) every philosophical problem — and most of all every psychological and epistemological one — into a problem about language, or at least into a problem dependent upon problems about language.