ABSTRACT
This book has set out to challenge the idea that ‘linguistic philosophy’, in its AngloAmerican guises, has no points of contact with French theoretical developments in the wake of Saussure. What links them at root is the principle, as Frege expressed it, that ‘meaning determines reference’. Knowledge and perception are always already structured by those forms of linguistic predication which stake out the limits of admissible sense. Thus for Frege it is a question of showing that referents can only be identified if language and logic between them provide the salient criteria for picking out the object referred to. There is no direct or one-to-one relation between word, concept and referent. Naming must always depend upon a structure of predicative assumptions which mark out the object in question, defining its relevant or necessary features and thus providing a referential framework. Bertrand Russell argued to similar effect in his well-known ‘theory of descriptions’. On his account, names were a species of compacted or summary definition, words which had to be unpacked, as it were, in order to identify the semantic markers which characterized their object.
