ABSTRACT
When the intellectual historians of the next century come to write their accounts of our own, they will inevitably remark on the dramatic quickening of interest in virtually all disciplines in the question of language. Although anticipations of this change can be discerned in literature before 1900, an obvious example being the poetics of Stephane Mallarmé, the twentieth century dawned with the longstanding assumption still widely unshaken that language is an essentially transparent medium for the expression of ideas and emotions or the description of an external world. Private mental reflection was thus taken to be prior to public, intersubjective discourse. Generally accompanying the equally time-honored notion that truth is an adequate expression of objective reality, this concept of language can be traced at least as far back as Plato’s denigration of Sophistic rhetoric and the poetical ambiguities of the Homeric epic.1 Perhaps its most exaggerated manifestation in the Western philosophical tradition was Baruch Spinoza’s attempt to negate linguistic mediation entirely by casting philosophy in the form of geometric proofs. In the early twentieth century, its greatest exemplar was Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus with its contention that language provides Bilder (pictures or models) of a real external world.2
