ABSTRACT
The analytic tradition’s inquiry into the structure of language, throughout
the course of its itinerary, has repeatedly taken up the question of the rela-
tionship of language to its everyday use, practice or employment. This inquiry
has not yielded any consistent or complete positive theory of this relationship.
But its most significant implication might be its ability to continue, and re-
inscribe, the traditional critique of reason on the indeterminate ground of the
everyday relationship of language to the life of the being that speaks. For with
its ongoing consideration of the structure of language, the analytic tradition has, as we have seen, also sought to understand how language structures the
possibilities of a human life. In seeking a description of the rules and regula-
rities that would determine the extent and nature of the possible mean-
ingfulness of signs, and so fix the bounds of linguistic sense, it has also
sought to elucidate what we can understand or appreciate in the words or
utterances of another, what we can take as a reason for an action or an
explanation of its sense, what we can see as a project to be shared or con-
tested, a way of life to be endorsed or refused.1 The desire for the clarification of meaning that underlies this inquiry is an ordinary one, marked already in
the most mundane requests for clarification, the most everyday questions of
shared meaning. But in its detailed development in the analytic tradition, its
‘‘object’’ is the same as that which philosophical thought has long sought to
grasp as logos, the form of the meaning of words as well as the linguistic
reason their everyday practice embodies. Historical reflection on the itinerary
of the tradition’s encounter with this problematic object suggests both a more
comprehensive sense of the significance of its most innovative methods and a more exact placement of them in a broader geography of critical thought.
