ABSTRACT
Since language is a central concept for Alasdair MacIntyre, the subject appears in several of his works. In the preface to his early exposition on religious belief, MacIntyre declares two fundamental positions that shape his philosophical outlook. He acknowledges his great debt to Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophical revolution. MacIntyre's position on the correspondence of terms and propositions underscores the nature of the linguistic turn in philosophy. Instead of trying, like Kant, to determine the conditions for the possibility of knowledge, some philosophers, such as Hilary Putnam, now are concerned with the conditions for the possibility of reference. Putnam thinks that skeptical issues arise from two faulty moves. The first one is basing knowledge on a first-person perspective. The second source of skepticism arises over claims that things have intrinsic properties of their own, independently of their being known. Conceptual relativism is the view that every object of knowledge or talk obtains its character from the concept that touches it.
