ABSTRACT
Central to the development of analytic philosophy in the twentieth century was what came to be known as the ‘linguistic turn.’ The origins of this are disputed. Some have dated it to the use by Gottlob Frege of contextual definition in The Foundations of Arithmetic of 1884 (see for example Dummett 1991, pp. 111-12), or at least to the more selfconscious use of contextual definition by Bertrand Russell in his theory of descriptions, first put forward in 1905. Some have dated it even earlier, to Jeremy Bentham’s use of paraphrasis in ‘analysing away’ talk of obligations (see for example Hacker 1996, p. 281). But there is little doubt that it received a canonical formulation in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which was published in 1921. Here Wittgenstein wrote that “Most of the propositions and questions of philosophers arise from our failure to understand the logic of our language” (4.003). All philosophy, he went on, is ‘critique of language’, and he singled out Russell’s theory of descriptions as showing how the grammatical form of a sentence can mislead us as to its real logical form (cf. 4.0031).
