ABSTRACT
In the last two chapters, we have seen how the analytical projects of Frege
and the early Wittgenstein already demonstrated some of the revolutionary
implications of a determinative theoretical recourse to the structure of language in relation to its everyday practice. Although this recourse did
not figure explicitly in Frege’s project of logical clarification, it was never-
theless, as we have seen, already strongly suggested by his application of the
context principle to criticize psychologism. In Wittgenstein’s explicit for-
mulation of a use-theory of meaningfulness in the Tractatus, this critical
application became the basis of a methodologically radical reflection on the
significance of the structure of signs in the ordinary and everyday contexts
of their use. Both projects, indeed, insofar as they raised the question of the relationship of signs to their ordinary, intersubjective use, also suggested, at
least implicitly, the pervasive and determinative instabilities of a structural-
ist picture of language in relation to the life of practice it aims to capture.
Although it would take a long time yet for these implications to come
clearly to light, the projects that immediately followed in the course of the
developing tradition of analysis would nevertheless confirm them even as
they redefined and broadened the practice of logical or conceptual ‘‘analy-
sis’’ itself. The first, and most methodologically significant, application of Wittgen-
stein’s program of logical syntax was, as we have seen, the Vienna Circle’s
project of analysis. Carnap, Schlick, and other logical empiricists applied
the methods of structural analysis to produce a wide-ranging critical and
reformative project, conceived by at least some of its adherents as having
radical and utopian social consequences as well.2 Especially in its pejorative
application against ‘‘metaphysics,’’ the project involved, as recent scholar-
ship has demonstrated, significant and central misunderstandings of Wittgenstein’s original project.3 Nevertheless it demonstrated the relevance of
the specific methods of logical analysis to broader questions of philosophy of
science, politics, and culture, and consolidated the legacy of these methods
for the logically based styles of philosophical analysis and reflection that
became more and more popular, especially in the USA and Britain, follow-
ing World War II.
