ABSTRACT
Over the last several chapters, we have seen how the analytic tradition’s inquiry
into language has led it repeatedly to experience the failures and paradoxes of
its attempt to envision language as a total structure of signs. This withdrawal
of language at the point of its own positive description occurs repeatedly in the
history of the tradition, and marks in a fundamental way the most prominent
results of its consideration of the basis and nature of linguistic meaning. The
analytic tradition’s inquiry into language begins with the attempt to demon-
strate the philosophical relevance of what at first seems self-evident, our ordinary access to the language that we speak. It ends, as we have seen over the
last several chapters, by demonstrating the inherent and pervasive ambiguities
of this access, not only in the theories of philosophers but in its everyday forms
as well. In the demonstration, what had been self-evident becomes less so; the
aporias of the explicit, theoretical attempt to grasp the structure of language
reveal the underlying and pervasive ambiguities of our ordinary relationship
to it. The inherent problems of the structuralist picture of language thereby
become opportunities for the renewed posing of a set of critical questions about the linguistic basis of the practices and circumstances of an ordinary life.
