Cognitive Turn and Linguistic Turn :: Philosophy Symbols Papers

Cognitive and lingual biteMy first determination is to question a received view ab bring out the development of uninflected doctrine. According to this received view uninflected Philosophy is born out of a Linguistic Turn establishing the study of language as the tush of the discipline this primacy of language is then overthrown by the return of the study of idea as philosophia prima through a second Cognitive Turn taken in the mid-sixties. My contention is that this picture is a gross oversimplification and that the Cognitive Turn should better be seen as an extension of the Linguistic one. Indeed, if the Cognitive Turn take holds explicit logical priority to the study of melodic theme over the study of language, one of its central features is to see the mind as a representational system offering no substantial diversity with a lingual one. However, no justification is offered for the fundamental soaking up of the genius of a mental representation with that of a linguis tic symbol encouraging this picture of the mind, although the idea that a system of mental representations is identical in structure with a system of linguistic symbols has been argued over and over. I attack to demonstrate this point through a close critical mental testing of Fodors paradigmatic notion of double reduction. My second claim is that the widespread contemporary assimilation of a mental representation with a symbol of a linguistic kind is no more than a prejudice. Fin wholey I contend that this prejudice cannot survive a rigorous critical examination. 1. Introduction linguistic symbol and mental representationA good deal of that key branch of contemporary philosophy which goes by the loose term of Analytical Philosophy lives, in my opinion, with a distorted representation of its own past, and consequently, with an wide appreciation of the nature of its own achievements.As a matter of feature the belief is widely spread among analytical circles that the birth of A nalytical Philosophy is the result of a Linguistic Turn taken by its asylum figures G. Frege and B. Russell and then expanded into various directions by their notorious or less(prenominal) notorious followers. (1) To put it in a nutshell, the Linguistic Turn of which historians give in fact conflicting accounts (2) can be characterized by proverb that it turned (better said, intended to) every philosophical problem and most of all every psychological and epistemological one into a problem nigh language, or at least into a problem dependent upon problems roughly language.