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p The aim of logico-philosophical analysis of natural language, on the general methodological plane, is to disclose the relation between thought, language, and the world. That makes it possible to define its place and functions in the cognitive process as a human reflection of the world. Logico-philosophical analysis of natural language is thus directly related to the fundamental epistemological question of the connection of consciousness (mind) and matter, thought and reality.^^1^^

p The fundamental epistemological task from that angle, otherwise formulated as examination of the relation of the meaning, or semantic, aspect of language and the world, a? analysis of the distinctive reflection of reality in the meaning aspect of language, is to bring out the role of language in reflection, and in the structure of knowledge of the world itself. Disclosure of the content of the concept ’meaning aspect of the natural language’ also determines the essence of contemporary logico-semantic conceptions of it.

p Reflection of objectively existing reality in the consciousness of a person at a certain stage of social development, as understanding, comprehension of it, is an activity directed to knowing the objective world, its properties and regularities, and on that basis transforming it. Knowledge of reality is not a mirror reflection of it, but an active process: it is subjective activity in which the knowing subject himself, his aims, and his practical attitude to the world play an essential role in choice of the object of cognition, and in creation of the cognitive image of it needed for practical assimilation of objective reality.

p Because of its communicative, social function, language 13 is not only a means of expressing and communicating thought, but is also, at a certain stage, a means of forming and constructing thought. One should not not stop at this statement of the role of language and reduce thought to it. The identification of mental and language structures and their complete divorce are both unacceptable. Consideration of thinking as a process goes hand in hand with a pointing out of its universality irrespective of its linguistic formulation.

p Every thought process is subjective and individual; without the subject and his activity there is no thought. At the same time it is objective in the sense that it is always a ’ subject-object of cognition’ relation; in order to be a means of practical transformation of the world, thinking, admittedly, has to have an objective content. So the term ’ object of cognition’ in its epistemological use refers to any conceivable object: to things, properties, relations, activities, processes, events, etc., whether real or possible.

p My task is to give these initial programmic methodological propositions a concrete theoretical content in the light of the results of contemporary logico-philosophical study of natural language, and to bring out through that the promise or lack of promise of certain directions of this research. I shall judge the constructive nature of one semantic conception or another in that connection by how far it is adequate for solving problems of the logico-philosophical analysis of natural language, clarifying their methodological foundation in that context. Other ideological, general philosophical precepts of the authors of these conceptions will not be specially discussed.

p In critically assessing the methodological principles of dialectical-materialist epistemology, according to which it is unsound to examine the thought process out of context of the thinking, historically determined subject who is cognising the world, I shall try to demonstrate that the fundamental methodological feature of modern semantic conceptions of natural language lies in their making an absolute of language. In my view this absolutising is expressed in examination of the meaning of linguistic expressions outside definite systems of belief and knowledge as 14 aggregates of man’s notions and ideas about the surrounding reality by means of which he assimilates it.

p This absolutising is characteristic of the various schools that form the ’analytical tradition’ of Western philosophy, beginning with the logical atomism of Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Carnap’s neopositivist doctrine, the philosophy of ’ordinary language’ in its classic and modern versions, and a number of contemporary Western logico-linguistic schools.

p The wave of semantic studies in modern logic went hand in hand with logico-philosophical analysis of the language of science, examination of the relation of the empirical and theoretical levels of knowledge, construction of logical models of scientific knowledge, and investigation of the possibility of constructing a satisfactory semantics for various systems of modal logic.^^2^^ The bringing of semantics into modern logico-linguistic studies of natural language proved much more complicated.^^3^^

p The drawing of analogies between artificial and natural languages is as fruitful in the programme of logico philosophical analysis of natural language, as it is problematic. By an artificial language is meant one specially created to meet certain scientific or practical needs (mathematical languages, the logical languages of programming, etc.). The expressions of these languages are built according to strictly defined rules. By natural languages are meant ordinary languages (Lithuanian, Russian, English, etc.) as the result of centuries of social practice and as vital means of human intercourse. The main question of modern logico linguistic studies of these languages is what is the character of the rules for constructing expressions in them, and what is their structure.

p From an analogy between artificial and natural languages as definite systems of signs, languages began to be called uninterpreted calculus in logic. This calculus is characterised by a list of primary signs and rules that define the possible operations on them, or syntactical rules. They include rules of formation by which ’well-formed expressions’ are built from primary signs, and rules of deduction or transformation that make it possible to transform one well- 15 formed expression into another. By the interpretation of this calculus, or constructed language, is understood the ascribing of certain meanings or senses to well-formed expressions by means of ‘semantic rules’.

p Because interpreted calculus becomes contradictory when the rules of formation make it possible to construct expressions whose interpretation by semantic rules leads to one and the same expression’s being both true and false, many researchers ask whether a natural language, too, is contradictory since expressions can be formed in it both about it itself and about its expressions. That is clearly to be seen, for example, in the possibility of formulating the paradox of the liar in a natural language expressed in the statement T lie (am lying)’: if I lie, then I am telling the truth, if I speak the truth, I am lying. If I affirm the one I am compelled to admit the opposite, and vice versa. The logician John G. Kemeny wrote about this paradox:

[it shows] that English is inconsistent. Since it can be shown that in an inconsistent system anything at all. true or false, can be proved we have to conclude that ordinary English is a language not suitable for logical arguments.^^4^^

But, no matter how strange, this example of argumentation was made in that same English language which, by virtue of its ’paradoxical nature’ is ’not suitable for logical arguments’.

p Characteristically Alfred Tarski, who first investigated the matter of the possibility of an adequate definition of truth for natural and artificial languages, refrained from an unambiguous answer to the question of the contradictoriness of the former, pointing out first of all that they do not possess a distinct structure in contrast to artificial languages. Hence one can conclude that if the problem of contradictoriness has clear sense for a natural language, the latter is contradictory. If it does not have such a sense in regard to natural language, then one must inevitably conclude (in view of the analogy with an artificial language) that this natural language is mainly indeterminate and not amenable to systematising and description in an uncontradictory model. In that case the construction of the artificial lan- 16 guage can be reasonably treated, as regards the natural language, as the creation of an ideal language.

p The prehistory of the critique of natural language as unable to cope with the task of adequate expression of thoughts about external reality is connected with the logical analysis of the foundations of mathematics; the paradoxes of the classical theory of sets engendered by the indeterminacy of the understanding of the term ’set’, showed that it was a main task of analysis of the language of science to establish criteria of the meaningfulness of its expressions. Whitehead and Russell came to the conclusion, when examining the reasons for the rise of meaningless expressions, that the opposition of true and false propositions depended on a much more fundamental dichotomy of meaningful and meaningless propositions; the ’theory of types’ produced by Russell was means to eliminate meaningless expressions of an artificial language.^^5^^ Wittgenstein, who generalised this conclusion in his Tractatus Logico Philosophicus claimed that the aim of logic and philosophy was to show why one proposition was meaningful and another meaningless. Science strives to bring out what propositions about the world were true, while ’the object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts’,^^6^^ to discover what was truly or falsely, but meaningfully established about the world, i.e. analysis of the basic structure of language, of its logical form concealed in the complex, imperfect forms of natural language.

p Natural language was examined in the Tractatus not just as a means of philosophical investigation but also as the sole object of this research. According to the conception of language adopted in the Tractatus as a picture of the world, we know the world only because language, in its essential features, i.e. its logical structure, reflects the structure of the world. For a proposition to reflect the world meaningfully its structure should be an isomorphic of the simplest or atomic facts from which the world is built. Consequently a language that depicted the facts and disclosed their logcial relations would, by the very character of its symbols, be ideal.

p Propositions express a meaning that is affirmed or de- 17 nied by reality; that is what constitutes their link with the world. In order to make sure whether a proposition makes sense it is necessary to break it down into elementary parts that directly correspond to the atomic facts of the world and designate the limits of our language, or the limits of meaning. Then all meaningful propositions are regarded as functions of the truth of the elementary propositions. When the thesis of the depictive function of a proposition (’the proposition is a picture of reality’^^7^^ is joined to this conception, it follows that the foundation on which the limits of meaningful language are established has an empirical nature; the boundaries of meaningful language are determined by what objects are given in the world.

p When a proposition is meaningful it is either true or false, but if it is impossible to ascribe either of these characteristics to it, then it is meaningless. That is the way most propositions and questions of ’traditional philosophy’ are posed.

p

The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his = propositions.^^8^^

p ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’.^^9^^ The task of philosophy, in Wittgenstein’s view, was not to present new statements about the world but to bring out their logical structure concealed in the imperfect forms of natural language. The latter is far from an ideal language with a transparent logical structure unambiguously correlated with the structure of the world; its imperfection is the main reason for the origin of philosophical muddles and nonsense.

p A critique of language was thus given in the Tractatus that was a critique of traditional philosophy: ’All philosophy is “Critique of language”.’^^10^^ The aim of this critique was to show that we do not understand the logic of our language, that the set of propositions and questions of tradi- 18 tional philosophy are pseudopropositions and pseudoquestions, because they breach the limits of the natural language so that neither the questions themselves nor the answers to them are meaningful. The possibility of knowledge was therefore defined in the Tractatus not as going outside the limits of the empirical world (as in Kant’s ’critical’ philosophy), but beyond the limits of meaningful language. ’The limits of my language mean the limits of my world’,^^11^^ and that already clearly leads to solipsism in the interpretation of language.^^12^^

p Russell’s logical analysis of mathematics, and Wittgenstein’s treatment of philosophy as a critique of language, played the main role in neopositivist philosophy’s receiving a linguistic turn through absorbing these ideas. The task of philosophy was proclaimed to be logical analysis of the language, terms, and propositions of science, in short, analysis of its conceptual apparatus fixed by means of language.

p Like Wittgenstein, the logical positivists (Rudolf Carnap and his sympathisers from the Vienna Circle), saw the imperfection of natural language in that its linguistic structure that concealed and masked the logical form of thought led to confusion and, from the epistemological standpoint, to all kinds of undesirable hypostases, and a filling of the world with essences. As in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus they regarded the imperfection of natural language as a main source of mistakes of knowledge and muddle in philosophy.

p The logical positivist orientation to language, the expressions of which are built according to strictly defined rules given in a set of initial meaningful objects, enabled Carnap to note the following causes of the imperfection of natural language.^^13^^ (1) the existence in it of terms like ’Pegasus’, ’a round square’, etc.) that do not denote objects of the real world but grammatically perform the same functions as terms that do denote objects given in the world, (from that a danger arose of hypostatising natural language, i.e. an idea that a condition of the meaningful use of a term was the existence of an object designated by it); (2) breach of the requirements of syntax in expressions formed from meaningful components (as in ’Caesar is and’—in which the conjunction ’and’ occupies a place im- 19 proper for it as a representative of a certain grammatical category, but precisely a place belonging to the verb, adjective,, or noun); (3) breaches of the rules of logical syntax (as in the sentence ’Caesar is a prime number’—in which the predicate ’prime number’ is inappropriate as regards the object concerned). In this case we have what Carnap called a ’mixing of spheres’.

p Analysis of the reasons why the expressions ’Caesar is and’, on the one hand, and ’Caesar is a prime number’, on the other, are incorrect suggested to Carnap the idea that if the rules of the grammar of natural language were broadened at the expense of the rules of ’logical grammar’, or logical syntax, the incorrectness of expressions like ’Caesar is a prime number’ could be demonstrated by as strict a procedure as the incorrectness of ’Caesar is and’. This idea of Carnap’s was purely programmatic; he did not formulate a system of rules governing the correctness of the construction of expressions of natural language. But the view of artificial languages as an idealisation of natural language means that they were regarded as models of the systematic features of natural language.

p It has been suggested, in that connection, that the construction of artificial languages helps avoid meaningless propositions both in the language of science and in philosophy. Those propositions of natural language that have an empirical, factual content could be translated into an artificial language; their meaningfulness would consequently be determined by the possibility of verifying them (i.e. of establishing their truth): ’Analytical truths’ whose meaningfulness was determined not by facts but by the logic of the language itself, i.e. by the meaning given to its expressions by the rules of constructing expressions in it, could also be so translated. The translation of philosophical statements into an ideal language would either bring out their purely linguistic content, i.e. that they were simply statements about the language, or be impossible in view of infringements of the rules of ’logical syntax’ by the statements in question.

p The category of statements that are untranslatable into an ideal language included, for example, statements of 20 transcendental metaphysics that laid claim to the role of statements presenting knowledge about what was above or beyond any experience, for example, about the true essence of things, about things in themselves, about the absolute and so on.^^14^^ While the construction of artificial languages was a programme, for some proponents of them, for the formal reconstruction of natural language, it served as grounds for others for rejecting use of natural language in general for conducting a rational argument. It was suggested that a reliable argument could only be made by means of concepts expressed in formalised, artificial languages.

p The search for analogies between artificial languages and natural ones was an attempt to find a system in everything that constitutes a natural language, and in particular in what forms its semantic aspect. At first glance it seemed that the fact of rational intercourse by means of natural language, and its significance for human knowledge, could serve as objective justification of this attempt. However, consistent implementation of the view of natural_ language as a certain semantic system distorts its role in constructing a conceptual picture of the world (as will be shown below), and inevitably leads to understanding it as a contradictory system.

p As for the methodological and theoretical basis on which modern logico-philosophical analysis of natural language arose, I must touch briefly on what distinguished it essentially from the neopositivist approach to analysis of natural language in the ’philosophy of language’ or ’linguistic philosophy’ that found expression in Wittgenstein’s last works, and in those of G. E. Moore, Gilbert Ryle, and later of Peter F. Strawson, J. L. Austin, John R. Searle, Michael Dummett, Anthony Quinton, and others.

p Whereas logical positivists looked for a way out of the blind alley into which natural language had, in their opinion, led philosophy in the creation of artificial languages that did not have natural language’s imperfections, this approach consisted primarily (the last works of Wittgenstein, the leading exponent of ’linguistic philosophy’, who changed his mind about the reliability of the thesis about ideal 21 language he put forward in the Tractatus), in description of the ways of employing linguistic expressions that generated philosophical confusion.^^15^^ Wittgenstein now saw the reason for the origin of undesirable philosophical problems in the attitude to natural language and the ways of employing it rather than in the language itself. The way out, therefore, in his opinion, consisted not in constructing an ideal language that unambiguously depicted the ontological structure of the world and did not have the shortcomings of natural language, but in describing the means or structures of intelligent use of expressions of the latter and consequently in exposing the incorrect ways of using it that generated absurdities.^^16^^

p In his Philosophical Investigations (in contrast to Tractatus) the world is considered as something accessible to us only through language, through interpretation in language, rather than as something existing independently of its description in language and subject to reflection in the logical structure of natural language. The conception of language as a ’picture of the world’ gave way to one of language as a means and instrument of articulating and comprehending the world. From that standpoint it was no longer a matter of clarifying the logical structures of natural language and of the real meanings of the linguistic expressions concealed under its imprecise, indefinite formulations. In that conception philosophical problems did not arise while natural language was employed in the ordinary way, in a number of its functions, so as to transmit information, describe facts, evaluate scientific theories, express feelings, and so on. All these were ’language games’ with their own rules and logic, which must not be broken, otherwise we ceased to use expressions in this ’game’ in which its meaningfulness was determined. Each term, if comprehended, should have its paradigm of use; words meant only what they signified in the given ’language game’. Thus, if I am told how the names of flowers, or the words ’gene’, ’continuum’, ’pain’, and so on, are used, i.e. if I am told what ’game’ one can play with them, I will understand their meaning. Knowing what ’games’ terms can be used in, I thereby also know what games they can- 22 not be used in. Each correct move in the ’language game’ must consequently have its alternative, its antithesis, or contrast (for example, the command ’Go left!’ says at the same time ’Do not go right!’). Words are used meaninglessly when they are used without an antithesis and without contrast.

p Hence the striving to correlate analysis of the meaning of a linguistic expression with the pragmatic context of its use as a definite, correctly formed action of a speaker of the language directed to achieving certain aims. In order j to understand or explain the meaning of an expression or ’. utterance, one should not look for some concrete or abstract substance (essence) signified by the utterance (as in the classical conceptions of ’semantic realism’) but should refer to its use, which also constitutes its meaning. By use, moreover, is also understood not just the set of concrete cases of the expression’s use. but the definite way of proper use that correspond to the linguistic standards generally accepted in the given society; meaning is constituted in the inter-subject use of natural language.^^17^^ Mastery of the meaning of a linguistic expression is thus regarded as mastery of the criteria of its correct use, which necessarily presupposes general application of the criteria and gives the language activity an objective character (for example, in delimiting objects of the world by use of the predicates ’red’ and ’not-red’ to demarcate red and not-red object respectively; understanding of the meaning of these predicates consists in knowing the rules of their use).

p All philosophical problems are expressed in natural language; they would not puzzle us if this language was used correctly. According to Wittgenstein, philosophical absurdities arise when speakers of natural language break the rules of its usage and try to formulate certain philosophical statements by means of it, i.e. when a linguistic expression is employed outside a certain ’language game’. Complications consequently arise not because of the imperfection of natural language but because of the violence done to it by speakers when it is torn out of the natural sphere of use in which it only could function sensibly.

p The concepts of natural language, being the verbal ac- 23 tivity of individuals in complex social conditions, are inevitably inexact and imprecise. The idea! of precision preached in the Tract at us was a myth from that angle, a metaphysical fiction; the precision was always sufficient to a certain context; absolute exactness did not exist. Allowing for that, and for there being no common essential features between ’language games’ but only a greater or less ’ family resemblance’, Wittgenstein suggested that to model a natural language, to look at its expressions through some logical, stereotyped pattern, and to look for something common and essential in them, something concealed in their logical form, meant to distort them and deprive them of life. There was such a danger, for example, in the illusion that all meaningful terms were names; because of that illusion, universals, various intensional objects, objective entities, etc., were hypostasised.

p It was the task of philosophy to describe in detail the logic of the use of linguistic expressions of a certain ’ language game’, in particular to disclose the way to analyse these uses of natural language that led to philosophical muddles, and gave an excuse for the rise of a ’pathology of language’, and ’convulsions of intellect’ in the form of philosophical problems.

p In summing up what I have said about the two schools of the philosophy of natural language—the neopositivist and ’ordinary language philosophy’ as represented in Wittgenstein’s last works—-I must note that a definite service of the former has been that it demonstrated the importance of the logico-philosophical epistemological problematic of natural language. The orientation to a systematicity in the logico-epistemological analysis of language is evidence of a striving to follow the spirit of science (rigorousness, definiteness) in theoretical investigation of natural language. This requirement had to be observed whenever any scientific theory of language as a means of constructing and transmitting information about the world was to be created. This theoretical precept is the rational kernel that must be extracted from the methodologically unsound interpretations and conclusions that proponents of the neopositivist doctrine of language have come to.

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p It is methodologically mistaken, for instance, to put forward as a fundamental thesis, the thesis of an ideal language, as one with a perfect structure, that unambiguously reflects the structure of reality, and not as an approximation of natural language. This thesis is a consequence of the conception advanced by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus of the isomorphism of the logical form of a linguistic expression and the structure of reality. The approach based on that thesis signified a projecting onto reality of an absolutised logical scheme that in the end led to an idealistically distorted (’upside-down’) understanding of reflection of the world. The world does not consist of any absolutely simple ’atomic’ facts independent of each other, and natural language and its expressions perform the function of transmitting information about the world not because they are analogues of this structure of the world, but because of their semantic aspect, inaccessible to observation (in contract to natural language) and inseparable from the systems of information that its speakers have of the world (as will be shown below).

p With that approach the criteria of meaningfulness are harmful for the conceptions in which they themselves are formulated, not to mention their discrepancy with the real use of natural language. The latter not only will not fit into the procrustean bed of true and false propositions but also not, in general, into any absolute, a priori scheme of meaningfulness that ignores the real process of cognition as one of the construction and change of knowledge of the world and, on the philosophical plane, as one of the construction of a certain world conception and world outlook of the speaker.

p The illusory nature of claims to have established final criteria of meaningfulness, the futility of the search for a solely correct logical structure of linguistic expressions that corresponds to the structure of reality, and the methodological unsoundness of attempts to reduce the semantic ( including the general philosophical) problems to linguistic ones are confirmed by analysis of the further evolution of logico-philosophical study of natural language.

p Linguistic philosophy’s view of the functioning of natur- 25 al language as part of man’s complex social being, and the drive to allow for the natural, dynamic, ’full-blooded’ process of its functioning are positive factors compared with the ’rarefied’ model of natural language proposed by neopositivists. But whereas the neopositivist analysis was determined by the search for a systematic theory of language, an absolutising of the polysemy of linguistic expressions, independent of any systematising was primarily characteristic of linguistic philosophy of the ’classical period’. But that absolutising led ultimately to a linguistic fetishism no less destructive methodologically than the thesis of an ideal language in the neopositivist analysis. This conclusion has to be backed up by certain considerations of a general methodological character.

p The progress of theoretical thought has always been linked with discovery of factors important for explaining the phenomenon being investigated, to which attention was not paid (or was not sufficiently paid) and allowance for which was a constructive step towards understanding it. But the bringing out of this important aspect of the object under study entails a danger, or at least a temptation to make an absolute of its significance that could lead to deplorable methodological and theoretical consequences, namely to an attempt to present the whole explanation exclusively in the light of these new factors to the detriment of others. The use in linguistic philosophy of linguistic expressions that require the context of their use to be taken into account, and that necessitate treating the linguistic activity as meaningful only when it is governed by certain rules, i.e. when the use of the expression is correct from the standpoint of a certain linguistic practice, functions as an extremely important but absolutised element.

p But this conception, as we shall see, does not require us to identify the meaningfulness of a linguistic expression with the correctness of its use, and correspondingly to identify the theory of meaning with the theory of the correct use of linguistic expressions, as has been done in the conception of linguistic philosophy. Such an identification, as I shall show below, makes both the phenomenon of the acquiring of language and the possibility of assimilating 26 new knowledge by means of it inexplicable. The same goes for the possibility of meaningful use of one and the same language in different (new) situations and contexts in order to express the speaker’s different (including incompatible) notions about the world. The conception advanced by Wittgenstein in his last works about ’meaning as use’ must be regarded as an extremely important pointer to the significance of allowing for the pragmatic factor of the context of the use of linguistic expressions to define its meaningfulness, and not as a definite theory of meaning.

That attitude is maintained as well in the latest studies of linguistic philosophy, which merit recognition mainly because of their development of the conception of ’speech acts’. In these studies, as in Wittgenstein’s conception that preceded them, understanding of the meaning of a linguistic expression is treated as knowledge of the rules for using it; in contrast to the classic descriptive doctrine, however, there is a striving in them for systematic explanation of what knowledge of the meaning of a linguistic expression consists in, what it is manifested in, and what its role is in relating a person to reality and to other speakers of ; the language. In other words, an attempt is made to construct a systematic explanatory theory of the use of language, and to bring out the communications structure of its use. The postulate of an initial givenness of the language as a determinant of articulation, knowledge, and understanding of the world is retained in it, however, a postulate that not only essentially limits the theory’s explanatory possibilities theoretically but also (as I have already remarked) gives a methodologically distorted idea of the relation of thought, language, and the world.