Philosophy, linguistic analysis, and linguistics

Abstract

In his essay about Chomsky’s generative grammar Flach assesses the philosophically relevant doctrines of Chomsky’s linguistic theory. Generally, Flach considers those doctrines as philosophically relevant that are amenable or at least directly connective to a philosophic discipline.1 On the basis of his assessment, Flach declares the development of this theory a second linguistic turn in philosophy (LT2), stretching from the late 1950s through the 1960s.2 This verdict Chomsky owes to his discussion of the reciprocal epistemological relation between linguistics and philosophy.3 Flach observes that LT1, in its varieties of ideal language philosophy (ILP), ordinary language philosophy (OLP) and the ontologic-hermeneutical doctrine of communication has scarcely produced an account of the problem of language, i.e. of the structure of language along with its systematic classification.4 By contrast, LT2, with the generative grammar as its main asset, reveals this problemtheoretical deficit of LT1 in its quest for a philosophical theory of language which could serve as the philosophical foundation