Linguistic turn

The linguistic turn was a major development in Western philosophy during the early 20th century, the most important characteristic of which is the focusing of philosophy primarily on the relations between language, language users, and the world.

Frege invokes his "context principle", stated at the beginning of the book, that only in the context of a proposition do words have meaning, and thus finds the solution to be in defining "the sense of a proposition in which a number word occurs."

[4] This concern for the logic of propositions and their relationship to "facts" was later taken up by the notable analytic philosopher Bertrand Russell in "On Denoting", and played a weighty role in his early work in logical atomism.

Quine describes the historical continuity of the linguistic turn with earlier philosophy in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism": "Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word.

"[9] Later in the twentieth century, philosophers like Saul Kripke in Naming and Necessity drew metaphysical conclusions from closely analyzing language.