Abstract

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;The central position defended in this work is that Analytical philosophy is the best realization so far of Descartes' concern for the construction of a method of scientific investigation in philosophy. ;In Frege, the father of Analytical philosophy, such concern was embodied in his Conceptual Notation, which should have provided philosophy with a rigorous and powerful deductive system, and in the 'linguistic turn', i.e. the study of the structure of thought conducted by means of an analysis of the structure of language. This 'linguistic turn' should have produced, in Frege's view, definitive conclusions about the limits of what is thinkable not by setting up arbitrary systems of Pure Reason, but through the controllable investigation of the logical structure of an entity--language--of which we have conceptual experience. ;Wittgenstein's later philosophy is seen here as an attack against the aims and tenets of Analytical philosophy. In fact, what Wittgenstein shows in Philosophical Investigations is, among other things, that by means of an investigation of language it is impossible to justify the assumption that language is an expression of thought. But, if this were true, it would follow that we were not justified in assuming that there exists an isomorphism between language and thought. That there is such an isomorphism is the presupposition which lies at the basis of Frege's 'linguistic turn'. ;In conclusion I attempt to prove that there is no solution to Wittgenstein's objections unless the original exclusively linguistic Analytical philosophy model is modified by a 'pragmatic turn'. The key element of the 'pragmatic turn' is that the truth of certain assumptions--and therefore the justification for their introduction--can be confirmed by the impact that the system based on them has on reality in controlling and transforming it successfully through techniques which are logically dependent on the system