Online research in philosophy

The views of some contemporary (post)analytic philosophers who have rejected the doctrine of logical atomism (notably Goodman, Davidson, Rorty) involve such or another version of the conviction that our world is a ‘linguistic construct’. This paper is an attempt to indicate that however far-fetched such a conviction might seem to be, construed properly it amounts neither to a ‘postmodern irrationalism’, nor to the ‘betrayal of the ideals of analytic philosophy’. Despite appearances, what the philosophers in question maintain is neither Fichtean linguistic idealism, nor an uncontrolled relativism; their basic point rather is, as I argue, that we should get rid of viewing the language-world relationship in terms of the relation between the depicting and the depicted, the representation and the represented, and view it rather in terms of using certain tools to achieve what we want.