Abstract

Historically, the philosophy of language has held pride of place in the analytical tradition. In fact, it would be safe to say that for a long time it had been unquestioningly regarded as first philosophy. The reason for this is twofold. Firstly, many analytical philosophers held (and many still hold) that we could only get at the underlying nature of our world by understanding the nature of thought. And secondly, they held (and many still hold) that we could only understand the nature of thought by "an analysis of its linguistic expression" (Dummett, 1993, p. 154). Dummett recently goes so far as to tells us that the latter assumption is the fundamental axiom of analytical philosophy