Abstract

There is a strong mentalistic tendency in the tradition of philosophy toward a depreciation of the exteriority of linguistic tokens. Two arguments commonly motivate this claim : 1. Mental contents are in principle autonomous as far as reference and meaning are concerned. Linguistic tokens are instruments used to express meaning or to clarify reference. 2. The linguistic tokens chosen for this purpose are only arbitrarily connected with the mental contents they express or clarify. The legitimacy of this depreciation has been convincingly challenged by the later Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein's explorations of the field of artistic tokens (music, poetry) play a pivotal role in his critique of mentalism. These explorations are all the more provocative because they consider precisely those registers of language that are pregnant with mental representations. The point of Wittgenstein's critique is that there is an internal relation between the meaning of a linguistic token and its exteriority. No token can be replaced by another token without affecting its meaning. What is true of poetry, is true of proper names too. Contrary to a presupposition of the cluster concept theory of proper names — a theory commonly and wrongly associated with the name of Wittgenstein — proper names too cannot be replaced by other tokens without loss or change of meaning. Words in general, and proper names in particular, are like faces. Not every human face is a face for us : only those who are near to us, those with whom we are familiar are „faces” for us. By analogy, words and proper names are only meaningful for us if we are in some sense familiar with them. They touch us like familiar faces. This explains why we can be attached to our own language. This form of attachment may be called linguistic particularism. Linguistic particularism is not an unhappy aberration or an inconvenience that should be remedied — as it is supposed to be by attempts to create a universal language, such as Esperanto; rather it is a fact that is intimately related to the structure of meaning