Spór o podstawową funkcję języka w kontekście współczesnej filozofii nauki

Abstract

Since the mid-twentieth century one of the key issues of analytic philosophy is the question of the fundamental function of language. The dispute concerns two competing trends. The frst assumes that language is mainly used to describe reality. The second assumes that language is mainly an instrument of action – a kind of the social practice that not so much describes reality as it co-creates. The article analyzes arguments of both trends. It shows that in the frst case theorists focus on the syntactic and semantic way of recognition of language; in the second case they focus on a pragmatic approach. The author points out that the turn towards pragmatics is not exclusive to language studies. A similar situation occurs in philosophy of science.