Page 25 - Critical and Cultural Theory

LANGUAGE AND INTERPRETATION
Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). Idealism denied the very existence of
things-in-themselves. It argued that we create the world by perceiv-
ing it (like idea and ideology, idealism comes from the Greek
idein, 'to see'). As a result, the connection between language and
the world is radically severed: language and thought are self-
contained and the perceiver plays an active role in constructing a/
the world. Truth, moreover, can no longer be based on a corre-
spondence between language and the world. These positions influ-
enced deeply subsequent perspectives on the function of truth in
language. From these, two major theories originated: the coher-
ence theory of truth, according to which a statement is true if it
'coheres' or 'is consistent with' other statements, and the prag-
matic theory of truth, according to which the validity of a state-
ment depends on its practical relevance to experiences and actions.
Gottlob Frege (1848-1925), the founder of modern mathematical
logic, reestablished a link between language and truth by arguing
that sentences are not justified by either their connection with
ideas (Empiricism) or their connection with judgments (Kantian-
ism) but by their truth-conditions. A systematic theory of meaning
should classify the expressions contained by a language and
describe in a methodical fashion the ways in which the truth-
conditions of sentences are determined.
The following is a brief description of some of the principal
approaches to language that developed in the course of the twenti-
eth century. Logical Positivism, the approach formulated by
Alfred Jules Ayer (1910-89), argues that there are two sorts of
meaningful statements: those which can be empirically confirmed
and those which are true by virtue of linguistic rules. The former
are scientific statements and statements of common facts, while
the latter pertain to mathematic and logic. Religious and metaphy-
sical statements do not belong to either category and are, there-
fore, considered meaningless. Ethical statements are also
meaningless from a factual point of view but are capable of
carrying affective meanings. Pragmatism, the philosophical
approach descending from the writings of Charles Sanders Peirce
(1839-1914), maintains that the truth of statements can only be
ascertained with reference to practice. For Peirce, in particular,
the meaning of a concept is based on the relationship between the
practical circumstances in which it is used and the practical conse-
quences of its use. The meaning of a statement, accordingly, is

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