Page 190 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Truth and Meaning
'egocentricity' or 'deixis,' like / shall see you there tomorrow. Ultimately, however, even the most banal examples seem to point up the salient differences between linguistic and pictorial modes of represen- tation. If one takes the hackneyed example The cat sat on the mat, then a drawing of the relevant state of affairs would show the representation of a cat and the representation of a mat, but no obvious element answering to the linguistic element 'sat on.' Yet despite this difference, there is a sense in which it would be perfectly legitimate to claim that the same state of affairs has been communicated by both the drawing
and the proposition.
4. The Aftermath of the Theory
Despite the general consensus that the picture theory is fatally flawed, some of its traits have proved remark- ably tenacious. For at least some theorists, there remains a serious question of whether an atomistic metaphysics can be made to serve the project of con- structing a theory of meaning for a formalized language, i.e., a rigorous technical idiom sufficiently sophisticated to render explicitly the subtleties and more contextually bound features of natural language. Additionally, many of the prominent logico-semantic theories are compositional, if not simply truth-func- tional in complexion, and usually appeal to some dis- tinction between fundamental and derived semantic categories. Thus, for example, in some such schemes, sentences and (simple) nouns or nominals are taken as basic, while predicate and functional expressions are taken as belonging to a derived category of
expressions which make sentences out of nouns or out of other sentences. So a predicate like ' . . . is sitting' would combine with the noun 'Socrates' to yield the sentence Socrates issitting.
However, the demise of the original theory has also had its more skeptical consequences. The difficulty of constructing a plausible account of the central notion of isomorphism has raised doubts about the very feasi- bility of systematic attempts to 'match words to the world.' In the spirit of Wittgenstein's own later work,
it has been argued in some quarters that the notion of such an isomorphism of language and world is itself an artefact of language, 'a shadow cast by grammar.' The natural corollary of this view is that reality (or one's conception of it) is if anything constituted by language. In its most extreme form, this latter position implies that different languages embody 'distinct real- ities'. Interestingly, this issue of relativism in linguistic theory has an echo in discussions of artistic rep- resentation: if there are different conventions of pic- torial representation rendering nugatory any claims to the effect that one kind of picture is any more 'objective' than any other, then it might be argued that this undermines the very metaphor or analogy on which the picture theory depends. Whether this point has negative implications for representational accounts of language in general remains an open question.
See also: Wittgenstein, Ludwig.
Bibliography
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The scenario of 'radical interpretation' is that of an individual—perhapsafieldlinguist—whofindsherself amongst a people with which her own culture has had no previous contact, and who must try to come to
understand them and their language. Philosophers in what may be called the 'interpretationist' school in analytic philosophy have thought that, by con- sidering how she might proceed with her task, light
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Radical Interpretation E. M. Flicker