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The Picture Theory of Language: A Philosophical Investigation into the Genesis of Meaning
The Picture Theory of Language A Philosophical Investigation into the Genesis of Meaning Author:John Roscoe This work is intended to challenge Frege's "Begriffsschrift" as the foundation of philosophical work which either uses formal methods or is inspired by them. Whilst it is emphatically not a work of Wittgensteinian scholarship, it attempts the synthesis of the antithetical ideas associated with Wittgenstein, the Picture-Theory, and the language-g... more »ame conceived as the ultimate level of explanation. The games with which it is concerned are not language-games played with a language already instituted, but rather language-making games in the playing of which a language comes into being. These games are played with pictures, the only natural source of meaning. In the course of play meaning is extracted from elaborate pictures by a process related to Kant's schematization and exploiting (again following a suggestion from Kant) the homogeneity of symbols and simple drawings. Frege's artefact is rejected as merely a pseudo-language, parasitic upon natural language, and for that reason of no use in understanding the essence of Language; what is offered instead is a real language, Picture-Writing, which is autonomous from all natural language and so (being as it is our own artefact and thereby entirely intelligible) apt for showing us the nature of Language.« less