| This is a century of language. It has seen linguistics develop into a science1 and philosophy take a "linguistic turn." 2 It will have witnessed the disappearance of half the world's languages, with no children today who speak them, and can expect most of the rest to disappear in another century. Language has been said to express the essence of humanity, or of reason, even to surpass both humanity and rationality. 3 That these functions, separately and together, threaten to overwhelm more proximate questions of language, especially what, under particular circumstances, would be best to say and why, is the least of the difficulties, engendered by such extravagant views. Yet this extravagance is not without plausibility or significance, and language transcends whatever limits we set for it. This phenomenon is the burden of the ensuing discussion. |
| Four general questions express the focus of our attention on language as a prevailing characteristic of human experience: |
| 1. What is language? Is it an identifiable subject matter (beyond the rudimentary sense that we are located within it)? |
| 2. What is its relation to the world we speak of or write about, that is, to what we may address through language? |
| 3. What is its role in human life and experience, especially in relation to the characteristic traits of human being? |
| 4. Are there determining characteristic traits of language and of human being, or does language place every "we" and "us," every "natural creature" and "thing," in jeopardy? |
| These questions shape the ensuing discussion, though we may find that the answers elude us. But whether or not we can answer such questions about language may be the issue that concerns us, and, more important, if we conclude we cannot do so, just why we cannot, whether this inability reflects an important truth about language, or even about humanity or nature. |
| If there can be a science of language along with other human sciences, if human being is something that can be known as well as lived through, then each of these questions may be supposed to have a definite answer. 4 And there have always been philosophers who believed that we can provide a definitive if not exhaustive |
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