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During the twentieth century, language enters the foreground of philosophy in an unprecedented way. One speaks of a "linguistic turn" that is to have taken place around the turn of the century and which meant not only a greater interest in language as a subject matter or one field of inquiry among others, but more importantly, a new way of dealing with philosophical problems generally, even those which are not directly concerned with language as such.¹ The concentration on language is commonly depicted in historical accounts as characteristic of the kind of analytic philosophy that was predominant in the United States, England and the Nordic countries during the twentieth century, but it is also described as a distinctive feature of structuralism and hermeneutics, even if the role of language in these traditions is somewhat different.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-3439-4_2

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