Dialogic Foundations 273that language particularly (as has already been noted throughout this book) has been
the more general growth area of twentieth-century humanistic and social thought. As
the idea of a deep-rooted metaphysical foundation for moral and political beliefs has
become, over the twentieth century, more questionable, thinkers, such as Habermas
and Gadamer, have focused more intensely on language and dialogue as supplying a
more defensible ground on which to articulate and defend certain social and political
practices. However, language is no longer considered to be a translucent medium
through which we account for, defend, or represent an external objective order or
world. This is neither to say that the latter ‘representative’ idea is not compatible with a
focusonlanguage, northatlanguagehasacentralityforalltwentieth-centurythinkers.
Karl Popper, for example, although having deep critical reservation over ‘represent-
ational accounts of knowledge’, was nonetheless adamant in opposing the language
emphasis of philosophy. For Popper, there were real philosophical problems, which
were not linguistic. His antipathy, particularly to Wittgenstein and linguistic philo-
sophy, is legendary (see Popper 1976). However, there has, nonetheless, been a quite
marked shift of focus in twentieth-century thought towards the issue of language.
Gadamer, Wittgenstein, Habermas, and Derrida all take the ‘linguistic turn’ in
their own distinctive ways, although their differences are as striking as their simil-
arities. The language focus has appeared quite differently within distinct intellectual
traditions. Thus, in Anglo-American thought, from the 1930s up to the 1980s, the
impact of Wittgenstein’s latePhilosophical Investigations(already examined in Part
Two), the writings of J. L. Austin, the views of John Searle on speech act theory,
and many similar thinkers, were largely hegemonic. The long tail of this form of
philosophical theory still wags, somewhat more disconsolately now, at the open-
ing of the twenty-first century. The aim of philosophy, in this perspective, was to
clarify a predominantly ‘public’, analytically-orientated conception of language. In
France, a linguistic perspective also came to the fore, initially in the structural lin-
guistics of Saussure and Mauss’s semiotics, and then to a strange fruition of sorts in
Derrida’sGrammatologyand Foucault’sOrder of Things(examined in Part Four). In
Germany—where the emphasis largely falls in this chapter—the linguistic emphasis
came through strongly in developments within critical theory (particularly in the
later writing of Habermas) and in hermeneutics.^1 Although there are deep differ-
ences between all of these linguistically-orientated philosophies, they still all focus on
language as the key to comprehending reality.
Second, in the light of the critical theory and hermeneutic focus on language as
a key for the comprehension of social reality, there was a wide-ranging scepticism
concerning Cartesianism and the role played by individual human consciousness
in apprehending the world. Intersubjectivity and dialogue—or the total loss of the
human subject in some cases—became the primary medium for understanding. More
significantly, in any discussion of human knowledge, there was a rejection of a ‘human
subject-centred’ paradigm of epistemology, that is, bringing the world under the
reflective control of individual reason, cognition, and will. This was a philosophical
theme, which dominated European thought from Descartes to Husserl. Modern
critics were also dubious about, or hostile to, the idea of any private language and