CORRESPONDENCE AND MEANING. ARISTOTLE, WITTGENSTEIN’S TRACTATUS AND THE SEMANTIC HOLISM

The birth of philosophy of language, the progresses of logic, those of linguistic sciences and the “linguistic turn”, since the beginning of twentieth century, have given new energies to the studies on the relation between ontology and semantics, but this question is much more ancient. The contemporary correspondence theory of truth could be regarded as produced under Russell’s and Wittgeinstein’s influence, but the influence, actually, comes foremost from Aristotle, because the correspondentist view of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is almost a repetition, in modern terms, of the logical-linguistic Aristotelian ontology. As a matter of fact, the Aristotelian shape of Frege’s theory of proposition influenced both Russell’s logical atomism and the view of the young Wittgenstein. This does not mean that Aristotle was an analytic philosopher ante litteram, but that the similarity between world and language was deeply studied and employed long before the linguistic turn. Following both Aristotle and Wittgenstein, the fundamental idea at work is that our ontology has the same structures of our verbal language. This thesis raises more problems than it seems at first glance.