Philosophy in the modern world a new history of western philosophy, volume 4 (new history of western philosophy) ( PDFDrive ) (1) 160

LANGUAGE question whether there was a sharp boundary between philosophy and empirical science In particular, there was a drive to amalgamate the philosophy of language with psychology and linguistics This was spearheaded from the philosophical side by Donald Davidson in the quest of a systematic theory of meaning for natural languages, and from the side of linguistics by Noam Chomsky with successive theories postulating hidden mechanisms underlying the acquisition of everyday grammar In my view, Wittgenstein was correct in seeing the task of philosophy as completely different from that of empirical science, and many developments in the philosophy of language in the latter part of the twentieth century served to obscure, rather than to enrich, the insights that had been gained in its earlier decades 143