Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle) / quote 8 of 138
From philosophy of language to philosophy of mind
For most of the twentieth century the philosophy of language was “first philosophy.” Other branches of philosophy were seen as derived from the philosophy of language and dependent on results in the philosophy of language for their solution. The center of attention has now moved from language to mind. Why? Well, first, I think many of us working in the philosophy of language see many of the questions of language as special cases of questions about the mind. Our use of language is an expression of our more biologically fundamental mental capacities, and we will not fully understand the functioning of language until we see how it is grounded in our mental abilities. A second reason is that with the growth of knowledge we have seen a movement away from treating the theory of knowledge, epistemology, as central in philosophy and we are now prepared to do a more substantive, theoretical, constructive philosophy, rather than just dealing piecemeal with specific traditional problems.