Dasein - Monoskop

8 PART II
3. SOME QUALIFICATIONS AND
THE MAIN THESES OF THIS STUDY
In the preceeding section, the main ingredients of the conception
of language as the universal medium were presented, by and large,
along the same lines as in Jaakko and Merrill B. Hintikka's work on
Wittgenstein. The major qualification that this procedure calls for,
that is to say, the major qualification that has to be made with respect
to the two Idealtypen formulated above, concerns the relation
of the two basic assumptions—the assumptions that language is a
universal medium or that it is a calculus—and the subsequent eight
theses formulated above. This relation is not to be understood as
one of entailment in anything like a strict logical sense. In other
words, a philosopher might well accept the thesis of the ineffability
of semantics without thereby countenancing, for example, linguistic
relativism or semantical Kantianism. For instance, even though
Frege considers his logical language as a universal medium, he does
not believe in anything like logical relativism. On the contrary, he
argues that the universality of logic implies its uniqueness, i.e., its
absoluteness. Other advocates of language as the universal medium
might hold that language is not like a distorting and hiding medium
between us and the world, but rather a crystal-clear glass—like a
translucent window-pane—which does not add to the representation
of reality nor distort it. On this view, there is no reason to regard
reality an sich as being ineffable.
The fact that the interconnections between the different theses
within each of the two Idealtypen are thus not necessarily tight
and strict ones does not make these Idealtypen useless for the purposes
of comparing different philosophical systems or for analyzing
the deeper unity between the different facets of one and the same
philosopher's oeuvre. This is so because the major function of an
Idealtyp in interpretation is to work first and foremost as a questionraising
device. An Idealtyp as understood here provides us with a
catalogue of questions that can be raised with respect to different
philosophies in order to arrive at their differences as well as their
common tenets. Furthermore, deviations from the Idealtyp, far from
invalidating it as a heuristic device, lead to new questions as to the
deeper motivation for these deviations. They might thus lead us to