The linguistic turn is over.

Skimming the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article supplement to "Relativism," on "The Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis," it seems that Chris Swoyer is undecided about the ultimate merit of "the" hypothesis (though maybe he’s just being pedagogically useful). I've long thought that cognitive science antedates the linguistic turn in philosophy, and this is greatly corroborated by The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, whose whole dramatically corroborates the upshot of its chapter on linguistic relativity that (it seems to me) the Hypothesis isn't very philosophically interesting any longer.

It seems to me that cognitive linguistics registers a profound turn for anthropological thinking, in light of cognitive science (more specifically: in light of evolutionary cognitive neuroscience [ECS]), such that the heart of the future of philosophy is now relative to that kind of discursive formation (i.e., philosophy primarily in light of ECS, rather than philosophy primarily in light of, say, physics), beyond "the really hard problem" (i.e., accounting for consciousness) that Owen Flanagan recently recounts, to a locus of the so-called "question of Being" (we never outgrow The Question!) now in our conceptuality of evolution as such.

So, I hope that the SEP (already, indeed, in Chris' estimation, "the best...philosophical encyclopedia in the world") will grow to greatly register the evolutionary turn in philosophy (in light of the great biological turn in leading science). These are exciting times, against those who wonder whether there is any future for philosophy at all.

[The above is an email sent to Chris that I’ve only revised to no longer be directly addressing him.]

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