The genesis of analytic philosophy in the twentieth century has been characterized as “the linguistic turn” in the history of philosophy. It is true that a philosophical movement emerged in the beginning of this century that drew on the groundbreaking work of the philosopher and logician Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) and held that “philosophical problems may be solved (or dissolved) either by reforming language, or by understanding more about language we presently use.” Nevertheless, the definite article in “the linguistic turn” is inappropriate because there were other significant turns to language besides Frege's.

Language was as central to the Prague Linguistic Circle as it was to the Vienna Circle, and the Prague Circle was also interdisciplinary, including not only linguists but also literary critics, anthropologists, and philosophers (Steiner 1982, ix–xii and 83). Rooted in Ferdinand de Saussure's (1857–1913) groundbreaking theory of language, the “Theses of the Prague Circle” was an important milestone in the history of structuralism and had a profound influence on European thought. The idea that language and its structural properties are appropriate models for understanding other fields of study, including philosophy, still reverberates in discussions of texts and subtexts. No less influential was the linguistic hypothesis formulated by Edward Sapir (1884–1939) and Benjamin Lee Whorff (1897–1941) that human languages have incommensurable differences that cause human beings to perceive the world in radically different ways. This hypothesis has been so influential that it is considered a ruling paradigm in the contemporary social sciences.