Philosophers were great thinkers; they thought about a lot of things and wrote down what they thought. Their thoughts were so important that we still read them today. But they forgot to give thought to a very important aspect that makes them readable even now. Language. The philosophers didn't think about how they wrote their thoughts down, or how language made it so that they could. They took language for granted, and it wasn't until the Linguistic Turn around 1900 that people started thinking about how and why we can communicate with language.
The Linguistic Turn was a shift in how people thought about language; the phrase "Linguistic Turn" was popularized by Richard Rorty as the title of a book of essays that he published on the topic. People started thinking about how language allows speech and how we find meaning from language, and how meaning is constructed. Looking into these things, people also realized that what is true in one language and culture is not always true in other languages and cultures. An example of this that was mentioned in class is that in English we have words for the past, present, and future, but in one of the Native American languages (I don't remember which one) they don't have a word for past or future. They only have words for "manifest" and "non-manifest"; everything is in the present.
