Linguaggio e concetti

An established tradition in philosophy, from Aristotle to Frege and his followers, has tried to explain the relationship between language and reality by appealing to thoughts and their constituents, concepts. In this frame, a word would designate the thing that it designates in virtue of the concept that it expresses, and a sentence would express a thought that is its meaning. Here I suggest that there is something wrong with this strategy. Indeed, I provide an argument aiming to show that concepts are not strange, mysterious entities (mental or belonging to a platonic third realm), but simple words, usually coming from our public language. So, if we really want to understand how words — also the words that constitute our thoughts — are connected with things, we should look elsewhere.