Abstract

The central question of this thesis is: what is the relationship between speech and the world? I address this question through Merleau-Ponty's late philosophy of language, specifically as it is elaborated in his posthumously published work The Visible and the Invisible. I draw upon his notions of invariance, the visible and the invisible, and reversibility. Using these notions, I posit that the sense of the situation in which we speak, both precedes and makes sense of what is said. In responding to this central question, I draw upon the interpretations of both Martin C. Dillon and Renaud Barbaras. I employ the work of Dillon in order to make sense of the notion of reversibility and, in order to give weight to the idea that the relationship between speech and the world is characterized by reversibility, I consider Merleau-Ponty's view of metaphor, as it is interpreted by Barbaras. This exploration illustrates that reversibility is operative even in our mundane use of metaphoric language. In sum, in this work, I consider the relationship between speech and the world. I argue that speech cannot be properly understood in absence of its worldly situation. In that, it is the situation in which one speaks that makes the sense of an expression intelligible and I demonstrate that this understanding of sense is articulated by Merleau-Ponty through his notion of reversibility.