Philosophy of language

Philosophy of language is the branch of philosophy that studies language. Its primary concerns include the nature of linguistic meaning, reference, language use, language learning, and language understanding, truth, thought (to the extent that it is linguistic), communication, interpretation, and translation.

Plato and Aristotle were concerned with language as were the stoics, medieval philosophers and many modern western philosophers such as Leibniz, John Locke, Vico, Johann Georg Hamann ,Johann Gottfried Herder, Immanuel Kant, Hegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Charles Peirce and Friedrich Nietzsche.

For reasons still to explore in the 20th century "language" became an even more central 'theme' within the most diverse traditions. Among the most important are:

A theory of language as part of a general theory of symbolic forms (Ernst Cassirer)
Philosophers who tied up to the humboldtian tradition (Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger)
Marxist theoreticians (Vološinov, Rossi-Landi)
Post-structuralism (Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida)
Feminist theoreticians (H�l�ne Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler)
Theoreticians of literature whose work is of philosophical relevance ( Mikhail Bakhtin,Maurice Blanchot, Paul de Man)
Philosophically oriented forms of semiotics following Charles Peirce (Umberto Eco)
In the English-speaking world philosophical discourse about language was dominated by Analytical philosophy which derives from the work of Gottlob Frege, and makes extensive use of modern logic and linguistics.

Overview

We might ask, "What is the meaning of meaning?" Philosophers of language are less concerned with what individual words or sentences mean than with what it means for an expression to mean something. How do expressions have the meanings they have, which expressions have the same meanings as which others, and how can these meanings can be known. (The exceptions, of course, are expressions about language, or words otherwise of philosophical significance). So a better question might be, "what does the word 'meaning' mean?" In a similar vein, (and with similar caveats), philosophers are less concerned with which sentences are true than with what kinds of things can be true or false (sentences, presumably, but all sentences, or only meaningful ones?) J.L. Austin a language philosopher who is most well known for his text, How to Do Things With Words concentrated upon various "tasks" of words and phrases or speech acts.

Language, how things 'mean' something, and truth (though postmodern thought incorporates the claim that there is no truth apart from a human perception of truth), are important not just because they are used daily with important effects; language has shaped our human development, from our earliest childhood and continuing to our deaths. Some contemporary philosophers hold that it is impossible to have any thoughts without having a language, while others argue that thoughts differ in kind and some exist a priori, before we acquire any use of language. Still more would agree that there are at least some thoughts that one cannot think without having a language. Since we often, or always, reason according to rules laid down by our language, then the language we speak has a great deal of influence (if not totally encompassing all that we "know") on how we perceive and act in the world. Accordingly it is not by accident that philosophical discussions of language begin by clarifying terminology, drawing distinctions between different senses of words, and so forth. The philosophy of language is important because language is important, and language is important because it is inseparable from how we think and live. Some philosophers argue that the the term "language" is too vague to be useful and entire systems have been developed to clarify the field. See semiotics.

Human beings have an integrated set of language concepts which are brought to bear upon signs and symbols, including all words (symbols): "object," "love," "good," "God," "masculine," "feminine," "art," "government," and so on. By incorporating "meaning," each of us has shaped (or has had shaped for us) an entire view of the universe and how we ourselves have "meaning" within it.

Major problems and sub-fields

Meaning

Natural language

Logic

History (Analytical philosophy)

Though philosophers had always discussed language, it took on a central role in philosophy beginning in the late nineteenth century, especially in the English speaking world and parts of Europe, to the extent that in this part of the world for a time philosophy of language seemed to be virtually synonymous with analytic philosophy.

Frege, Russell, and logic

The turn to language is tied closely to the development of modern logic, which began with the work of the German logician Frege in the late nineteenth century. Logicians had known since Aristotle how to codify certain common patterns of reasoning: For example, the argument "Socrates is a man. All men are mortal. Therefore Socrates is mortal" is called a syllogism. This is a valid syllogism, meaning that if its premises are true its conclusion must also be true. It can be represented thus: "All A are B. All B are C. Therefore all A are C." Frege (simultaneously with Boole and Charles Sanders Peirce) advanced logic significantly by showing how to codify inferences using Sentential connectives, like and, or and if-then, and quantifiers like all and some. Much of this work was made possible by the development of set theory. Frege used his new logic to further develop the foundations of arithmetic. He undertook to answer the question, "what is a number?" or "what objects do number-words ("one", "two", etc.) refer to?" In pursuing this he was led to analyse the idea of meaning, and saw that it could be explained as consisting of two elements.

Hence the sense (or intension) of a concept is what it attributes to an object; the reference (or extension) is the collection of objects that fall under the concept. The sense of a sentence is a proposition, or state of affairs; the reference is (confusingly, and still disputedly, but for good reasons) a truth value: "true" or "false." The referent of a proper name is an individual; the meaning of a proper name is a description that picks out that person (Russell thought something similar, although since the work of Saul Kripke almost no one holds this view now. Some, such as Gareth Evans, have argued that even Frege did not hold it).

Logic was further advanced by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead in their groundbreaking Principia Mathematica, which attempted to produce a formal language with which the truth of all mathematical statements could be demonstrated from first principles. Russell differed from Frege greatly on many points, however. He rejected Frege's sense-reference distinction (though this is perhaps an accident of how Russell viewed language, and many scholars think he misunderstood Frege more than he disagreed with him.) He disagreed that language was of fundamental significance to philosophy, and saw the project of developing formal logic as a way of eliminating all of the confusions caused by ordinary language, and hence at creating a perfectly transparent medium in which to conduct traditional philosophical argument. He hoped, ultimately, to extend the proofs of the Principia to all possible true statements, a scheme he called logical atomism. For a while it appeared that his pupil Wittgenstein had succeeded in this plan with his "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus".

Russell's work, and that of his colleague G. E. Moore, developed in response to what they perceived as the nonsense dominating British philosophy departments at the turn of the century, a kind of British Idealism most of which was derived (albeit very distantly) from the work of Hegel. In response Moore developed an approach ("Common Sense Philosophy") which sought to examine philosophical difficulties by a close analysis of the language used in order to determine its meaning. In this way Moore sought to expunge philosophical absurdities such as "time is unreal". Moore's work would have significant, if oblique, influence (largely mediated by Wittgenstein) on Ordinary language philosophy (see below.)

The later Wittgenstein and ordinary language

In 1929 Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge from Vienna, having concluded (with some persuasion from Frank Ramsey) that the Tractatus was not the end of philosophy, and indeed that it had serious problems. For the next twenty years he worked prodigiously, but as none of his work was published until his death much of his early influence was on his students.

This close examination of natural language is a powerful philosophical technique. Practitioners have included J. L. Austin, P. F. Strawson, John Searle, R. M. Hare and R. S. Peters. Wittgenstein himself returned to philosophy after becoming aware that there was much more to natural languages than he had surmised in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The result, "Philosophical Investigations", confirmed the central place of natural languages in the philosophy of language.

The Vienna Circle and Quine

Davidson and Truth theories

Perhaps the most influential current approach to the theory of meaning is that sketched by Donald Davidson in his introduction to the collection of essays Truth and Meaning in 1967. There he argued for the following two theses:

Any learnable language must be statable in a finite form, even if it is capable of a theoretically infinite number of expressions--as we may assume that natural human languages are, at least in principle. If it could not be stated in a finite way then it could not be learned through a finite, empirical method such as the way humans learn their languages. It follows that it must be possible to give a theoretical semantics for any natural language which could give the meanings of an infinite number of sentences on the basis of a finite system of axioms.
"Giving the meaning of a sentence", he further argued, was equivalent to stating its truth conditions. He proposed that it must be possible to account for language as a set of distinct grammatical features together with a lexicon, and for each of them explain its workings in such a way as to generate trivial (obviously correct) statements of the truth conditions of all the (infinitely many) sentences built up from these.

The result is a theory of meaning that rather resembles, by no accident, the account of the semantics of logic given by Alfred Tarski's semantic theory of truth: it consists of a recursive set of rules yielding an infinite set of sentences "'p' is true if and only if p", covering the whole language. Davidson's account, though brief, constitutes the first systematic presentation of truth-conditional semantics.

Kripke and direct reference

However there is still much that can be done by using formal logic to show how natural languages might work. Saul Kripke's analysis of reference is a case in point. Donald Davidson proposed simply translating natural languages into first-order predicate calculus in order to reduce meaning to a function of truth.

Dummett, logical harmony, and inferential role semantics

Main article: Inferential role semantics

Michael Dummett argued against the kind of truth-conditional semantics presented by Davidson; instead he argued that basing semantics on assertion conditions avoids a number of difficulties with truth-conditional semantics, such as the transcendental nature of certain kinds of truth condition. He leverages work done in proof-theoretic semantics to provide a kind of inferential role semantics, where:

The meaning of sentences and grammatical constructs is given by their assertion conditions; and
Such a semantics is only guaranteed to be coherent if the inferences associated with the parts of language are in logical harmony.

A semantics based upon assertion conditions is called a verificationist semantics: cf. the verificationism of the Vienna Circle.

References

Hale, B. and crispin Wright, Ed. (1999). Blackwell Companions To Philosophy. Malden, Massachusetts, Blackwell Publishers.
Lycan, W. G. (2000). Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction. New York, Routledge.

Miscellaneous

In 1950s, an artificial language loglan was invented that is based on first order predicate logic.

Key issues

Meaning and speech acts
Sense and reference
Meaning and intentionality
Meaning and truth