Philosophy of language

Philosophy of language investigates the nature of language and the relations between language, language
users, and the world.[1] Investigations may include inquiry into the nature of meaning, intentionality,
reference, the constitution of sentences, concepts, learning, and thought.

Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell were pivotal figures in analytic philosophy's "linguistic turn". These
writers were followed by Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus), the Vienna Circle,
logical positivists, and Willard Van Orman Quine.[2]

History

Ancient philosophy
In the West, inquiry into language stretches back to the 5th century BC with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and
the Stoics.[3] Linguistic speculation predated systematic descriptions of grammar which emerged
c. the 5th century BC in India and c. the 3rd century BC in Greece.

In the dialogue Cratylus, Plato considered the question of whether the names of things were determined
by convention or by nature. He criticized conventionalism because it led to the bizarre consequence that
anything can be conventionally denominated by any name. Hence, it cannot account for the correct or
incorrect application of a name. He claimed that there was a natural correctness to names. To do this, he
pointed out that compound words and phrases have a range of correctness. He also argued that primitive
names had a natural correctness, because each phoneme represented basic ideas or sentiments. For
example, for Plato the letter l and its sound represented the idea of softness. However, by the end of
Cratylus, he had admitted that some social conventions were also involved, and that there were faults in
the idea that phonemes had individual meanings.[4] Plato is often considered a proponent of extreme
realism.

Aristotle interested himself with issues of logic, categories, and the creation of meaning. He separated all
things into categories of species and genus. He thought that the meaning of a predicate was established
through an abstraction of the similarities between various individual things. This theory later came to be
called nominalism.[5] However, since Aristotle took these similarities to be constituted by a real
commonality of form, he is more often considered a proponent of moderate realism.

The Stoics made important contributions to the analysis of grammar, distinguishing five parts of speech:
nouns, verbs, appellatives (names or epithets), conjunctions and articles. They also developed a
sophisticated doctrine of the lektón associated with each sign of a language, but distinct from both the
sign itself and the thing to which it refers. This lektón was the meaning or sense of every term. The
complete lektón of a sentence is what we would now call its proposition.[6] Only propositions were
considered truth-bearing—meaning they could be considered true or false—while sentences were simply
their vehicles of expression. Different lektá could also express things besides propositions, such as
commands, questions and exclamations.[7]

Medieval philosophy
Medieval philosophers were greatly interested in the subtleties of language and its usage. For many
scholastics, this interest was provoked by the necessity of translating Greek texts into Latin. There were
several noteworthy philosophers of language in the medieval period. According to Peter J. King,
(although this has been disputed), Peter Abelard anticipated the modern theories of reference.[8] Also,
William of Ockham's Summa Logicae brought forward one of the first serious proposals for codifying a
mental language.[9]

The scholastics of the high medieval period, such as Ockham and John Duns Scotus, considered logic to
be a scientia sermocinalis (science of language). The result of their studies was the elaboration of
linguistic-philosophical notions whose complexity and subtlety has only recently come to be appreciated.
Many of the most interesting problems of modern philosophy of language were anticipated by medieval
thinkers. The phenomena of vagueness and ambiguity were analyzed intensely, and this led to an
increasing interest in problems related to the use of syncategorematic words such as and, or, not, if, and
every. The study of categorematic words (or terms) and their properties was also developed greatly.[10]
One of the major developments of the scholastics in this area was the doctrine of the suppositio.[11] The
suppositio of a term is the interpretation that is given of it in a specific context. It can be proper or
improper (as when it is used in metaphor, metonyms and other figures of speech). A proper suppositio, in
turn, can be either formal or material accordingly when it refers to its usual non-linguistic referent (as in
"Charles is a man"), or to itself as a linguistic entity (as in "Charles has seven letters"). Such a
classification scheme is the precursor of modern distinctions between use and mention, and between
language and metalanguage.[11]

There is a tradition called speculative grammar which existed from the 11th to the 13th century. Leading
scholars included Martin of Dacia and Thomas of Erfurt (see Modistae).

Modern philosophy
Linguists of the Renaissance and Baroque periods such as Johannes Goropius Becanus, Athanasius
Kircher and John Wilkins were infatuated with the idea of a philosophical language reversing the
confusion of tongues, influenced by the gradual discovery of Chinese characters and Egyptian
hieroglyphs (Hieroglyphica). This thought parallels the idea that there might be a universal language of
music.

European scholarship began to absorb the Indian linguistic tradition only from the mid-18th century,
pioneered by Jean François Pons and Henry Thomas Colebrooke (the editio princeps of Varadarāja, a
17th-century Sanskrit grammarian, dating to 1849).

In the early 19th century, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard insisted that language ought to play
a larger role in Western philosophy. He argued that philosophy has not sufficiently focused on the role
language plays in cognition and that future philosophy ought to proceed with a conscious focus on
language:
 If the claim of philosophers to be unbiased were all it pretends to be, it would also have to take
account of language and its whole significance in relation to speculative philosophy ...
Language is partly something originally given, partly that which develops freely. And just as
the individual can never reach the point at which he becomes absolutely independent ... so too
with language.[12]

Contemporary philosophy
The phrase "linguistic turn" was used to describe the noteworthy emphasis that contemporary
philosophers put upon language.

Language began to play a central role in Western philosophy in the early 20th century. One of the central
figures involved in this development was the German philosopher Gottlob Frege, whose work on
philosophical logic and the philosophy of language in the late 19th century influenced the work of 20th-
century analytic philosophers Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The philosophy of language
became so pervasive that for a time, in analytic philosophy circles, philosophy as a whole was understood
to be a matter of philosophy of language.

In continental philosophy, the foundational work in the field was Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de
linguistique générale,[13] published posthumously in 1916.

Major topics and subfields

Meaning
The topic that has received the most attention in the philosophy of language has been the nature of
meaning, to explain what "meaning" is, and what we mean when we talk about meaning. Within this area,
issues include: the nature of synonymy, the origins of meaning itself, our apprehension of meaning, and
the nature of composition (the question of how meaningful units of language are composed of smaller
meaningful parts, and how the meaning of the whole is derived from the meaning of its parts).

There have been several distinctive explanations of what a linguistic "meaning" is. Each has been
associated with its own body of literature.

The ideational theory of meaning, most commonly associated with the British empiricist
John Locke, claims that meanings are mental representations provoked by signs.[14]
Although this view of meaning has been beset by a number of problems from the beginning
(see the main article for details), interest in it has been renewed by some contemporary
theorists under the guise of semantic internalism.[15]
The truth-conditional theory of meaning holds meaning to be the conditions under which an
expression may be true or false. This tradition goes back at least to Frege and is associated
with a rich body of modern work, spearheaded by philosophers like Alfred Tarski and Donald
Davidson.[16][17] (See also Wittgenstein's picture theory of language.)
The use theory of meaning, most commonly associated with the later Wittgenstein, helped
inaugurate the idea of "meaning as use", and a communitarian view of language.
Wittgenstein was interested in the way in which the communities use language, and how far
 it can be taken.[18] It is also associated with P. F. Strawson, John Searle, Robert Brandom,
and others.[19]
The inferentialist theory of meaning, the view that the meaning of an expression is derived
from the inferential relations that it has with other expressions. This view is thought to be
descended from the use theory of meaning, and has been most notably defended by Wilfrid
Sellars and Robert Brandom.
The direct reference theory of meaning, the view that the meaning of a word or expression
is what it points out in the world. While views of this kind have been widely criticized
regarding the use of language in general, John Stuart Mill defended a form of this view, and
Saul Kripke and Ruth Barcan Marcus have both defended the application of direct reference
theory to proper names.
The semantic externalist theory of meaning, according to which meaning is not a purely
psychological phenomenon, because it is determined, at least in part, by features of one's
environment. There are two broad subspecies of externalism: social and environmental. The
first is most closely associated with Tyler Burge and the second with Hilary Putnam, Saul
Kripke and others.[20][21][22]
The verificationist theory of meaning is generally associated with the early 20th century
movement of logical positivism. The traditional formulation of such a theory is that the
meaning of a sentence is its method of verification or falsification. In this form, the thesis
was abandoned after the acceptance by most philosophers of the Duhem–Quine thesis of
confirmation holism after the publication of Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism".[23]
However, Michael Dummett has advocated a modified form of verificationism since the
1970s. In this version, the comprehension (and hence meaning) of a sentence consists in
the hearer's ability to recognize the demonstration (mathematical, empirical or other) of the
truth of the sentence.[24]
Pragmatic theories of meaning include any theory in which the meaning (or understanding)
of a sentence is determined by the consequences of its application. Dummett attributes
such a theory of meaning to Charles Sanders Peirce and other early 20th century American
pragmatists.[24]
Psychological theories of meaning, which focus on the intentions of a speaker in
determining the meaning of an utterance. One notable proponent of such a view was Paul
Grice, whose views also account for non-linguistic meaning (i.e., meaning as conveyed by
body language, meanings as consequences, etc.).[25]

Reference
Investigations into how language interacts with the world are called theories of reference. Gottlob Frege
was an advocate of a mediated reference theory. Frege divided the semantic content of every expression,
including sentences, into two components: sense and reference. The sense of a sentence is the thought
that it expresses. Such a thought is abstract, universal and objective. The sense of any sub-sentential
expression consists in its contribution to the thought that its embedding sentence expresses. Senses
determine reference and are also the modes of presentation of the objects to which expressions refer.
Referents are the objects in the world that words pick out. The senses of sentences are thoughts, while
their referents are truth values (true or false). The referents of sentences embedded in propositional
attitude ascriptions and other opaque contexts are their usual senses.[26]

Bertrand Russell, in his later writings and for reasons related to his theory of acquaintance in
epistemology, held that the only directly referential expressions are what he called "logically proper
names". Logically proper names are such terms as I, now, here and other indexicals.[27][28] He viewed
proper names of the sort described above as "abbreviated definite descriptions" (see Theory of
descriptions). Hence Joseph R. Biden may be an abbreviation for "the current President of the United
States and husband of Jill Biden". Definite descriptions are denoting phrases (see "On Denoting") which
are analyzed by Russell into existentially quantified logical constructions. Such phrases denote in the
sense that there is an object that satisfies the description. However, such objects are not to be considered
meaningful on their own, but have meaning only in the proposition expressed by the sentences of which
they are a part. Hence, they are not directly referential in the same way as logically proper names, for
Russell.[29][30]

On Frege's account, any referring expression has a sense as well as a referent. Such a "mediated
reference" view has certain theoretical advantages over Mill's view. For example, co-referential names,
such as Samuel Clemens and Mark Twain, cause problems for a directly referential view because it is
possible for someone to hear "Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens" and be surprised – thus, their cognitive
content seems different.

Despite the differences between the views of Frege and Russell, they are generally lumped together as
descriptivists about proper names. Such descriptivism was criticized in Saul Kripke's Naming and
Necessity.

Kripke put forth what has come to be known as "the modal argument" (or "argument from rigidity").
Consider the name Aristotle and the descriptions "the greatest student of Plato", "the founder of logic"
and "the teacher of Alexander". Aristotle obviously satisfies all of the descriptions (and many of the
others we commonly associate with him), but it is not necessarily true that if Aristotle existed then
Aristotle was any one, or all, of these descriptions. Aristotle may well have existed without doing any
single one of the things for which he is known to posterity. He may have existed and not have become
known to posterity at all or he may have died in infancy. Suppose that Aristotle is associated by Mary
with the description "the last great philosopher of antiquity" and (the actual) Aristotle died in infancy.
Then Mary's description would seem to refer to Plato. But this is deeply counterintuitive. Hence, names
are rigid designators, according to Kripke. That is, they refer to the same individual in every possible
world in which that individual exists. In the same work, Kripke articulated several other arguments
against "Frege–Russell" descriptivism[22] (see also Kripke's causal theory of reference).

The whole philosophical enterprise of studying reference has been critiqued by linguist Noam Chomsky
in various works.[31][32]

Composition and parts

It has long been known that there are different parts of speech. One part of the common sentence is the
lexical word, which is composed of nouns, verbs, and adjectives. A major question in the field – perhaps
the single most important question for formalist and structuralist thinkers – is how the meaning of a
sentence emerges from its parts.

Many aspects of the problem of the composition of sentences are addressed in the field of linguistics of
syntax. Philosophical semantics tends to focus on the principle of compositionality to explain the
relationship between meaningful parts and whole sentences. The principle of compositionality asserts that
a sentence can be understood on the basis of the meaning of the parts of the sentence (i.e., words,
morphemes) along with an understanding of its structure (i.e., syntax, logic).[33] Further, syntactic
propositions are arranged into discourse or narrative structures, which also encode meanings through
pragmatics like temporal relations and pronominals.[34]
It is possible to use the concept of functions to describe more
than just how lexical meanings work: they can also be used to
describe the meaning of a sentence. In the sentence "The horse is
red", "the horse" can be considered to be the product of a
propositional function. A propositional function is an operation
of language that takes an entity (in this case, the horse) as an
input and outputs a semantic fact (i.e., the proposition that is
represented by "The horse is red"). In other words, a
propositional function is like an algorithm. The meaning of "red"
in this case is whatever takes the entity "the horse" and turns it
into the statement, "The horse is red."[35]

Linguists have developed at least two general methods of Example of a syntactic tree
understanding the relationship between the parts of a linguistic
string and how it is put together: syntactic and semantic trees.
Syntactic trees draw upon the words of a sentence with the grammar of the sentence in mind; semantic
trees focus upon the role of the meaning of the words and how those meanings combine to provide insight
onto the genesis of semantic facts.

Mind and language

Innateness and learning

Some of the major issues at the intersection of philosophy of language and philosophy of mind are also
dealt with in modern psycholinguistics. Some important questions regard the amount of innate language,
if language acquisition is a special faculty in the mind, and what the connection is between thought and
language.

There are three general perspectives on the issue of language learning. The first is the behaviorist
perspective, which dictates that not only is the solid bulk of language learned, but it is learned via
conditioning. The second is the hypothesis testing perspective, which understands the child's learning of
syntactic rules and meanings to involve the postulation and testing of hypotheses, through the use of the
general faculty of intelligence. The final candidate for explanation is the innatist perspective, which states
that at least some of the syntactic settings are innate and hardwired, based on certain modules of the
mind.[36][37]

There are varying notions of the structure of the brain when it comes to language. Connectionist models
emphasize the idea that a person's lexicon and their thoughts operate in a kind of distributed, associative
network.[38] Nativist models assert that there are specialized devices in the brain that are dedicated to
language acquisition.[37] Computation models emphasize the notion of a representational language of
thought and the logic-like, computational processing that the mind performs over them.[39] Emergentist
models focus on the notion that natural faculties are a complex system that emerge from simpler
biological parts. Reductionist models attempt to explain higher-level mental processes in terms of the
basic low-level neurophysiological activity.[40]

Communication
Firstly, this field of study seeks to better understand what speakers and listeners do with language in
communication, and how it is used socially. Specific interests include the topics of language learning,
language creation, and speech acts.

Secondly, the question of how language relates to the minds of both the speaker and the interpreter is
investigated. Of specific interest is the grounds for successful translation of words and concepts into their
equivalents in another language.

Language and thought

An important problem which touches both philosophy of language and philosophy of mind is to what
extent language influences thought and vice versa. There have been a number of different perspectives on
this issue, each offering a number of insights and suggestions.

Linguists Sapir and Whorf suggested that language limited the extent to which members of a "linguistic
community" can think about certain subjects (a hypothesis paralleled in George Orwell's novel Nineteen
Eighty-Four).[41] In other words, language was analytically prior to thought. Philosopher Michael
Dummett is also a proponent of the "language-first" viewpoint.[42]

The stark opposite to the Sapir–Whorf position is the notion that thought (or, more broadly, mental
content) has priority over language. The "knowledge-first" position can be found, for instance, in the
work of Paul Grice.[42] Further, this view is closely associated with Jerry Fodor and his language of
thought hypothesis. According to his argument, spoken and written language derive their intentionality
and meaning from an internal language encoded in the mind.[43] The main argument in favor of such a
view is that the structure of thoughts and the structure of language seem to share a compositional,
systematic character. Another argument is that it is difficult to explain how signs and symbols on paper
can represent anything meaningful unless some sort of meaning is infused into them by the contents of
the mind. One of the main arguments against is that such levels of language can lead to an infinite
regress.[43] In any case, many philosophers of mind and language, such as Ruth Millikan, Fred Dretske
and Fodor, have recently turned their attention to explaining the meanings of mental contents and states
directly.

Another tradition of philosophers has attempted to show that language and thought are coextensive – that
there is no way of explaining one without the other. Donald Davidson, in his essay "Thought and Talk",
argued that the notion of belief could only arise as a product of public linguistic interaction. Daniel
Dennett holds a similar interpretationist view of propositional attitudes.[44] To an extent, the theoretical
underpinnings to cognitive semantics (including the notion of semantic framing) suggest the influence of
language upon thought.[45] However, the same tradition views meaning and grammar as a function of
conceptualization, making it difficult to assess in any straightforward way.

Some thinkers, like the ancient sophist Gorgias, have questioned whether or not language was capable of
capturing thought at all.

...speech can never exactly represent perceptibles, since it is different from them, and
perceptibles are apprehended each by the one kind of organ, speech by another. Hence, since
the objects of sight cannot be presented to any other organ but sight, and the different sense-
 organs cannot give their information to one another, similarly speech cannot give any
information about perceptibles. Therefore, if anything exists and is comprehended, it is
incommunicable.[46]

There are studies that prove that languages shape how people understand causality. Some of them were
performed by Lera Boroditsky. For example, English speakers tend to say things like "John broke the
vase" even for accidents. However, Spanish or Japanese speakers would be more likely to say "the vase
broke itself". In studies conducted by Caitlin Fausey at Stanford University speakers of English, Spanish
and Japanese watched videos of two people popping balloons, breaking eggs and spilling drinks either
intentionally or accidentally. Later everyone was asked whether they could remember who did what.
Spanish and Japanese speakers did not remember the agents of accidental events as well as did English
speakers.[47]

Russian speakers, who make an extra distinction between light and dark blue in their language, are better
able to visually discriminate shades of blue. The Piraha, a tribe in Brazil, whose language has only terms
like few and many instead of numerals, are not able to keep track of exact quantities.[48]

In one study German and Spanish speakers were asked to describe objects having opposite gender
assignment in those two languages. The descriptions they gave differed in a way predicted by
grammatical gender. For example, when asked to describe a "key"—a word that is masculine in German
and feminine in Spanish—the German speakers were more likely to use words like "hard", "heavy",
"jagged", "metal", "serrated" and "useful" whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say "golden",
"intricate", "little", "lovely", "shiny" and "tiny". To describe a "bridge", which is feminine in German and
masculine in Spanish, the German speakers said "beautiful", "elegant", "fragile", "peaceful", "pretty" and
"slender", and the Spanish speakers said "big", "dangerous", "long", "strong", "sturdy" and "towering".
This was the case even though all testing was done in English, a language without grammatical
gender.[49]

In a series of studies conducted by Gary Lupyan, people were asked to look at a series of images of
imaginary aliens.[50] Whether each alien was friendly or hostile was determined by certain subtle features
but participants were not told what these were. They had to guess whether each alien was friendly or
hostile, and after each response they were told if they were correct or not, helping them learn the subtle
cues that distinguished friend from foe. A quarter of the participants were told in advance that the friendly
aliens were called "leebish" and the hostile ones "grecious", while another quarter were told the opposite.
For the rest, the aliens remained nameless. It was found that participants who were given names for the
aliens learned to categorize the aliens far more quickly, reaching 80 per cent accuracy in less than half the
time taken by those not told the names. By the end of the test, those told the names could correctly
categorize 88 per cent of aliens, compared to just 80 per cent for the rest. It was concluded that naming
objects helps us categorize and memorize them.

In another series of experiments,[51] a group of people was asked to view furniture from an IKEA catalog.
Half the time they were asked to label the object – whether it was a chair or lamp, for example – while
the rest of the time they had to say whether or not they liked it. It was found that when asked to label
items, people were later less likely to recall the specific details of products, such as whether a chair had
arms or not. It was concluded that labeling objects helps our minds build a prototype of the typical object
in the group at the expense of individual features.[52]

Social interaction and language

A common claim is that language is governed by social conventions. Questions inevitably arise on
surrounding topics. One question regards what a convention exactly is, and how it is studied, and second
regards the extent that conventions even matter in the study of language. David Kellogg Lewis proposed
a worthy reply to the first question by expounding the view that a convention is a "rationally self-
perpetuating regularity in behavior". However, this view seems to compete to some extent with the
Gricean view of speaker's meaning, requiring either one (or both) to be weakened if both are to be taken
as true.[42]

Some have questioned whether or not conventions are relevant to the study of meaning at all. Noam
Chomsky proposed that the study of language could be done in terms of the I-Language, or internal
language of persons. If this is so, then it undermines the pursuit of explanations in terms of conventions,
and relegates such explanations to the domain of metasemantics. Metasemantics is a term used by
philosopher of language Robert Stainton to describe all those fields that attempt to explain how semantic
facts arise.[35] One fruitful source of research involves investigation into the social conditions that give
rise to, or are associated with, meanings and languages. Etymology (the study of the origins of words) and
stylistics (philosophical argumentation over what makes "good grammar", relative to a particular
language) are two other examples of fields that are taken to be metasemantic.

Many separate (but related) fields have investigated the topic of linguistic convention within their own
research paradigms. The presumptions that prop up each theoretical view are of interest to the
philosopher of language. For instance, one of the major fields of sociology, symbolic interactionism, is
based on the insight that human social organization is based almost entirely on the use of meanings.[53] In
consequence, any explanation of a social structure (like an institution) would need to account for the
shared meanings which create and sustain the structure.

Rhetoric is the study of the particular words that people use to achieve the proper emotional and rational
effect in the listener, be it to persuade, provoke, endear, or teach. Some relevant applications of the field
include the examination of propaganda and didacticism, the examination of the purposes of swearing and
pejoratives (especially how it influences the behaviors of others, and defines relationships), or the effects
of gendered language. It can also be used to study linguistic transparency (or speaking in an accessible
manner), as well as performative utterances and the various tasks that language can perform (called
"speech acts"). It also has applications to the study and interpretation of law, and helps give insight to the
logical concept of the domain of discourse.

Literary theory is a discipline that some literary theorists claim overlaps with the philosophy of language.
It emphasizes the methods that readers and critics use in understanding a text. This field, an outgrowth of
the study of how to properly interpret messages, is closely tied to the ancient discipline of hermeneutics.

Truth
Finally, philosophers of language investigate how language and meaning relate to truth and the reality
being referred to. They tend to be less interested in which sentences are actually true, and more in what
kinds of meanings can be true or false. A truth-oriented philosopher of language might wonder whether or
not a meaningless sentence can be true or false, or whether or not sentences can express propositions
about things that do not exist, rather than the way sentences are used.

Problems in the philosophy of language

Nature of language
In the philosophical tradition stemming from the Ancient Greeks, such as Plato and Aristotle, language is
seen as a tool for making statements about the reality by means of predication; e.g. "Man is a rational
animal", where Man is the subject and is a rational animal is the predicate, which expresses a property of
the subject. Such structures also constitute the syntactic basis of syllogism, which remained the standard
model of formal logic until the early 20th century, when it was replaced with predicate logic. In
linguistics and philosophy of language, the classical model survived in the Middle Ages, and the link
between Aristotelian philosophy of science and linguistics was elaborated by Thomas of Erfurt's
Modistae grammar (c. 1305), which gives an example of the analysis of the transitive sentence: "Plato
strikes Socrates", where Socrates is the object and part of the predicate.[54][55]

The social and evolutionary aspects of language were discussed during the classical and mediaeval
periods. Plato's dialogue Cratylus investigates the iconicity of words, arguing that words are made by
"wordsmiths" and selected by those who need the words, and that the study of language is external to the
philosophical objective of studying ideas.[56] Age-of-Enlightenment thinkers accommodated the classical
model with a Christian worldview, arguing that God created Man social and rational, and, out of these
properties, Man created his own cultural habits including language.[57] In this tradition, the logic of the
subject-predicate structure forms a general, or 'universal' grammar, which governs thinking and underpins
all languages. Variation between languages was investigated in the Port-Royal Grammar of Arnauld and
Lancelot, among others, who described it as accidental and separate from the logical requirements of
thought and language.[58]

The classical view was overturned in the early 19th century by the advocates of German romanticism.
Humboldt and his contemporaries questioned the existence of a universal inner form of thought. They
argued that, since thinking is verbal, language must be the prerequisite for thought. Therefore, every
nation has its own unique way of thinking, a worldview, which has evolved with the linguistic history of
the nation.[59] Diversity became emphasized with a focus on the uncontrollable sociohistorical
construction of language. Influential romantic accounts include Grimm's sound laws of linguistic
evolution, Schleicher's "Darwinian" species-language analogy, the Völkerpsychologie accounts of
language by Steinthal and Wundt, and Saussure's semiology, a dyadic model of semiotics, i.e., language
as a sign system with its own inner logic, separated from physical reality.[60]

In the early 20th century, logical grammar was defended by Frege and Husserl. Husserl's 'pure logical
grammar' draws from 17th-century rational universal grammar, proposing a formal semantics that links
the structures of physical reality (e.g., "This paper is white") with the structures of the mind, meaning,
and the surface form of natural languages. Husserl's treatise was, however, rejected in general
linguistics.[61] Instead, linguists opted for Chomsky's theory of universal grammar as an innate biological
structure that generates syntax in a formalistic fashion, i.e., irrespective of meaning.[54]

Many philosophers continue to hold the view that language is a logically based tool of expressing the
structures of reality by means of predicate-argument structure. Proponents include, with different
nuances, Russell, Wittgenstein, Sellars, Davidson, Putnam, and Searle. Attempts to revive logical formal
semantics as a basis of linguistics followed, e.g., the Montague grammar. Despite resistance from
linguists including Chomsky and Lakoff, formal semantics was established in the late twentieth century.
However, its influence has been mostly limited to computational linguistics, with little impact on general
linguistics.[62]

The incompatibility with genetics and neuropsychology of Chomsky's innate grammar gave rise to new
psychologically and biologically oriented theories of language in the 1980s, and these have gained
influence in linguistics and cognitive science in the 21st century. Examples include Lakoff's conceptual
metaphor, which argues that language arises automatically from visual and other sensory input, and
different models inspired by Dawkins's memetics,[63] a neo-Darwinian model of linguistic units as the
units of natural selection. These include cognitive grammar, construction grammar, and usage-based
linguistics.[64]

Problem of universals and composition

One debate that has captured the interest of many philosophers is the debate over the meaning of
universals. It might be asked, for example, why when people say the word rocks, what it is that the word
represents. Two different answers have emerged to this question. Some have said that the expression
stands for some real, abstract universal out in the world called "rocks". Others have said that the word
stands for some collection of particular, individual rocks that are associated with merely a nomenclature.
The former position has been called philosophical realism, and the latter nominalism.[65]

The issue here can be explicated in examination of the proposition "Socrates is a man".

From the realist's perspective, the connection between S and M is a connection between two abstract
entities. There is an entity, "man", and an entity, "Socrates". These two things connect in some way or
overlap.

From a nominalist's perspective, the connection between S and M is the connection between a particular
entity (Socrates) and a vast collection of particular things (men). To say that Socrates is a man is to say
that Socrates is a part of the class of "men". Another perspective is to consider "man" to be a property of
the entity, "Socrates".

There is a third way, between nominalism and (extreme) realism, usually called "moderate realism" and
attributed to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Moderate realists hold that "man" refers to a real essence or
form that is really present and identical in Socrates and all other men, but "man" does not exist as a
separate and distinct entity. This is a realist position, because "man" is real, insofar as it really exists in all
men; but it is a moderate realism, because "man" is not an entity separate from the men it informs.

Formal versus informal approaches

Another of the questions that has divided philosophers of language is the extent to which formal logic can
be used as an effective tool in the analysis and understanding of natural languages. While most
philosophers, including Gottlob Frege, Alfred Tarski and Rudolf Carnap, have been more or less skeptical
about formalizing natural languages, many of them developed formal languages for use in the sciences or
formalized parts of natural language for investigation. Some of the most prominent members of this
tradition of formal semantics include Tarski, Carnap, Richard Montague and Donald Davidson.[66]

On the other side of the divide, and especially prominent in the 1950s and '60s, were the so-called
"ordinary language philosophers". Philosophers such as P. F. Strawson, John Langshaw Austin and
Gilbert Ryle stressed the importance of studying natural language without regard to the truth-conditions
of sentences and the references of terms. They did not believe that the social and practical dimensions of
linguistic meaning could be captured by any attempts at formalization using the tools of logic. Logic is
one thing and language is something entirely different. What is important is not expressions themselves
but what people use them to do in communication.[67]

Hence, Austin developed a theory of speech acts, which described the kinds of things which can be done
with a sentence (assertion, command, inquiry, exclamation) in different contexts of use on different
occasions.[68] Strawson argued that the truth-table semantics of the logical connectives (e.g., , and
) do not capture the meanings of their natural language counterparts ("and", "or" and "if-then").[69] While
the "ordinary language" movement basically died out in the 1970s, its influence was crucial to the
development of the fields of speech-act theory and the study of pragmatics. Many of its ideas have been
absorbed by theorists such as Kent Bach, Robert Brandom, Paul Horwich and Stephen Neale.[19] In
recent work, the division between semantics and pragmatics has become a lively topic of discussion at the
interface of philosophy and linguistics, for instance in work by Sperber and Wilson, Carston and
Levinson.[70][71][72]

While keeping these traditions in mind, the question of whether or not there is any grounds for conflict
between the formal and informal approaches is far from being decided. Some theorists, like Paul Grice,
have been skeptical of any claims that there is a substantial conflict between logic and natural
language.[73]

Game theoretical approach

Game theory has been suggested as a tool to study the evolution of language. Some researchers that have
developed game theoretical approaches to philosophy of language are David K. Lewis, Schuhmacher, and
Rubinstein. [74]

Translation and interpretation

Translation and interpretation are two other problems that philosophers of language have attempted to
confront. In the 1950s, W.V. Quine argued for the indeterminacy of meaning and reference based on the
principle of radical translation. In Word and Object, Quine asks readers to imagine a situation in which
they are confronted with a previously undocumented, group of indigenous people where they must
attempt to make sense of the utterances and gestures that its members make. This is the situation of
radical translation.[75]
He claimed that, in such a situation, it is impossible in principle to be absolutely certain of the meaning or
reference that a speaker of the indigenous peoples language attaches to an utterance. For example, if a
speaker sees a rabbit and says "gavagai", is she referring to the whole rabbit, to the rabbit's tail, or to a
temporal part of the rabbit? All that can be done is to examine the utterance as a part of the overall
linguistic behaviour of the individual, and then use these observations to interpret the meaning of all other
utterances. From this basis, one can form a manual of translation. But, since reference is indeterminate,
there will be many such manuals, no one of which is more correct than the others. For Quine, as for
Wittgenstein and Austin, meaning is not something that is associated with a single word or sentence, but
is rather something that, if it can be attributed at all, can only be attributed to a whole language.[75] The
resulting view is called semantic holism.

Inspired by Quine's discussion, Donald Davidson extended the idea of radical translation to the
interpretation of utterances and behavior within a single linguistic community. He dubbed this notion
radical interpretation. He suggested that the meaning that any individual ascribed to a sentence could
only be determined by attributing meanings to many, perhaps all, of the individual's assertions, as well as
their mental states and attitudes.[17]

Vagueness
One issue that has troubled philosophers of language and logic is the problem of the vagueness of words.
The specific instances of vagueness that most interest philosophers of language are those where the
existence of "borderline cases" makes it seemingly impossible to say whether a predicate is true or false.
Classic examples are "is tall" or "is bald", where it cannot be said that some borderline case (some given
person) is tall or not-tall. In consequence, vagueness gives rise to the paradox of the heap. Many theorists
have attempted to solve the paradox by way of n-valued logics, such as fuzzy logic, which have radically
departed from classical two-valued logics.[76]

Further reading
Atherton, Catherine. 1993. The Stoics on Ambiguity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press.
Denyer, Nicholas. 1991. Language, Thought and Falsehood in Ancient Greek Philosophy.
London: Routledge.
Kneale, W., and M. Kneale. 1962. The Development of Logic. Oxford: Clarendon.
Modrak, Deborah K. W. 2001. Aristotle's Theory of Language and Meaning. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
Sedley, David. 2003. Plato's Cratylus. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

See also
Analytic philosophy
Discourse
Interpersonal communication
Linguistics
Semiotics
 Theory of language

External links
Philosophy of language (https://www.inphoproject.org/taxonomy/2231) at the Indiana
Philosophy Ontology Project
Philosophy of language (https://philpapers.org/browse/philosophy-of-language) at
PhilPapers
"Philosophy of Language" (http://www.iep.utm.edu/lang-phi/). Internet Encyclopedia of
Philosophy.
Magee, Bryan (March 14, 2008). "John Searle on the Philosophy of Language, Part 1" (http
s://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOlJZabio3g). Searle John (interviewee). flame0430's
channel. Archived (https://ghostarchive.org/varchive/youtube/20211111/jOlJZabio3g) from
the original on 2021-11-11. One of five parts, the others found here, 2 (https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=FC3vosOlRZ4&hl=en&fs=1&) here. 3 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pM
NMFaL-xrM) here, 4 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFX0wz86bMw) here, 5 (https://w
ww.youtube.com/watch?v=mpyKwYNt9BM) There are also 16 lectures by Searle, beginning
with "Searle: Philosophy of Language, lecture 1" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk5pIz
CNOzU). SocioPhilosophy's channel. October 25, 2011. Archived (https://ghostarchive.org/v
archive/youtube/20211111/Uk5pIzCNOzU) from the original on 2021-11-11.
Sprachlogik (http://sprachlogik.blogspot.com/) short articles in the philosophies of logic and
language.
Glossary of Linguistic terms (http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/content
s.htm).
What is I-language? (http://linguistics.concordia.ca/i-language/) Archived (https://web.archiv
e.org/web/20110706173454/http://linguistics.concordia.ca/i-language/) 2011-07-06 at the
Wayback Machine – Chapter 1 of I-language: An Introduction to Linguistics as Cognitive
Science.
The London Philosophy Study Guide (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/philosophy/LPSG/) Archived (http
s://web.archive.org/web/20090923081848/http://www.ucl.ac.uk/philosophy/LPSG/Language.
htm) 2009-09-23 at the Wayback Machine offers many suggestions on what to read,
depending on the student's familiarity with the subject: Philosophy of Language (http://www.
ucl.ac.uk/philosophy/LPSG/Language.htm).
Carnap, R., (1956). Meaning and Necessity: a Study in Semantics and Modal Logic.
University of Chicago Press.
Collins, John. (2001). Truth Conditions Without Interpretation. [1] (http://www.sorites.org/Issu
e_13/collins.htm).
Devitt, Michael and Hanley, Richard, eds. (2006) The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of
Language. Oxford: Blackwell.
Greenberg, Mark and Harman, Gilbert. (2005). Conceptual Role Semantics. [2] (http://www.
princeton.edu/~harman/Papers/CRS.pdf).
Hale, B. and Crispin Wright, Ed. (1999). Blackwell Companions To Philosophy. Malden,
Massachusetts, Blackwell Publishers.
Isac, Daniela; Charles Reiss (2013). I-language: An Introduction to Linguistics as Cognitive
Science, 2nd edition (https://archive.org/details/ilanguageintrodu00dani). Oxford University
Press. ISBN 978-0-19-953420-3.
Lepore, Ernest and Barry C. Smith (eds). (2006). The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of
Language (https://archive.today/20130114053128/http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-925941-
0). Oxford University Press.
Lycan, W. G. (2008). Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction (https://books.g
oogle.com/books?id=j94wa55sCU8C). New York, Routledge.
 Miller, James. (1999). PEN-L message, Bad writing (https://web.archive.org/web/200511121
34830/http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pen-l/1999m12.1/msg00185.htm).
Searle, John (2007). Philosophy of Language (https://web.archive.org/web/2012030700412
2/http://www.revel.inf.br/site2007/_pdf/8/entrevistas/revel_8_interview_john_searle.pdf): an
interview with John Searle.
Stainton, Robert J. (1996). Philosophical Perspectives on Language (https://archive.org/deta
ils/philosophicalper0000stai). Peterborough, Ont., Broadview Press.
Tarski, Alfred. (1944). "The Semantical Conception of Truth (http://www.ditext.com/tarski/tars
ki.html)".
Turri, John. (2016). Knowledge and the Norm of Assertion: An Essay in Philosophical
Science (http://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/397/knowledge-and-the-norm-of-asse
rtion--an-essay-in-philosophical-science/42469331bb1d787aa245c5b76c49762d). Open
Book Publishers. doi:10.11647/OBP.0083 (https://doi.org/10.11647%2FOBP.0083).
ISBN 978-1-78374-183-0.
Eco, Umberto. Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. Indiana University Press, 1986,
ISBN 0253203988, ISBN 9780253203984.

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