Philosophy of language, or sometimes linguistic philosophy, is the study of the nature of language. It investigates the relationship between language, language users, and the world. Investigations may include inquiry into the nature of meaning, indexicality, 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.
History
Ancient philosophy In the West, inquiry into language stretches back to the 5th century BC with philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. Linguistic speculation predated systematic descriptions of grammar which emerged in India and in Greece.
In the dialogue Cratylus, Plato considers the question of whether the names of things are determined by convention or by nature. He criticizes conventionalism as leading to the bizarre consequence that, as anything can be conventionally denominated by any name, there can hence be neither fitting, or correct, names, nor unfitting or incorrect ones—yet it seems, intuitively, that such "incorrect" names are indeed possible: e.g., if Theophilus means "god-beloved", it seems inappropriate for anyone who is not, in fact, very pious at all.Cratylus 394e 1–6 Plato argues, further, that primitive (as opposed to derived) names have a natural correctness, because each phoneme represents basic ideas or sentiments; for example, the letter and its sound represent—for Plato—the idea of smoothness or softness.Cratylus 434c 1–5 However, by the end of Cratylus, he seems to admit that some social conventions are also involved, and that the idea that phonemes have individual meanings is not without flaw. Also available via Project Gutenberg. 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. 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. 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.
Classical Indian philosophy saw the primary debates occurring between the Nyāya school, Mīmāṃsā philosophy, and Vyākaraṇa (grammar) traditions regarding linguistic meaning. The Mīmāṃsā school developed theories on how sentences carry meaning, which is expressed through the ideas of Kumārila Bhaṭṭa who proposed abhihitānvayavāda (meaning arising from the association of expressed words) and Prabhākara who proposed anvitābhidhānavāda (words conveying meaning only in relation to a sentence's unified action). In contrast, the 5th-century grammarian Bhartṛhari puts forth a holistic model in his treatise, the Vākyapadīya, known as akhaṇḍavākyasphoṭa. In this view, words and sounds do not carry the meaning in and of themselves. It is the sentences that are the units of meaning which can be realized through an intuitive cognition known as pratibhā. He also linked language to metaphysics through his concept of Śabdādvaita, asserting that cognition is fundamentally structured by language (Śabda-Brahman).
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 (though this has been disputed), Peter Abelard anticipated the modern theories of reference. Also, William of Ockham's Summa Logicae brought forward one of the first serious proposals for codifying a mental language.Chalmers, D. (1999) "Is there Synonymy in Occam's Mental Language?". Published in The Cambridge Companion to Ockham, edited by Paul Vincent Spade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
The scholastics of the high medieval period, such as Ockham and John Duns Scotus, considered logic to be a (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.Marconi, D. "Storia della Filosofia del Linguaggio". In L'Enciclopedia Garzantina della Filosofia. ed. Gianni Vattimo. Milan: Garzanti Editori. 1981. One of the major developments of the scholastics in this area was the doctrine of the .Kretzmann, N., Anthony Kenny & Jan Pinborg. (1982) Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The 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, metonym, and other figures of speech). A proper , in turn, can be either formal or material according to whether 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.
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 should 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:
Contemporary philosophy
Language began to play a central role in Western philosophy in the early 20th century. The phrase "linguistic turn" describes the noteworthy emphasis that contemporary philosophers put upon language during this time.
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. In continental philosophy, the foundational work in the field was Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale,David Kreps, Bergson, Complexity and Creative Emergence, Springer, 2015, p. 92. published posthumously in 1916. 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.
Searching to disrupt the philosophy of language embroiled in these postmodernist and post-structuralist deadlocks, American academic Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm has introduced hylosemiotics. Influenced by theory including pragmatism in the mode of William James combined with insight into plant and animal communication, hylosemiotics seeks to establish a panspecies approach to signs, their intention, and meaning. In other words, hylosemiotics is a movement to strip the philosophy of language of its anthropocentrism.
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.Grigoris Antoniou, John Slaney (eds.), Advanced Topics in Artificial Intelligence, Springer, 1998, p. 9. 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.Block, Ned. "Conceptual Role Semantics" (online). 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.Tarski, Alfred. (1944). "The Semantical Conception of Truth". PDF.Davidson, D. (2001) Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (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.Wittgenstein, L. (1958) Philosophical Investigations. Third edition. trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co. It is also associated with P. F. Strawson, John Searle, Robert Brandom, and others.Brandom, R. (1994) Making it Explicit. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 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.