Philosophy of language
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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 creation, language understanding, truth, thought and experience (to the extent that both are linguistic), communication, interpretation, and translation.
At heart, the discipline is concerned with five fundamental issues.
- How are sentences composed into a meaningful whole, and what are the meanings of the parts of sentences?
- What is the nature of meaning? (What exactly is a meaning?)
- What do we do with language? (How do we use it socially? What is the purpose of language?)
- How does language relate to the mind, both of the speaker and the interpreter?
- How does language relate to the world?
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Overview
Philosophers of language are not much concerned with what individual words or sentences mean. The nearest dictionary or encyclopedia may solve the problem of the meaning of words, and to speak a language correctly is generally to know what most sentences mean. What is more interesting for philosophers is the question of what it means for an expression to mean something. Why do expressions have the meanings they have? Which expressions have the same meaning as other expressions, and why? How can these meanings be known? And the best, and simplest, question might be, "what does the word 'meaning' mean?"
In a similar vein, philosophers wonder about the relationship between meaning and truth. Philosophers tend to be less concerned with which sentences are actually true, and more with what kinds of meanings can be true or false. Some examples of questions a truth-oriented philosopher of language might ask include: Can meaningless sentences be true or false? What about sentences about things that don't exist? Is it sentences that are true or false, or is it the usage of sentences?
Language, how things 'mean' something, and truth are important not just because they are used in everyday life; language shapes human development, from earliest childhood and continuing to death. Knowledge itself may be intertwined with language. Notions of self, experience, and existence may depend entirely on how language is used and what is learned through it.
The topic of learning language leads to all kinds of interesting questions. Is it possible to have any thoughts without having a language? What kinds of thoughts need a language to happen? How much does language influence knowledge of the world and how one acts in it? Can anyone reason at all without using language?
The philosophy of language is important because, for all of the above reasons, language is important, and language is important because it is inseparable from how one thinks and lives. People in general have a set of vital concepts which are connected with signs and symbols, including all words (symbols): "object," "love," "good," "God," "masculine," "feminine," "art," "government," and so on. By incorporating "meaning," everyone has shaped (or has had shaped for us) a view of the universe and how they have "meaning" within it.
Set for the task, many philosophical discussions of language begin by clarifying terminology. Some philosophers -- for instance some semiotic outlooks, and some works by linguist Noam Chomsky -- worry that the term "language" is too vague. Entire systems have been developed to clarify the field.
History
The inquiry into language stretches back to the beginnings of western philosophy with Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics.
Plato argued in the dialogue Cratylus that there was a natural correctness to names. To do this, he pointed out that compound words and phrases have a range of correctness. For example, it is obviously wrong to say that the term "houseboat" is any good when referring to, say, a cat, because cats have nothing to do with houses or boats. He also argued that primitive names (or morphemes) also had a natural correctness, because each phoneme represented basic ideas or sentiments. For example, the letter and sound of "l" for Plato represented the idea of softness. However, by the end of the Cratylus, he had admitted that some social conventions were also involved, and that there were faults in the idea that phonemes had individual meanings. (A link to the full text of the Cratylus can be found here, courtesy of M.I.T.)
Aristotle concerned himself with the issues of logic, categories, and meaning creation. He separated all things into notions 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 is called a theory of nominalism (see the section below for more details).
Medieval philosophers also had some interest in the subject -- for many of them, the interest was provoked by a dependence upon their job of translating Greek texts. Of particular interest is the work of Peter Abelard, noteworthy for his remarkable anticipation of modern ideas of language.
Many modern western philosophers such as Umberto Eco, Ferdinand de Saussure, J.L. Austin, J. R. Searle, Leibniz, John Locke, Vico, Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Gottfried Herder, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Charles Peirce, Friedrich Nietzsche and Ludwig Wittgenstein also saw the field as important.
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. The philosophy of language was so pervasive that for a time, in analytic philosophy circles, philosophy as a whole was understood to be a matter of mere philosophy of language. In the 20th century, "language" became an even more central 'theme' within the most diverse traditions of philosophy. The phrase "the linguistic turn", was used to describe the noteworthy emphasis that modern-day philosophers put upon language.
Major problems and sub-fields
Composition and parts
A major question in the field - perhaps the single most important question for formalist and structuralist thinkers - is, "how does the meaning of a sentence emerge out of its parts?"
Principle of compositionality
Much about composition of sentences is addressed in the work of linguistics of syntax.
More logic-oriented semantics tend to look towards the principle of compositionality in order 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 (words) along with an understanding of its structure.
Problem of universals and composition
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One debate that has captured the interest of many philosophers is the debate over the meaning of universals. One might ask, for example, "when people say the word, "rocks", what do they mean?" Two general answers have emerged to this question. Some have said that the expression stands for some real entity out in the world called "rocks". Others have said that it stands for some collection of particular rocks that we put into a common category. The former position has been called philosophical realism, and the latter has been called nominalism.
From the radical 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 together in some way or overlap one another. Plato's theory of forms was an instance of this.
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". A property is a characteristic of the thing.
Still another perspective considers "man" to be the product of a propositional function. A propositional function is an operation of language that takes an entity (Socrates) and outputs a proposition. In other words, a propositional function is like an algorithm. The meaning of man is whatever takes the entity, "Socrates", and turns it into the statement, "Socrates is a man".
The nature of meaning
- Main article: Meaning (linguistic).
The answer to the question, "What is the meaning of meaning?", is not immediately obvious. One section of philosophy of language tries to answer this very question.
Types of meaning
Geoffrey Leech posited that there are two essentially different types of linguistic meaning: conceptual and associative.
The conceptual meanings of an expression have to do with the definitions of words themselves, and the features of those definitions. This kind of meaning is treated by using a technique called the semantic feature analysis. The conceptual meaning of an expression inevitably involves both definition (also called "connotation" and "intension" in the literature) and extension (also called "denotation").
The associative meaning of an expression has to do with individual mental understandings of the speaker. They, in turn, can be broken up into six sub-types: connotative, collocative, social, affective, reflected and thematic (Mwihaki 2004).
Vagueness
One issue that has bothered philosophers of language and logic is the problem of the vagueness of words. Often, meanings expressed by the speaker are not as explicit as the listener would like them to be. The consequences of vagueness can be disastrous to classical logic because they give rise to the Sorites paradox.
Theories of meaning
There have been at least four different kinds of attempts at explaining what a linguistic "meaning" is:
- Idea theories of meaning, which emphasize that meanings are thoughts provoked by signs;
- Truth-conditional theories, which hold a meaning to be the conditions under which it may be true or false;
- Meaning as usage, which understands meaning to involve or be related to speech acts;
- Reference theories of meaning, which view meaning to be equivalent to those things in the world that are actually connected to signs.
Other theories exist to discuss non-linguistic meaning (i.e., meaning as conveyed by body language, meanings as consequences, etc.)
Language and the world
Investigations into how language interacts with the world are called "theories of reference".
- Gottlob Frege was an advocate of a mediated reference theory, which appealed to the sense of a referent (the sense being the way the referent is presented).
- By contrast, in response to British idealism, Bertrand Russell sought to scrap all "unreal" things from language. To do this, he created a direct reference theory.
Frege's mediated reference theory seems to differ from Russell's direct reference theory in that the former seems to leave room for senses, while the latter does not. This is problematic because it seemingly fails to recognize the difference in meaning between two statements that have the same referent but have different meanings. For example, "The President of the United States in 2004" and "George W. Bush" refer to the same thing, but in one case the person is presented in a certain light - as the President - while in the other they are presented just by name. There has to be something in between that accounts for this meaningful difference.
Mind and language
Innateness and learning
Some of the major issues in the philosophy of language that deal with the mind are paralleled by modern psycholinguistics. Some important questions: how much of language is innate? Is language acquisition a special faculty in the mind? What's the connection between thought and language?
There are three general perspectives on the issue of language learning:
- The behaviorist perspective, which dictates that not only is the solid bulk of language learned, but it is learned via conditioning;
- The hypothesis testing perspective, which states that syntactic rules and meanings are triangulated by a child using hypotheses, in much the same way that any learning occurs;
- The innatist perspective, which states that at least some of the syntactic settings are innate and hardwired.
There are varying notions of the structure of the brain when it comes to language, as well:
- Connectionist models, which emphasize the idea that a person's lexicon and their thoughts operate in a kind of network;
- Nativist models, which assert that there are specialized devices in the brain that are dedicated to language acquisition;
- Computation models, which emphasize the work done related to logic-like processing of the mind;
- Emergentist models, which focus upon the notion that natural faculties are a complex system that emerge out of simpler biological parts;
- Reductionist models
Language and thought
Another important question relating to language and the mind is, to what extent does language influence thought (and vice-versa)? There have been a number of different perspectives on this issue, ranging across a number of suggestions.
For example, 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 "1984"). To a lesser extent, issues in the philosophy of rhetoric (including the notion of framing of debate) suggest the influence of language upon thought.
There is also some controversy about the very meaning of a "thought". Gottlob Frege believed that thought occupied a "third realm", that was neither psychological nor a part of the universe, and believed that his Begriffsschrift calculus was a theory of thought. By contrast, Wittgenstein - in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus - considered thought to be a "significant proposition".
Social interaction and language
Metasemantics is a term of art used to describe all those fields that examine the social conditions that give rise to 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 examples of metasemantic fields.
Meaning and social structures
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.
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Rhetoric and discourse analysis
Rhetoric is the study of the particular words that people use in order to achieve the proper emotional and rational effect in the listener, be it to persuade, provoke, endear, teach, etc. Some offshoots include:
- The examination of propaganda and didacticism;
- The examination of the purposes of swearing and pejoratives (especially how it influences the behavior of others, and defines relationships);
- The effects of gendered language;
- Linguistic transparency, or speaking in an accessible manner, inspired by George Orwell's essay, Politics and the English Language;
- Performative utterances and the various tasks that language can perform (called "speech acts"), pioneered by J.L. Austin's book, How to Do Things With Words.
- The logical concept of the domain of discourse.
Literary theory
Literary theory is a discipline that overlaps with the philosophy of language. It emphasizes the methods that readers and critics use in understanding a text. This field, being an outgrowth of the study of how to properly interpret messages, is closely tied to the ancient discipline of hermeneutics.
[[Category:{{{1|}}} articles with sections needing expansion]]Miscellaneous
In 1950s, an artificial language loglan was invented that is based on first order predicate logic.
Important theorists
Among the most important theorists in the philosophy of language are:
- Plato and Aristotle - classical philosophers
- Ferdinand de Saussure - founder of linguistic Structuralism
- John Stuart Mill - influential in theories of reference
- Ludwig Wittgenstein - creator of the "meaning is use" dictum
- Ernst Cassirer - theory of language as part of a general theory of symbolic forms
- Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger - philosophers tied to the Humboldtian tradition
- Valentin Voloshinov, Rossi-Landi - Marxist theoreticians of language
- Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida - Post-structuralist figures
- Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler - feminist theoreticians of language
- Mikhail Bakhtin, Maurice Blanchot, Paul de Man - Theoreticians of literature whose work is of philosophical relevance
- Charles Peirce, Umberto Eco - advocates of philosophically oriented forms of semiotics
- Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Saul Kripke, Richard Montague - analytical philosophers of language rooted in logic-like analysis of language
- Noam Chomsky and Jerry Fodor - syntactic, computational, and knowledge-oriented perspectives
- Keith Donnellan, Jürgen Habermas, J.L. Austin, H. P. Grice, and John Searle - use-oriented theorists
Important topics and terms
- Fields of interest
- Parts of speech
- Speaker / (or "Encoder")
- Interpreter / (or "Decoder")
- Intentionality
- Signs and Phonemes
- Tone
- Truth conditions (and / or satisfaction conditions)
- Meaning
- Ideas
- Sense and reference
- Speech acts
- Linguistic Context (see also deixis)
- Linguistic community
- Essential aspects of meaning
- Concepts
- Categories, sets, classes, and Natural kinds
- Types and tokens
- Genus and Species
- Connotation and denotation (intension and extension)
- Statements and propositions
- Subject and predicate
- Synonyms, antonyms, and all other -onyms
- Essential aspects of reference
- Linguistic phenomena
- Demonstratives and Indexicals
- Descriptions, esp. Definite descriptions
- Proper names
- Metaphor
- "Is" (of identity, predication, existence)
- Sentences (Commandative, Indicative, and Performative)
References
- Collins, John. (2001). http://www.sorites.org/Issue_13/collins.htm
- Gauker, Christopher. Zero Tolerance for Pragmatics. http://asweb.artsci.uc.edu/philosophy/gauker/ZeroTolerance.pdf
- Greenberg, Mark and Harman, Gilbert. (2005). Conceptual Role Semantics. http://www.princeton.edu/~harman/Papers/CRS.pdf
- Hale, B. and Crispin Wright, Ed. (1999). Blackwell Companions To Philosophy. Malden, Massachusetts, Blackwell Publishers.
- Lepore, Ernest and Barry C. Smith (eds). (2006). The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language. Oxford University Press.
- Lycan, W. G. (2000). Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction. New York, Routledge.
- Miller, James. (1999). http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pen-l/1999m12.1/msg00185.htm
- Mwihaki, Alice. (2004). http://www.ifeas.uni-mainz.de/SwaFo/SF11Mwihaki.pdf
- Stainton, Robert J. (1996). Philosophical perspectives on language. Peterborough, Ont., Broadview Press.
- Stanley, Jason. (2006). Philosophy of Language in the Twentieth Century. Forthcoming in the Routledge Guide to Twentieth Century Philosophy.
- Tarski, Alfred. (1944). The Semantical Conception of Truth. http://www.ditext.com/tarski/tarski.html
- Glossary of Linguistic terms. http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/contents.htm
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