Philosophers generally take language to be fundamental to our definition of what constitutes the human and to our understanding of the world and our relation to it. Because of this, philosophical concern with and accounts of language date back to ancient times. Modern Philosophy of Language is generally agreed to begin with the work of the German logician and philosopher, Gottlob Frege (1848-1925) and is primarily concerned with giving a rigorous analysis of language in an attempt to answer questions like:
- What makes marks and noises meaningful?
- What is the relationship between meaning and truth-value?
- What is the relationship between language and reality?
- What is the relationship between language and understanding?
- How ought we to understand the role played by rules in language?
There are three major aspects of language that are of philosophical interest:
- Syntax: This is the study of the structural aspects of language and how the rules of a language govern the construction of grammatically correct expressions. This aspect of language is now mainly a subject of inquiry in Linguistics (e.g. in the work of Noam Chomsky).
- Semantics: This is broadly the study of meaning and the generation of meaning in language. Work dealing with this aspect of language ranges from the Classical semantics of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, to the causal theories of Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam and the truth-conditional semantics of Donald Davidson.
- Pragmatics: This focuses on the use of linguistic expressions, the relationship between use and meaning and the relationship between language and language users. This aspect of language is addressed in the Speech Act Theory of J L Austin, H Paul Grice’s work, the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Robert Brandom’s work on assertion.
A better understanding of language can potentially be applied in a number of fields, including metaphysics, linguistics, literary theory and semiotics.
Key texts:
Martinich, A P, The Philosophy of Language, Third Edition (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
Collin, Finn and Finn Guldman, Meaning, Use and Truth: Introducing the Philosophy of Language (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005)
Lycan, William, Philosophy of Language: a contemporary introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 2000)
Summary written by
Michaela Baker
Department of Philosophy
Macquarie University
