What is Philosophy of Language?
During the last century, concern for language managed to infiltrate
almost every area of philosophy. This pervasive concern for language
often makes it difficult to distinguish philosophy of language from
general philosophy. In areas relating the philosophy of mind, the
distinction is especially difficult to draw, because many philosophers
who take the analogy between thinking and speaking seriously have
blurred the distinction between language and mind.
As a separate, independent subfield of philosophy, philosophy of
language is concerned with foundational issues relating to
language. These can include very general questions like the
following ones.
- What is the difference between artificial and human languages,
and how can we account for phenomena that seem to
be most characteristic of human language, such as
context-dependence, vagueness, and presupposition.
- How can we account for meanings as we find them in
human languages, and what is the relationship between
meaning and use?
- What is it to know a language?
- Does knowing and using a language commit a speaker to any
sort of world-view, and if so, what is this world-view
like?
But these very general questions can lead to much more specific ones,
such as the questions about reference and truth and the relationship
of these to meaning that have been so central in the philosophy of the
last thirty years.
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Why is language important for philosophy?
Naturally, preoccupation with language has made philosophers
intensely aware of issues having to do with the structure and usage of
language. Language is, after all, the most distinctive characteristic
of the human species, and its study can provide many insights that are
relevant to the traditional concerns of philosophers.
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Why is Linguistics important for philosophy of language?
As you investigate the very general questions that tend to
initiate philosophical inquiry into language, you very soon find
yourself led to more specific questions that can't be addressed
without taking into account the structure and use of actual languages.
For instance, the question of what sort of world-view a language may
commit a speaker to can lead to a study of the sorts of noun phrases
that occur in human languages, and their meaning, or to a study of
how human languages talk about time and change.
As soon as a philosophical question about language
becomes this specific, linguistic data and linguistic theories become
relevant, and can often yield new insights and suggest unexpected
avenues of philosophical exploration.
A benefit of this process is that it can lead to new
philosophical questions and new ways to enrich the study of old
philosophical questions. In fact, the systematic use of linguistic
insights seems to be one of the most consistently successful ways
of arriving at philosophical insights that are genuinely new.
One way to track the fascinating and influential interactions
between philosophy and linguistics is to look at the history of the
journal Philosophy and Linguistics, which for over twenty-five
years has contributed to research at the interection of the two
fields. A bibliography of the first twenty-five years of the journal
can be found at this location.
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