Ordinary language philosophy is a philosophical school that approaches traditional philosophical problems as rooted in misunderstandings philosophers develop by distorting or forgetting what words actually mean in everyday use.

This approach typically involves eschewing philosophical "theories" in favour of close attention to the details of the use of everyday, "ordinary" language. Sometimes called "Oxford philosophy", it is generally associated with the work of a number of mid-century Oxford professors: mainly J.L. Austin, but also Gilbert Ryle, H.L.A. Hart, and Peter Strawson. The later Ludwig Wittgenstein is ordinary language philosophy's most celebrated proponent outside the Oxford circle. Second generation figures include Stanley Cavell and John Searle.

The Wittgenstein scholar A. C. Grayling (Wittgenstein, Oxford University Press, (Oxford), 1988, p. 114) is certain that, despite the fact that Wittgenstein’s work might have played some "second or third-hand [part in the promotion of] the philosophical concern for language which was dominant in the mid-century", neither Gilbert Ryle nor any of those in the so-called "ordinary language philosophy" school that is chiefly associated with J. L. Austin were Wittgensteinians. More significantly, Grayling asserts that "most of them were largely unaffected by Wittgenstein’s later ideas, and some were actively hostile to them".

The name comes from the contrast between this approach and earlier views of the role of language in solving philosophical problems that had been dominant in analytic philosophy, now sometimes called ideal language philosophy. Ordinary language philosophy was a major philosophic school between 1930 and 1970, and remains an important force in philosophy today.

History[link]

Part of a series on
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Early Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein
Picture theory of language Truth tables · Truth conditions Truth functions · States of affairs Logical necessity
Later Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein
Meaning is use · Language-games Private language argument Family resemblance · Rule following Forms of life · Grammar Anti-skepticism Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics
Movements
Analytic philosophy · Linguistic turn Ideal language philosophy Logical atomism · Logical positivism Ordinary language philosophy Wittgensteinian fideism · Quietism
Works
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Some Remarks on Logical Form Blue and Brown Books · Philosophical Remarks Philosophical Investigations On Certainty · Culture and Value Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics Zettel · Remarks on Colour Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief
People
Bertrand Russell · G.E. Moore John Maynard Keynes · Paul Engelmann Friedrich Waismann · Moritz Schlick Rudolf Carnap · Francis Skinner Frank Ramsey · Vienna Circle G.E.M. Anscombe · Norman Malcolm Rush Rhees · Peter Winch Peter Geach · G.H. von Wright
Interpreters
Barry Stroud · Cora Diamond Peter Hacker · Terry Eagleton Stephen Toulmin · Saul Kripke Anthony Kenny · Crispin Wright Warren Goldfarb · James F. Conant Gordon Baker · Stanley Cavell D.Z. Phillips · Colin McGinn Jaakko Hintikka · Oswald Hanfling A.C. Grayling · Rupert Read
Other
Apostles · Moral Sciences Club Stonborough House
v t e

Early analytic philosophy had a less positive view of ordinary language. Bertrand Russell tended to dismiss language as being of little philosophical significance, and ordinary language as just being too confused to help solve metaphysical and epistemological problems. Frege, the Vienna Circle (especially Rudolf Carnap), the young Wittgenstein, and W.V. Quine, all attempted to improve upon it, in particular using the resources of modern logic. Wittgenstein's view in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus more or less agreed with Russell's that language ought to be reformulated so as to be unambiguous, so as to accurately represent the world, so that we could better deal with the questions of philosophy.

By contrast, Wittgenstein would later describe his task as bringing "words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use".^[1] The sea of change brought on by his unpublished work in the 1930s centered largely on the idea that there is nothing wrong with ordinary language as it stands, and that many traditional philosophical problems were only illusions brought on by misunderstandings about language and related subjects. The former idea led to rejecting the approaches of earlier analytic philosophy – arguably, of any earlier philosophy – and the latter led to replacing them with the careful attention to language in its normal use, in order to "dissolve" the appearance of philosophical problems, rather than attempt to solve them. At its inception, ordinary language philosophy (also called linguistic philosophy) had been taken as either an extension of or as an alternative to analytic philosophy. Now that the term "analytic philosophy" has a more standardized meaning, ordinary language philosophy is viewed as a stage of the analytic tradition that followed logical positivism and that preceded the yet-to-be-named stage analytic philosophy continues in today.^{[citation needed]}.

Ordinary language analysis largely flourished and developed at Oxford in the 1940s, under Austin and Gilbert Ryle, and was quite widespread for a time before declining rapidly in popularity in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is now not uncommon to hear that "ordinary language philosophy is dead"^{[citation needed]}. Wittgenstein is perhaps the only one among the major figures of linguistic philosophy to retain anything like the reputation he had at that time. On the other hand, the attention to language remains one of the most important techniques in contemporary analytic thought, and many of the effects of ordinary language philosophy can still be felt across many academic disciplines.

Central ideas[link]

Wittgenstein held that the meanings of words reside in their ordinary uses and that this is why philosophers trip over words taken in abstraction. From England came the idea that philosophy had gotten into trouble by trying to understand words outside of the context of their use in ordinary language (cf. contextualism).

For example: What is reality? Philosophers have treated it as a noun denoting something that has certain properties. For thousands of years, they have debated those properties. Ordinary language philosophy instead looks at how we use the word "reality" in everyday language. In some instances, people will say, "It may seem that X is the case, but in reality, Y is the case". This expression is not used to mean that there is some special dimension of being where Y is true although X is true in our dimension. What it really means is, "X seemed right, but appearances were misleading in some way. Now I'm about to tell you the truth: Y". That is, the meaning of "in reality" is a bit like "however". And the phrase, "The reality of the matter is ..." serves a similar function — to set the listener's expectations. Further, when we talk about a "real gun", we aren't making a metaphysical statement about the nature of reality; we are merely opposing this gun to a toy gun, pretend gun, imaginary gun, etc.

The controversy really begins when ordinary language philosophers apply the same leveling tendency to questions such as What is Truth? or What is Consciousness?. Philosophers in this school would insist that we cannot assume that (for example) 'Truth' 'is' a 'thing' (in the same sense that tables and chairs are 'things'), which the word 'truth' represents. Instead, we must look at the differing ways in which the words 'truth' and 'conscious' actually function in ordinary language. We may well discover, after investigation, that there is no single entity to which the word 'truth' corresponds, something Wittgenstein attempts to get across via his concept of a 'family resemblance' (cf. Philosophical Investigations). Therefore ordinary language philosophers tend to be anti-essentialist. Of course, this was and is a very controversial viewpoint. Anti-essentialism and the linguistic philosophy associated with it are often important to contemporary accounts of feminism, Marxism, and other social philosophies that are critical of the injustice of the status quo. The essentialist 'Truth' as 'thing' is argued to be closely related to projects of domination, where the denial of alternate truths is understood to be a denial of alternate forms of living. Similar arguments sometimes involve ordinary language philosophy with other anti-essentialist movements like post-structuralism. However, strictly speaking, this is not a position derived from Wittgenstein, as it still involves 'misuse' (ungrammatical use) of the term "truth" in reference to "alternate truths".

References[link]

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (May 2012)

Further reading[link]

Primary sources[link]

• Austin, J. L. How to do things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.
• -----. "A Plea for Excuses". In Austin, Philosophical Papers, ed. J. O. Urmson & G. J. Warnock. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1961.
• -----. Sense and Sensibilia, ed. G. J. Warnock. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1962.
• Hanfling, Oswald. Philosophy and Ordinary Language.
• Hart, H.L.A. "The Ascription of Responsibility and Rights". Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society1949.
• Ryle, Gilbert. The Concept of Mind. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965.
• -----. Dilemmas.
• Strawson, P.F.. Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963.
• -----. "On Referring". Reprinted in Meaning and Reference, ed. A.W. Moore. Oxford, Oxford University Press: 1993.

John Wisdom, _Other Minds_ 1952, _Philosophy & PsychoAnalysis_ 1953, _ Paradox and Discovery, 1965

• Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Blue and Brown Books
• -----.Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan, 1953.

Secondary sources[link]

• Passmore, John. A Hundred Years of Philosophy, revised edition. New York: Basic Books, 1966. See chapter 18, "Wittgenstein and Ordinary Language Philosophy".
• Soames, Scott. Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century: Volume Two, The Age of Meaning. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2005.
• Ordinary Language Philosophy: A Reappraisal – edited by Anthony Coleman & Ivan Welty.

External links[link]

• Ordinary language philosophy at the Open Directory Project

Philosophy of language is the reasoned inquiry into the nature, origins, and usage of language. As a topic, the philosophy of language for analytic philosophers is concerned with four central problems: the nature of meaning, language use, language cognition, and the relationship between language and reality. For continental philosophers, however, the philosophy of language tends to be dealt with, not as a separate topic, but as a part of logic. (See the section "Language and continental philosophy" below.)

First, philosophers of language inquire into the nature of meaning, and seek to explain what it means to "mean" something. Topics in that vein include the nature of synonymy, the origins of meaning itself, and how any meaning can ever really be known. Another project under this heading of special interest to analytic philosophers of language is the investigation into the manner in which sentences are composed into a meaningful whole out of the meaning of its parts.

Second, they would like to understand what speakers and listeners do with language in communication, and how it is used socially. Specific interests may include the topics of language learning, language creation, and speech acts.

Third, they would like to know how language relates to the minds of both the speaker and the interpreter. Of specific interest is the grounds for successful translation of words into other words.

Finally, they investigate how language and meaning relate to truth and the world. Philosophers tend to be less concerned with which sentences are actually true, and more with 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.

History[link]

Antiquity[link]

Linguistic speculation in India is attested since the Vedic period (roughly 1500 BC) with the deification of vāk, "speech". In the West, inquiry into language stretches back to the 5th century BC with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics.^[1] Both in India and in Greece, linguistic speculation predates the emergence of grammatical traditions of systematic description of language, which emerged around the 7th century BC in India (see Yāska), and around the 3rd century BC in Greece (see Rhianus).

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 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.^[2]

Aristotle concerned himself with the issues of logic, categories, and meaning creation. 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.^[3] 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 Stoic philosophers 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 lektón of a sentence is what we would now call its proposition. Only propositions were considered "truth-bearers" or "truth-vehicles" (i.e., they could be called 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.^[4]

Middle Ages[link]

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 ideas of sense and reference.^[5] Also, William of Ockham's Summa Logicae brought forward one of the first serious proposals for codifying a mental language.^[6]

The scholastics of the high medieval period, such as Occam 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.^[7] One of the major developments of the scholastics in this area was the doctrine of the suppositio.^[8] 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.^[8]

There is a tradition called speculative grammar which existed from the 11th to the 13th century. Leading scholars included, among others, Martin of Dace and Thomas of Erfurth.

Early modern period[link]

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 argues 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.^[9]

Hence, language began to play a central role in Western philosophy in the late 19th century, especially with Port Royal in France, and in the English-speaking world and other parts of Europe. The foundational work was Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale, published posthumously in 1916.

The philosophy of language then 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 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.^[7]

Major topics and sub-fields[link]

Composition and parts[link]

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 does the meaning of a sentence emerge out of 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).^[10]

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. Take, for a moment, the sentence "The horse is red". We may consider "the horse" 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."^[11]

Linguists have developed at least two general methods of 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, on the other hand, focus upon the role of the meaning of the words and how those meanings combine to provide insight onto the genesis of semantic facts.

Nature of meaning[link]

Generally speaking, there have been at least six distinctive explanations of what a linguistic "meaning" is. Each has been associated with its own body of literature.

1. Idea theories of meaning, most commonly associated with the British empiricist tradition of Locke, Berkeley and Hume, claim that meanings are purely mental contents provoked by signs.^[12] 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.^[13]
2. Truth-conditional theories hold 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.^[14][15]
3. Theories of language use, for example theories by 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.^[16] It is also associated with P. F. Strawson, John Searle, Robert Brandom, and others.^[17]
4. Constructivist theories of language are connected to the revolutionary idea claiming that speech is not only passively describing a given reality, but it can change the (social) reality it is describing through speech acts, which for linguistics was as revolutionary discovery as for physics was the discovery that measurement itself can change the measured reality itself. Speech act theory was developed by J. L. Austin, although other previous thinkers have had similar ideas.
5. Reference theories of meaning, also known collectively as semantic externalism, view meaning to be equivalent to those things in the world that are actually connected to signs. 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.^[18][19][20]
6. Verificationist theories of meaning are 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.^[21] 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.^[22]
7. A pragmatist theory of meaning is 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.^[22]

Other theories exist to discuss non-linguistic meaning (i.e., meaning as conveyed by body language, meanings as consequences, etc.)^[23]

References[link]

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 meaning. 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.^[24]

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.^[25][26] He viewed proper names of the sort described above as "abbreviated definite descriptions". Hence Barack H. Obama may be an abbreviation for "the current President of the United States and husband of Michelle Obama". 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.^[27][28]

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.^[20]

Mind and language[link]

Innateness and learning[link]

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 are How much of language is innate? Is language acquisition a special faculty in the mind? What is the connection 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.^[29][30]

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.^[31] Nativist models assert that there are specialized devices in the brain that are dedicated to language acquisition.^[30] Computation models emphasize the notion of a representational language of thought and the logic-like, computational processing that the mind performs over them.^[32] Emergentist models focus on the notion that natural faculties are a complex system that emerge out of simpler biological parts. Reductionist models attempt to explain higher-level mental processes in terms of the basic low-level neurophysiological activity of the brain.^[33]

Language and thought[link]

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).^[34] In other words, language was analytically prior to thought. Philosopher Michael Dummett is also a proponent of the "language-first" viewpoint.^[35]

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.^[35] 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.^[36] 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.^[36] 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.^[37] To an extent, the theoretical underpinnings to cognitive semantics (including the notion of semantic framing) suggest the influence of language upon thought.^[38] However, the same tradition views meaning and grammar as a function of conceptualization, making it difficult to assess in any straightfoward way.

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

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.^[40] In another study, English speakers watched the video of Janet Jackson's infamous "wardrobe malfunction", accompanied by one of two written reports. The reports were identical except in the last sentence where one used the agentive phrase "ripped the costume" while the other said "the costume ripped." The people who read "ripped the costume" blamed Justin Timberlake more.^{[citation needed]}

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.^[41]

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.^[42]

There are also studies in which people were asked to look at a series of images of imaginary aliens. 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 experiment 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.^[43]

Social interaction and language[link]

A common claim is that language is governed by social conventions. Questions inevitably arise on surrounding topics. One question is, "What exactly is a convention, and how do we study it?", and second, "To what extent do 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.^[35]

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 "meta-semantics". Metasemantics is a term used by philosopher of language Robert Stainton to describe all those fields that attempt to explain how semantic facts arise.^[11] 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 meta-semantic.

Not surprisingly, 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.^[44] 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 behavior 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 unsurprisingly closely tied to the ancient discipline of hermeneutics.

Language and continental philosophy[link]

In continental philosophy, language is not studied as a separate discipline, as it is in analytic philosophy. Rather, it is an inextricable part of many other areas of thought, such as phenomenology, semiotics, hermeneutics, Heideggerean ontology, existentialism, structuralism, deconstruction and critical theory. The idea of language is often related to that of logic in its Greek sense as "Logos", meaning discourse or dialectic. Language and concepts are also seen as having been formed by history and politics, or even by historical philosophy itself.

The field of hermeneutics, and the theory of interpretation in general, has played a significant role in 20th century continental philosophy of language and ontology beginning with Martin Heidegger. Heidegger combines phenomenology with the hermeneutics of Wilhelm Dilthey. Heidegger believed language was one of the most important concepts for Dasein: "Language is the house of being, which is propriated by being and pervaded by being."^[45] However, Heidegger believed that language today is worn out because of overuse of important words, and would be inadequate for in-depth study of Being (Sein). For example, Sein (being), the word itself, is saturated with multiple meanings. Thus, he invented new vocabulary and linguistic styles, based on Ancient Greek and Germanic etymological word relations, to disambiguate commonly used words. He avoid words like consciousness, ego, human, nature, etc. and instead talks holistically of Being-in-the-world, Dasein.

With such new concepts as Being-in-the-world, Heidegger constructs his theory of language, centered on speech. He believed speech (talking, listening, silence) was the most essential and pure form of language. Heidegger claims writing is only a supplement to speech, because even a reader constructs or contributes one's own "talk" while reading. The most important feature of language is its projectivity, the idea that language is prior to human speech. This means that when one is "thrown" into the world, his existence is characterized from the beginning by a certain pre-comprehension of the world. However, it is only after naming, or "articulation of intelligibility", can one have primary access to Dasein and Being-in-the-World.^[46]

Hans-Georg Gadamer expanded on these ideas of Heidegger and proposed a complete hermeneutic ontology. In Truth and Method, Gadamer describes language as "the medium in which substantive understanding and agreement take place between two people."^[47] In addition, Gadamer claims that the world is linguistically constituted, and cannot exist apart from language. For example, monuments and statues cannot communicate without the aid of language. Gadamer also claims that every language constitutes a world-view, because the linguistic nature of the world frees each individual from an objective environment: "... the fact that we have a world at all depends upon [language] and presents itself in it. The world as world exists for man as for no other creature in the world."^[47]

Paul Ricœur, on the other hand, proposed a hermeneutics which, reconnecting with the original Greek sense of the term, emphasized the discovery of hidden meanings in the equivocal terms (or "symbols") of ordinary language. Other philosophers who have worked in this tradition include Luigi Pareyson and Jacques Derrida.^[48]

Semiotics is the study of the transmission, reception and meaning of signs and symbols in general. In this field, human language (both natural and artificial) is just one among many ways that humans (and other conscious beings) are able to communicate. It allows them to take advantage of and effectively manipulate the external world in order to create meaning for themselves and transmit this meaning to others. Every object, every person, every event, and every force communicates (or signifies) continuously. The ringing of a telephone for example, is the telephone. The smoke that I see on the horizon is the sign that there is a fire. The smoke signifies. The things of the world, in this vision, seem to be labeled precisely for intelligent beings who only need to interpret them in the way that humans do. Everything has meaning. True communication, including the use of human language, however, requires someone (a sender) who sends a message, or text, in some code to someone else (a receiver). Language is studied only insofar as it is one of these forms (the most sophisticated form) of communication. Some important figures in the history of semiotics, are Charles Sanders Peirce, Roland Barthes, and Roman Jakobson. In modern times, its best-known figures include Umberto Eco, A.J. Greimas, Louis Hjelmslev, and Tullio De Mauro.^[48] Investigations on signs in non-human communications are subject to biosemiotics, a field founded in the late 20th century by Thomas Sebeok and Thure von Uexkuell.

Major problems in philosophy of language[link]

Vagueness[link]

One issue that has bothered 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" make it seemingly impossible to say whether a predicate is true or false of them. Classic examples are "is tall" or "is bald", where it can't 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.^[49]

Problem of universals and composition[link]

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 is it 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 we happen to put into a common category. The former position has been called philosophical realism, and the latter nominalism.^[50]

The issue here can be explicated if we examine the proposition "Socrates is a Man".

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 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 radical 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.

Nature of language[link]

Many philosophical discussions of language begin by clarifying terminology. One item which has undergone significant scrutiny is the idea of language itself. Those philosophers who have set themselves to the task ask two important questions: "What is language in general?" and "What is a particular, individual language?"

Some semiotic outlooks have stressed that language is the mere manipulation and use of symbols in order to draw attention to signified content. If this were so, then humans would not be the sole possessors of language skills.^[48] On the other hand, many works by linguist Noam Chomsky have emphasized the role of syntax as a characteristic of any language.^[51]

More puzzling is the question of what it is that distinguishes one particular language from another. What is it that makes "English" English? What's the difference between Spanish and French? Chomsky has indicated that the search for what it means to be a language must begin with the study of the internal language of persons, or I-languages, which are based upon certain rules (or principles and parameters) which generate grammars. This view is supported in part by the conviction that there is no clear, general, and principled difference between one language and the next, and which may apply across the field of all languages. Other attempts, which he dubs E-languages, have tried to explain a language as usage within a specific speech community with a specific set of well-formed utterances in mind (markedly associated with linguists like Bloomfield).^[52]

Formal versus informal approaches[link]

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 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.^[53]

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.^[54]

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.^[55] Strawson argued that the truth-table semantics of the logical connectives (e.g., Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \land , Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \lor

and Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.):  \rightarrow 

) do not capture the meanings of their natural language counterparts ("and", "or" and "if-then").^[56] 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.^[17]

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.^[57]

Translation and Interpretation[link]

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 the reader to imagine a situation in which he is confronted with a previously undocumented, primitive tribe and must attempt to make sense of the utterances and gestures that its members make. This is the situation of radical translation.^[58]

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 primitive tribe's 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.^[58] The resulting view is called semantic holism.

Inspired by Quine's discussion, Donald Davidson extended the idea of radical translation to the interpretation of utterences 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 his mental states and attitudes.^[15]

Notes[link]

References[link]

1. Aglo, John "Norme et Symbole. Les Fondement philosophiques de l'obligation, L'Harmattan, Paris.
2. Aglo, John (2001), 'Les Fondements philosophiques de la morale dans une société à tradition orale, le système adanu, L'Harmattan, Paris.
3. Aglo, John (2003), 'La Vie et le Vivre-ensemble. Le Principe organisateur de la vie dans le système adanu, L'Harmattan, Paris.
4. Luca Corchia, La logica dei processi culturali. Jürgen Habermas tra filosofia e sociologia, Genova, Edizioni ECIG, 2010, ISBN 978-88-7544-195-1.

External links[link]

• Philosophy of Language, from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Sprachlogik short articles in the philosophies of logic and language
• Glossary of Linguistic terms
• What is I-language? - Chapter 1 of I-language: An Introduction to Linguistics as Cognitive Science.
• The London Philosophy Study Guide offers many suggestions on what to read, depending on the student's familiarity with the subject: Philosophy of Language
• Carnap, R., (1956). Meaning and Necessity: a Study in Semantics and Modal Logic. University of Chicago Press.
• Collins, John. (2001). http://www.sorites.org/Issue_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. 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
• Searle, John (2007). Philosophy of Language: an interview with John Searle. ReVEL, vol. 5, n. 8. http://www.revel.inf.br/site2007/_pdf/8/entrevistas/revel_8_interview_john_searle.pdf
• Stainton, Robert J. (1996). Philosophical perspectives on language. Peterborough, Ont., Broadview Press.
• Tarski, Alfred. (1944). The Semantical Conception of Truth. http://www.ditext.com/tarski/tarski.html