Philosophy of Language

Abstract

In the twentieth century, logic and philosophy of language were two of the few areas of philosophy in which philosophers made indisputable progress. For example, even now many of the foremost living ethicists present their theories as somewhat more explicit versions of the ideas of Kant, Mill, or Aristotle. In contrast, it would be patently absurd for a contemporary philosopher of language or logician to think of herself as working in the shadow of any gure who died before the twentieth century began. Advances in these disciplines make even the most unaccomplished of its practitioners vastly more sophisticated than Kant. There were previous periods in which the problems of language and logic were studied extensively (e.g. the medieval period). But from the perspective of the progress made since the late nineteenth century, previous work is at most a source of interesting data or occasional insight. All systematic theorizing about content that meets contemporary standards of rigor has been done subsequently. The advances philosophy of language has made in the twentieth century are of course the result of the remarkable progress made in logic. Few other philosophical disciplines gained as much from the developments in logic as the philosophy of language. In the course of presenting the rst formal system in the Begriffsscrift (Concept Notation), Gottlob Frege (1848-1925) developed a formal language. Subsequently, logicians provided rigorous semantics for formal languages, in order to dene truth in a model, and thereby characterize logical consequence. Such rigor was required in order to enable logicians to carry out semantic proofs about formal systems in a formal system, thereby providing semantics with the same benets as increased formalization had provided for other branches of mathematics. It was but a short step to treating natural languages as more complex versions of formal languages, and then applying to the study of natural language the techniques developed by logicians interested in proving semantic results about formal theories. Increased formalization has yielded dividends in the philosophy of language similar to those in mathematics. It has enabled philosophers to provide better and more fruitful denitions and distinctions. Progress in philosophy of language and logic has positively affected neighboring disciplines such as metaphysics and meta-ethics. Because of this, some philosophers have thought that philosophy of language was some kind of “rst philosophy,” asDescartes viewed what we would now call “epistemology.” But the fact that philosophy of language has progressed signicantly does not mean that it provides us with a rst philosophy. One can recognize that a discipline has advanced more than others without thinking that it holds the key to all advancement. The twentieth century was the century of “linguistic philosophy,” not because all or even most philosophical problems have been resolved or dissolved by appeal to language, but because areas of philosophy that involved meaning and content became immeasurably more sophisticated. My purpose in this chapter is to explain some of the key developments in the philosophy of language. Discussions of content in other elds, such as philosophy of mind or meta-ethics, are reections of the distinctions drawn and categories developed in thinking about languages, both formal and natural.