Meaning The topic that has received the most attention in the philosophy of language has been the
nature of meaning, to explain what "meaning" is, and what we mean when we talk about meaning. Within this area, issues include: the nature of
synonymy, the origins of meaning itself, our apprehension of meaning, and the nature of composition (the question of how meaningful units of language are composed of smaller meaningful parts, and how the meaning of the whole is derived from the meaning of its parts). There have been several distinctive explanations of what a
linguistic "meaning" is. Each has been associated with its own body of literature. • The
ideational theory of meaning, most commonly associated with the British
empiricist John Locke, claims that meanings are
mental representations provoked by signs. 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. • The
truth-conditional theory of meaning holds 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. (See also Wittgenstein's
picture theory of language.) • The
use theory of meaning, most commonly associated with 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. It is also associated with
P. F. Strawson,
John Searle,
Robert Brandom, and others. • The
inferentialist theory of meaning, the view that the meaning of an expression is derived from the
inferential relations that it has with other expressions. This view is thought to be descended from the use theory of meaning, and has been most notably defended by
Wilfrid Sellars and
Robert Brandom. • The
direct reference theory of meaning, the view that the meaning of a word or expression is what it points out in the world. While views of this kind have been widely criticized regarding the use of language in general,
John Stuart Mill defended a form of this view, and
Saul Kripke and
Ruth Barcan Marcus have both defended the application of direct reference theory to
proper names. • The
semantic externalist theory of meaning, according to which meaning is not a purely psychological phenomenon, because it is determined, at least in part, by features of one's environment. 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. • The
verificationist theory of meaning is 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". 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. •
Pragmatic theories of meaning include 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.
Reference 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 reference. 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.
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. He viewed proper names of the sort described above as "abbreviated
definite descriptions" (see
Theory of descriptions). Hence
Joseph R. Biden may be an abbreviation for "a past President of the United States and husband of Jill Biden". 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. 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
Composition and parts 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 the meaning of a sentence emerges from 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). Further, syntactic propositions are arranged into
discourse or
narrative structures, which also encode meanings through
pragmatics like temporal relations and pronominals. 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. In the sentence "The horse is red", "the horse" can be considered 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." 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 focus upon the role of the
meaning of the words and how those meanings combine to provide insight onto the genesis of semantic facts.
Mind and language Innateness and learning 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 regard the amount of innate language, if language acquisition is a special faculty in the mind, and what the connection is 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. 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.
Nativist models assert that there are
specialized devices in the brain that are dedicated to language acquisition.
Emergentist models focus on the notion that natural faculties are a complex system that emerge from simpler biological parts.
Reductionist models attempt to explain higher-level mental processes in terms of the basic low-level neurophysiological activity.
Communication Firstly, this field of study seeks to better understand what speakers and listeners do with language in
communication, and how it is used socially. Specific interests include the topics of
language learning, language creation, and
speech acts. Secondly, the question of how language relates to the minds of both the speaker and the
interpreter is investigated. Of specific interest is the grounds for successful
translation of words and concepts into their equivalents in another language.
Language and thought 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). In other words, language was analytically prior to thought. Philosopher
Michael Dummett is also a proponent of the "language-first" viewpoint. 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. 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. To an extent, the theoretical underpinnings to
cognitive semantics (including the notion of semantic
framing) suggest the influence of language upon thought. However, the same tradition views meaning and grammar as a function of conceptualization, making it difficult to assess in any straightforward 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.
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. 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. In a series of studies conducted by Gary Lupyan, 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 series of experiments, 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.
Social interaction and language A common claim is that language is governed by social conventions. Questions inevitably arise on surrounding topics. One question regards what a convention exactly is, and how it is studied, and second regards the extent that 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. 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 behaviors 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 closely tied to the ancient discipline of
hermeneutics.
Truth Finally, philosophers of language investigate how language and meaning relate to
truth and
the reality being referred to. They tend to be less interested in which sentences are
actually true, and more in
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. ==Problems in the philosophy of language==