Philosophy of language

Philosophy of language is the branch of philosophy whose primary concerns include the natures of meaning, reference, truth, language learning, language creation, understanding, communication, interpretation, and translation.

The discipline is concerned with five central questions: How are sentences composed into a meaningful whole, and what are the meanings of the parts of sentences? What is the nature of meaning? (i.e., What exactly is a meaning?) What do we do with language? (How do we use it socially?) How does language relate to the mind, both of the speaker and the interpreter? Finally, how does language relate to the world?

Overview

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Extension and intension

Philosophers of language are not much concerned with what individual words or sentences mean. The nearest dictionary or encyclopedia may solve the problem of the meaning of words, and to speak a language correctly is generally to know what most sentences mean. What is more interesting for philosophers is the question of what it means for an expression to mean something. Why do expressions have the meanings they have? Which expressions have the same meaning as other expressions, and why? How can these meanings be known? And the most basic question: "what does the word 'meaning' mean?"

In a similar vein, philosophers wonder about the relationship between meaning and truth. Philosophers tend to be less concerned with which sentences are actually true, and more with what kinds of meanings can be true or false. Some examples of questions a truth-oriented philosopher of language might ask include: Can meaningless sentences be true or false? What about sentences about things that don't exist? Is it sentences that are true or false, or is it the usage of sentences?

Language, how things 'mean' something, and truth are important not just because they are used in everyday life; language shapes human development, from earliest childhood and continuing to death. Knowledge itself may be intertwined with language. Notions of self, experience, and existence may depend entirely on how language is used and what is learned through it.

The topic of learning language leads to all kinds of interesting questions. Is it possible to have any thoughts without having a language? What kinds of thoughts need a language to happen? How much does language influence knowledge of the world and how one acts in it? Can anyone reason at all without using language?

The philosophy of language is important because, for all of the above reasons, language is important, and language is important because it is inseparable from how one thinks and lives. People in general have a set of vital concepts which are connected with signs and symbols, including all words (symbols): "object," "love," "good," "God," "masculine," "feminine," "art," "government," and so on. By incorporating "meaning," everyone has shaped (or has had shaped for us) a view of the universe and how they have "meaning" within it.

History

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William of Ockham and other Scholastic philosophers anticipated many of the ideas of modern analytic philosophy.

The inquiry into language stretches back to the beginnings of western philosophy with Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. In the dialogue Cratylus, Plato considered the question whether the names of things were determined by convention or by nature. He criticized conventionalism because it leads 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. For example, it is obviously wrong to say that the term "houseboat" is any good when referring to, say, a cat, because cats have nothing to do with houses or boats. He also argued that primitive names (or morphemes) had a natural correctness, because each phoneme represented basic ideas or sentiments. For example, the letter and sound of "l" for Plato 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.

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.

The Stoic philosophers made important contributions to the analysis of grammar, distinguishing five parts of speech: nouns, verbs, appellatives, 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 it refers to. 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" (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.

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 King, although it has been disputed, Peter Abelard anticipated the modern ideas of sense and reference. Also, William of Occam's Summa Logicae brought forward one of the first serious proposals for codifying a mental language.

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. One of the major developments of the scholastics in this area was the doctrine of the suppositio. 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 as it refers to its normal non-linguistic referent (as in "Charles is a man") or to itself as a linguistic entity (as in "'Charles' has five letters"). Such a classification scheme is the precursor of modern distinctions between use and mention, and between language and metalanguage.

Though philosophers had always discussed language, it took on a central role in philosophy beginning in the late nineteenth century, especially in the English speaking world and parts of Europe. The philosophy of language was 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.

Major topics and sub-fields

Composition and parts

Essential terms Concepts Categories Sets Classes Genus and Species Property Entity Proposition Sentence

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 in order 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).

One perspective, put forward by logician Alfred Tarski, explains the lexical parts of a sentence by appealing to their satisfaction conditions. Roughly, this involves looking at the extension of the word -- that is to say, the objects which are governed by a certain meaning. "To obtain a definition of satisfaction... we indicate which objects satisfy the simplest sentential functions." By "sentential function", Tarski means roughly what we mean by a "sentence".

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".

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 in order to provide insight onto the genesis of semantic facts.

The nature of meaning

Main article: Meaning (linguistic)

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Donald Davidson developed a truth-conditional semantics.

The answer to the question, "What is the meaning of meaning?", is not immediately obvious. One section of philosophy of language tries to answer this very question.

Geoffrey Leech posited that there are two essentially different types of linguistic meaning: conceptual and associative. For Leech, the conceptual meanings of an expression have to do with the definitions of words themselves, and the features of those definitions. This kind of meaning is treated by using a technique called the semantic feature analysis. The conceptual meaning of an expression inevitably involves both definition (also called "connotation" and "intension" in the literature) and extension (also called "denotation"). The associative meaning of an expression has to do with individual mental understandings of the speaker. They, in turn, can be broken up into six sub-types: connotative, collocative, social, affective, reflected and thematic.

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

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. 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.

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.

Use theorist perspectives understand meaning to involve or be related to speech acts and particular utterances, not the expressions themselves. The later Wittgenstein helped inaugurate the idea of meaning as use. It is also associated with P.F. Strawson, Robert Brandom, and others.

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 sub-species of externalism: social and environmental. The first is most closely associated with Tyler Burge and the second with Hilary Putnam, Saul Kripke and others.

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. 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.

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 C.S. Peirce and other early 20th century American pragmatists.

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

Reference

Main article: Reference

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Gottlob Frege, a logician, made several influential contributions to philosopy of language.

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: Sinn (usually translated as "sense") and Bedeutung (translated as "meaning", "denotation", "nominatum", and "reference", among others). 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 that expressions refer to. Referents are the objects in the world that words pick out. Hence, the referents of "the evening star" and "the morning star" are the same, the planet Venus. But they are two different modes of presenting the same object and hence they have two different senses. The senses of sentences are thoughts, while their referents are truth-values (the True or the False). The referents of sentences embedded in propositional attitude ascriptions and other opaque contexts are their usual senses.

John Stuart Mill proposed a different analysis of the relationship between meaning and reference. For him, although there are two components to consider for most terms of a language (connotation and denotation), proper names, such as "Bill Clinton", "Bismark", or "John Hodgman" have only a denotation. Hence, Mill's view is similar to what is now called a direct reference theory.

Bertrand Russell, in his later writings and for reasons related to his acquaintance theory 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". Hence "George W. Bush" may be an abbreviation for the "the current President of the United States and son of George H.W. Bush." 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 satisifes the description. However, such objects are not to be considered constituents of the propositions 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 the Millian 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 that "Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens" and be surprised -- thus, their cognitive content seems different. Millian views also run into trouble in dealing with names without bearers. The sentence "Pegasus is the winged horse of Greek mythology" seems to be a perfectly meaningful, even true, sentence. But, according to Millianism, "Pegasus" has no meaning because it has no referent. Hence, following the principle of compositionality, the sentence itself is neither true nor false and has no meaning. Several other difficulties have also been noted in the literature.

Despite the differences between the views of Frege and Russell, they are generally lumped together as descriptivists about proper names. Such descriptivism faces problems which were articulated in Saul Kripke's influential Naming and Necessity.

First, Kripke put forth what has come to be known as "the modal argument" (or "argument from rigidity") against descriptivism. 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 a necessary truth 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.

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 are: how much of language is innate? Is language acquisition a special faculty in the mind? What's 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.

There are varying notions of the structure of the brain when it comes to language, as well. 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. Computation models emphasize the the notion of a representational language of thought and the logic-like, computational processing that the mind performs over them. 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.

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.

For example, 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 "1984"). To a lesser extent, issues in the philosophy of rhetoric (including the notion of framing of debate) suggest the influence of language upon thought.

At the other extreme from these positions, in a certain sense, is the notion that thought (or, more broadly, mental content) has priority over language. This idea is most closely associated with Jerry Fodor and his language of thought hypothesis. According to this view, spoken and written language derive their intentionality and meaning from an internal language encoded in the mind. 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. 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. 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.

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

...speech can never exactly represent perciptibles, since it is different from them, and perceptibles are apprehended each by the one kind of organ, speech by another. Hence, since the objects of sight cannot be presented to any opther organ but sight, and the different sense-organs cannot give their information to one another, similarly speech cannot give any information about perceptibles. Therefore, if anything exists and is comprehended, it is incommunicable.

Social interaction and language

Metasemantics is a term used to describe all those fields that attempt to explain how semantic facts arise. 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 examples of metasemantic fields.

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. 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 in order 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), the effects of gendered language, linguistic transparency, or speaking in an accessible manner, performative utterances and the various tasks that language can perform (called "speech acts"), applications to the study and interpretation of law, and to help give insight to the logical concept of the domain of discourse.

Literary theory is a discipline that overlaps with the philosophy of language. It emphasizes the methods that readers and critics use in understanding a text. This field, being an outgrowth of the study of how to properly interpret messages, is closely tied to the ancient discipline of hermeneutics.

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. For Heidegger, the social sciences and especially history, are sciences of interpretation of texts, as in Wilhelm Dilthey and Friedrich Schleiermacher. 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". However, Heidegger believed that language today is worn out because of overuse of important words, and would be inadequate for in-depth study of Sein. For example, Sein (being) 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. Dasein is Heidegger's specific term for human beings and their existence.

With the new vocabulary designed for Dasein, Heidegger constructs his theory of language, centered around 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.

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." 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."

Paul Ricoeur, 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.

Major problems in philosophy of language

Vagueness

One issue that has bothered philosophers of language and logic is the problem of the vagueness of words. Often, meanings expressed by the speaker are not as explicit or precise as the listener would like them to be. 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.

Problem of universals and composition

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 general 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 has been called nominalism.

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 together in some way or overlap one another.

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". Thus, a property is a characteristic of the thing.

The nature of language

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. On the other hand, many works by linguist Noam Chomsky have emphasized the role of syntax as a characteristic of any language.

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).

Formal versus informal approaches

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.

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 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.

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. Strawson argued that the truth-table semantics of the logical connectives (e.g., $\land$, $\lor$ and $\rightarrow$) do not capture the meanings of their natural language counterparts ("and", "or" and "if-then"). 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 Robert Brandom, Paul Horwich and Kent Bach.

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.

Translation and Interpretation

Translation and interpration 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.

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 attribued to a whole language. The resulting view is called semantic holism.

Quine's disciple, 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.

See also

• Pragmatics
• Rhetoric
• Semantics
• Semantics of logic
• General semantics
• Symbolic interactionism
• Interpreter
• Intentionality
• Signs
• Ideas
• Sense and reference
• Speech acts
• deixis

Further reading

• 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
• 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
• 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
• Glossary of Linguistic terms. http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/contents.htm
• Philosophy of Language---Internet Encylopedia of Philosophy