Branches of Philosophy

Philosophy of Language

The branch of philosophy that studies meaning and reference: what makes a sentence meaningful, how a name manages to pick out one thing in the world rather than another, and what a speaker actually does in using words at all. It investigates the relationship between language, language users, and the world, including questions of indexicality, intentionality, the constitution of sentences and concepts, and how language relates to learning and thought. Inquiry into language in the West reaches back to the fifth century BC, when Plato's dialogue Cratylus asked whether the names of things are fixed by convention or by nature; the field took its modern analytic form through Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell's linguistic turn, carried forward by Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle's logical positivists, and Willard Van Orman Quine.

Facts

Disputed

Key Debate

Descriptivism versus the causal-historical theory of reference: whether a proper name refers by way of a description the speaker associates with it, as Frege and Russell held, or by a causal chain of use running back to an original act of naming, as Saul Kripke argued in Naming and Necessity. 1

Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity (1970 lectures, published 1980) is widely credited with overturning the descriptivist consensus, though descriptivists have since offered revised versions of their view.

Central Question

What is meaning, and how do words and sentences come to refer to things in the world? 1

Key Debate

Whether meaning is fixed by a private, inner mental content or by public, rule-governed use: Wittgenstein's later work argues that a language only one person could in principle understand is not a language at all, so meaning lives in shared practice rather than in a picture of words as labels silently attached to private ideas. 1

Learn More

A Private Language Cannot Exist

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Imagine keeping a diary of a private sensation, say a peculiar recurring feeling, and inventing a sign, S, to mark it down each time it happens, with no definition of S beyond your own private ostensive act of attending to the feeling and associating the sign with it. Wittgenstein's later work argues that this project cannot get off the ground, and the argument matters far beyond the diary case, because it closes off a whole picture of what meaning is. The trouble is not that nobody else could check your diary. It is that you could not check it either. Having decided S means this feeling, whatever counts as correctly applying S again next week depends only on how it seems to you at the time, and whatever seems right to you is right, which is just another way of saying the distinction between using S correctly and merely thinking you have used it correctly has collapsed. A rule that nothing could ever count as breaking is not a rule. Meaning, on this argument, cannot be secured by a private mental ceremony of associating a sign with an inner object, because there is no independent check available to the sign user alone, only to a practice shared with others, correctable by others, answerable to a use that extends beyond any single person's say so. This is why the branch is called philosophy of language rather than philosophy of naming: meaning is not a private label glued to an inner idea, waiting to be spoken. It lives in what a whole community of speakers does with a word, correctably, publicly, together.

Al-Farabi's Grammar of Being

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Centuries before Wittgenstein worried about private diaries, Al-Farabi was worrying about a different but related problem: what happens to Greek logic when it is translated into Arabic, a language with its own grammar, its own particles, its own way of marking existence and predication. His Book of Letters is, among other things, an extended meditation on the relationship between logic, grammar and the words a particular language happens to supply for saying that something is. Al-Farabi noticed that Arabic, unlike Greek, has no simple copula verb doing the philosophical work to be does in Aristotle's logic, and he treated this not as a curiosity of translation but as a genuine philosophical problem: is the distinction between essence and existence a fact about the world, or partly an artifact of how a given language happens to be built. His answer leaned toward the world, arguing that logic aims at relationships holding independently of any one language's grammar, with Arabic's particles standing in, sometimes awkwardly, for distinctions Greek marked more directly. But the very act of asking the question, of treating a language's grammar as a possible source of philosophical confusion rather than a transparent window onto reality, anticipates a worry that would not be stated so starkly again until the twentieth century. Where Wittgenstein diagnosed philosophical problems as scars left by language, Al-Farabi got there first from a completely different direction, trying to carry one language's logic honestly into another's grammar.

Connections

Associated With

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Includes

Akeel Bilgrami

Source Akeel Bilgrami, Wikipedia

Alexius Meinong

Source Alexius Meinong (Wikipedia)

Al-Farabi

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Analytic Philosophy

Anton Marty

Source Wikipedia: Anton Marty

Ashok Gangadean

Source Ashok Gangadean (Wikipedia)

Berit Brogaard

Source Wikipedia: Berit Brogaard

Bhartrihari

Source Bhartṛhari (Wikipedia)

Crispin Wright

Source Crispin Wright, Wikipedia

Dagfinn Follesdal

Source Dagfinn Follesdal, Wikipedia

Danielle Macbeth

Source Danielle Macbeth, Wikipedia

David Chalmers

Source David Chalmers (Wikipedia)

David Kaplan

Source David Kaplan (philosopher), Wikipedia

David Lewis

Source David Lewis (philosopher) (Wikipedia)

Deconstruction

Source Deconstruction (Wikipedia)

Donald Davidson

Source Donald Davidson (Wikipedia)

Elizabeth Anscombe

Source Elizabeth Anscombe (Wikipedia)

Ferdinand de Saussure

Source Ferdinand de Saussure, Wikipedia

Frege's Puzzle

Source Frege's Puzzle (Wikipedia)

G.E.M. Anscombe

Source Elizabeth Anscombe (Wikipedia)

Georg Henrik von Wright

Source Georg Henrik von Wright, Wikipedia

Gilbert Ryle

Source Gilbert Ryle (Wikipedia)

Gottlob Frege

Graz School

Source Graz School (Wikipedia)

Gustav Shpet

Source Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Gustav Shpet

Hans-Georg Gadamer

Source Hans-Georg Gadamer (Wikipedia)

Henri Bergson

Source Henri Bergson (Wikipedia)

Herman Cappelen

Source Wikipedia: Herman Cappelen

Hermeneutics

Source Hermeneutics (Wikipedia)

Hilary Putnam

Source Hilary Putnam (Wikipedia)

Indeterminacy of Translation

Source Indeterminacy of translation (Wikipedia)

J.L. Austin

Source J.L. Austin (Wikipedia)

J.L. Mackie

Source Wikipedia: J. L. Mackie

Jesús Padilla Gálvez

Source Jesús Padilla Gálvez, Wikipedia

John McDowell

Source John McDowell (Wikipedia)

John Searle

Source John Searle (Wikipedia)

Jonathan Bennett

Source Jonathan Bennett (philosopher), Wikipedia

Julia Kristeva

Kendall Walton

Source Kendall Walton (Wikipedia)

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Lwów-Warsaw School

Source Lwów-Warsaw school (Wikipedia)

Max Black

Source Max Black, Wikipedia

Michael Dummett

Source Michael Dummett (Wikipedia)

Mikhail Bakhtin

Source Wikipedia: Mikhail Bakhtin

Mohamed Lakhdar Maougal

Source Wikipedia: Mohamed Lakhdar Maougal

Nelson Goodman

Source Nelson Goodman (Wikipedia)

P.F. Strawson

Source P. F. Strawson (Wikipedia)

Paradigm Case Argument

Source Paradigm case argument (Wikipedia)

Paul Grice

Source Paul Grice - Wikipedia

Paul Ricoeur

Source Paul Ricoeur (Wikipedia)

Showing 1 to 50 of 66 in Includes, page 1 of 2.

Long-Form Articles

A Private Language Cannot Exist

Al-Farabi's Grammar of Being

Sources

1. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Stanford University, Center for the Study of Language and Information

s.v. Private Language Argument
The idea of a private language was made famous in philosophy by Ludwig Wittgenstein, who in section 243 of his book Philosophical Investigations explained it thus: "The words of this language are to refer to what only the speaker can know - to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language."
s.v. Reference
Reference is a relation that obtains between a variety of representational tokens and objects or properties. For instance, when I assert that "Barack Obama is a Democrat," I use a particular sort of representational token - i.e. the name Barack Obama - which refers to a particular individual - i.e. Barack Obama.
Includes: Al-Farabi, s.v. Al-Farabi
Associated With: Ludwig Wittgenstein, entry: Wittgenstein