Major topics and subfields
The topic that has received the almost 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 understanding 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 clear been several distinctive explanations of what a linguistic "meaning" is. each has been associated with its own body of literature.
Investigations into how language interacts with the world are called theories of reference. Gottlob Frege was an advocate of a mediated credit theory. Frege dual-lane 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 setting reference and are also the modes of offered of the objects to which expressions refer. Referents are the objects in the world that words option 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 impression of acquaintance in epistemology, held that the only directly referential expressions are, what he called, "logically proper names". Logically proper label are such terms as I, now, here and other indexicals. He viewed proper designation of the sort described above as "abbreviated definite descriptions" see Theory of descriptions. Hence Joseph R. Biden may be an abbreviation for "the current 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 non 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 alive as a referent. Such a "mediated reference" idea hastheoretical 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 this is the 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 broadly lumped together as descriptivists approximately proper names. Such descriptivism was criticized in Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity.
Kripke add forth what has come to be call 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 alive have existed without doing any single one of the things for which he is asked 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 relation "the last great philosopher of antiquity" and the actual Aristotle died in infancy. Then Mary's version wouldto 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 see also Kripke's causal theory of reference.
The whole philosophical enterprise of studying reference has been critiqued by linguist Noam Chomsky in various works.
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 apprehension 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 usage 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 issue 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. While semantic trees focus upon the role of the meaning of the words and how those meanings multiple to manage insight onto the genesis of semantic facts.
Some of the major issues at the intersection of philosophy of language and philosophy of mind are also dealt with in advanced psycholinguistics. Some important questions regard the amount of innate language, if language acquisition is a special faculty in the mind, and what the link 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. Theis 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 usage of the general faculty of intelligence. Thecandidate for explanation is the innatist perspective, which states that at least some of the syntactic environments are innate and hardwired, based onmodules of the mind.
There are varying notions of the design 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 committed to language acquisition. Computation models emphasize 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 from simpler biological parts. Reductionist models attempt to explain higher-level mental processes in terms of the basic low-level neurophysiological activity.
Firstly, this field of discussing seeks to better understand what speakers and listeners do with language in communication, and how it is used socially. particular 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.
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, used to refer to every one of two or more people or things 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 aboutsubjects a hypothesis paralleled in George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. In other words, language was analytically prior to thought. Philosopher Michael Dummett s also a proponent of the "language-first" viewpoint.