Course Description

There's an amazing thing about language.  It is that by its use, a speaker can make you believe something just by telling you about it; asserting something to be the case can be sufficient for forming beliefs about it, in the absence of any direct experience.  Why does language have this magical and wonderful property?  The standard answer is that this is possible because language is meaningful, and it is the central concern of the philosophy of language to explicate this answer. Philosophy of language is thus concerned with such things as what can be significantly said in language about the world, and how people function linguistically so as to express their thoughts. The analysis of language so conceived has been taken over time as a window to such things as the nature of thought, reasoning, action, and science, as well as being intimately intertwined with views of metaphysics and epistemology. Thus, the philosophy of language is set at the intersection of diverse areas of inquiry, including the philosophies of mind, action, and science, logic, and linguistic theory. But, although there are many crosscurrents in the philosophy of language, there is a recognized historical development of the area, as well as a canon of literature. While there are any number of ancient, medieval and modern threads, it is universally recognized that the starting points of contemporary thought are the ideas formulated by Frege and Russell around the turn of the 20th century.  It is this tradition that we will be exploring in this course, in which we will be trace the development of ideas about the issue that has been at the core of the philosophy of language, the nature of meaning, and its relation to truth, reference and logical form.