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philosophy that studies language. Its primary concerns include the nature of linguistic meaning, reference, language use, language learning, and language understanding, truth, thought (to the extent that it is linguistic), communication, interpretation, and translation. In its modern form it derives from the work of Gottlob Frege, and makes extensive use of modern logic and linguistics.
We might ask, "what is a meaning?" Philosophers of language are in general less concerned with what individual words or sentences mean than with what it is for an expression to mean something, in virtue of what facts expressions have the meanings they do, which expressions have the same meanings as which others, and how these meanings can be known. (The exceptions, of course, are expressions about language, or words otherwise of philosophical significance). So a better question might be, "what does the word meaning mean?" In a similar vein, (and with similar caveats), philosophers are less concerned with which sentences are true than with what kinds of things can be true or false (sentences, presumably, but all sentences, or only meaningful ones?)
Language, meaning, and truth are important not just because they are used daily with important effects; language has shaped our human development, from our earliest childhood and continuing to the present. Many contemporary philosophers hold that it is impossible to have any thoughts without having a language. Still more would agree that there are at least some thoughts that one cannot think without having a language. Since we often or always reason according to rules laid down by our language, then the language we speak has a great deal of influence on how we view and respond to the world. Accordingly it is not by accident that philosophical discussions often begin by clarifying terminology, drawing distinctions between different senses of words, and so forth. The philosophy of language is important because language is important, and language is important because it is inseparable from how we think and live.
We each have a whole integrated set of concepts which we have associated with certain words like "object," "love," "good," "God," "masculine," "feminine," "art," "government," and so on. By learning the meanings of these words, each of us has shaped an entire view of the universe and our place in it. This is not to say that one's philosophy is only one's understanding of what important words mean; of course there's much more to it than that. But in arriving at a present philosophical outlook, questions about meaning play a central, extremely important role.
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, to the extent that for a time philosophy of language was virtually synonymous with analytic philosophy.
The turn to language is tied closely to the development of modern logic, which began with the work of the German logician Frege in the late nineteenth century. Logicians had known since Aristotle how to codify certain common patterns of reasoning: For example, the argument "Socrates is a man. All men are mortal. Therefore Socrates is mortal" is called a syllogism. This is a Boole and Charles Sanders Peirce) advanced logic significantly by showing how to codify inferences using Sentential connectives, like and, or and if-then, and quantifiers like all and some. Much of this work was made possible by the development of set theory. Frege used his new logic to further develop the foundations of arithmetic. He undertook to answer the question, "what is a number?" or "what objects do number-words ("one", "two", etc.) refer to?" In pursuing this he was led to analyse the idea of meaning, and saw that it could be explained as consisting of two elements.
Hence the sense (or intension) of a concept is what it attributes to an object; the reference (or extension) is the collection of objects that fall under the concept. The sense of a sentence is a proposition, or state of affairs; the reference is (confusingly, and still disputedly, but for good reasons) a truth value: "true" or "false." The referent of a proper name is an individual; the meaning of a proper name is a description that picks out that person (Russell thought something similar, although since the work of Saul Kripke almost no one holds this view now. Some, such as Gareth Evans, have argued that even Frege did not hold it).
Logic was further advanced by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead in their groundbreaking Principia Mathematica, which attempted to produce a formal language with which the truth of all mathematical statements could be demonstrated from first principles. Russell differed from Frege greatly on many points, however. He rejected Frege's sense-reference distinction (though this is perhaps an accident of how Russell viewed language, and many scholars think he misunderstood Frege more than he disagreed with him.) He disagreed that language was of fundamental significance to philosophy, and saw the project of developing formal logic as a way of eliminating all of the confusions caused by ordinary language, and hence at creating a perfectly transparent medium in which to conduct traditional philosophical argument. He hoped, ultimately, to extend the proofs of the Principia to all possible true statements, a scheme he called logical atomism. For a while it appeared that his pupil Wittgenstein had succeeded in this plan with his "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus".
Russell's work, and that of his colleague G. E. Moore, developed in response to what they perceived as the nonsense dominating British philosophy departments at the turn of the century, a kind of British Idealism most of which was derived (albeit very distantly) from the work of Hegel. In response Moore developed an approach ("Common Sense Philosophy") which sought to examine philosophical difficulties by a close analysis of the language used in order to determine its meaning. In this way Moore sought to expunge philosophical absurdities such as "time is unreal". Moore's work would have significant, if oblique, influence (largely mediated by Wittgenstein) on Ordinary language philosophy (see below.)
In 1929 Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge from Vienna, having concluded (with some persuasion from Frank Ramsey) that the Tractatus was not the end of philosophy, and indeed that it had serious problems. For the next twenty years he worked prodigiously, but as none of his work was published until his death much of his early influece was on his students.
This close examination of natural language is a powerful philosophical technique. Other practitioners have include J. L. Austin, P. F. Strawson, John Searle, R. M. Hare and R. S. Peters. Wittgenstein himself returned to philosophy after becoming aware that there was much more to natural languages than he had summarised in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The result, "Philosophical Investigations", confirmed the central place of natural languages in the philosophy of language.
Perhaps the most influential current approach to the theory of meaning is that sketched by Donald Davidson in his introduction to the collection of essays Truth and Meaning in 1967. There he argued for the following two theses:
The result is a theory of meaning that rather resembles, by no accident, the account of the semantics of logic given by Alfred Tarski's semantic theory of truth: it consists of a recursive set of rules yielding an infinite set of sentences "'p' is true if and only if p", covering the whole language. Davidson's account, though brief, constitutes the first systematic presentation of truth-conditional semantics.
However there is still much that can be done by using formal logic to show how natural languages might work. Saul Kripke's analysis of reference is a case in point. Donald Davidson proposed simply translating natural languages into first-order predicate calculus in order to reduce meaning to a function of truth.
Michael Dummett argued against the kind of truth-conditional semantics presented by Davidson; instead he argued that basing semantics on assertion conditions avoids a number of difficulties with truth-conditional semantics, such as the transcendental nature of certain kinds of truth condition. He leverages work done in proof-theoretic semantics to provide a kind of inferential role semantics, where:
A semantics based upon assertion conditions is called a artificial language loglan was invented that is based on first order predicate logic.
connotation and denotation (intension and extension) -- definite description -- epistemology -- logic and semantics of logic -- meaning -- proper names -- sense and reference -- truth
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