Philosophy of Language

Philosophy of language is the study of philosophical issues that arisedue to the language based nature of discourse and argument. It isdominated by philosophical analysis, the branch of philosophy thatoccupies itself with what the structures of language tell us about theconcepts we deploy in communicating. Philosophical analysis datesback to the Pre-Socratics , and was first made systematic inAristotle's Organon, but it was with the revolutionary newdevelopments in mathematical logic inaugurated by Frege thatphilosophical analysis assumed the central importance in philosophythat it does today.

Analytical philosophy is the school of philosophy which ascribesmost importance to the philosophy of language, and it is in analyticalphilosophy that the so-called `linguistic turn' took place: this isthe idea that long standing controversies in philosophy about thenature of the world and of knowledge can be settled by attention tothe use of the relevant concepts in language. But even outsideanalytical philosophy, philosophy of language is important: linguisticissues take centre stage in the philosophical hermeneutics ofHeidegger and Gadamer and in Derrida's Deconstruction, inphenomenology issues about privacy best formulated in linguistic termsare of crucial importance, whilst in cognitive science the debateabout the nature of concepts revolves about matters of content thatoriginated in the philosophy of language.

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Philosophy of Language, World Congress Papers - Proceedings of the 20th World Congress of Philosophy, held at Boston University in 1998. Archive of contributed papers in the subject area of Philosophy of Language. Provided by The Paideia Archive.
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Philosophy of Language in Classical China - Historical overview by Chad Hansen of interpretations of language in the major schools of philosophical thought in classical China (up to the Han dynasty).
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Review of Michael Beaney's `Frege: Making Sense' - By Mitchell Green, to appear in Mind.
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Pragmatism and the Philosophy of Language - Wide-ranging article by Danielle MacBeth. From the Wilfrid Sellars' archive.
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Conditions on Understanding Language - Article by Ernest Lepore. Discusses the nature of language competence.
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Structural Linguistics and Formal Semantics - Article by Jaroslav Peregrin, discussing to what extent Chomsky's views displace Saussure's.
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Wikipedia - Philosophy of Language - Acknowledges difficulties in defining the field but suggests a focus mainly on questions of meaning and truth.
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CogPrints: Philosophy of Language - A large number of online scholarly papers on the subject, from this electronic repository.
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