|
Those who use the term "philosophy of language" typically use
it to refer to work within the field of Anglo-American analytical philosophy and its
roots in German and Austrian philosophy of the early 20th century.
Many philosophers outside this tradition have views on the nature and use of
language, and the border between "analytical" and "continental" philosophy is
becoming more porous with time, but most who speak of this field are appealing
to a specific set of traditions, canonical authors and methods. The article
takes this more narrow focus in order to describe a tradition's history, but
readers should bear in mind this restriction of scope.
The history of the philosophy of language in the analytical
tradition begins with advances in logic and with tensions within traditional accounts
of the mind and its contents at the end of the 19th century. A
revolution of sorts resulted from these developments, often known as the
"Linguistic Turn" in philosophy. However, its early programs ran into serious
difficulties by mid-century, and significant changes in direction came about as
a result. Section 1 below addresses the precursors and early stages of the
"Linguistic Turn," while Section 2 addresses its development by the Logical
Positivists and others. Section 3 outlines the sudden shifts that resulted from
the works of Quine and Wittgenstein, and Section 4
charts the major approaches and figures that have followed from mid-century to
the present.
Table of Contents (Clicking on the links below will take you to those parts of this article)
1. Frege, Russell and the Linguistic Turn
a. Referential Theories of Meaning
Much of the stage-setting for the so-called "Linguistic Turn"
in Anglo-American philosophy took place in the mid 19th century.
Attention turned to language as many came to see it as a focal point in
understanding belief and representation of the world. Language came to be seen
as the "medium of conceptualization," as Wilfrid Sellars would later put it.
Idealists working in Kant's wake had developed more sophisticated
"transcendental" accounts of the conditions for the possibility of experience,
and this evoked strong reactions from more realist philosophers and those
sympathetic to the natural sciences. Scientists also made advances in describing
cognitive functions like speech production and comprehension as natural
phenomena, including the discovery of Broca's area and Wernicke's area, two
neural centers of linguistic activity, in the 1860s and 70s.
John Stuart
Mill's work around this time reinvigorated British empiricism and included
an approach to language that traced the meanings of individual words to the
objects to which they referred (see 1843, 1, 2, sec. 5). Mill's empiricism led
him to think that for meaning to have any significance for our thought and
understanding, we must explain it in terms of our experience. Thus, meaning
should ultimately be understood in terms of words standing for sets of sense
impressions. Not all those concerned with language shared Mill's empiricist
leanings, though most shared his sense that denotation, rather than connotation,
should be at the center of an account of meaning. A word denotes something by
standing for it, as my name stands for me, or "Baltimore" stands for a
particular city on America's East Coast; a word connotes something when it
"implies an attribute" in Mill's terms, as "professor" generally implies an
expert in an academic field and someone with certain sorts of institutional
authority. For most expressions, philosophers thought that to grasp their
meaning was to know what they stood for, as we often think of proper names serving simply as labels for the
things they denote. (Mill also tended to use "meaning" in talking about
connotation, and might have reservations with saying that proper names had
"meanings," though this is not to deny that they denote things.) Thus,
(1) The cat sat on the refrigerator.
should be understood as a complex arrangement of signs. "The
cat" denotes or refers to a particular furry domesticated quadruped, "the
refrigerator" denotes something, and so forth. Some further elaboration would be
needed for verbs, logical vocabulary and other categories of terms, but most
philosophers took the backbone of an account of meaning to be denotation, and
language use to be a process of the management of signs. These signs might
denote objects directly, or they might do so indirectly by standing for
something within our minds, following Locke, who described words as
"signs of ideas" (1690, III, 1).
Accounts that emphasized the reference of terms as
constitutive of the meaning of most expressions faced two serious problems,
however. First, they failed to explain the possibility of non-referring terms
and negative existential sentences. On such a referential picture of meaning,
the meaning of most expressions would simply be their bearers, so an existential
sentence like
(2) John Coltrane plays saxophone.
was easy to analyze. Its subject term, "John Coltrane,"
referred to a particular person and the sentence says of him that he does a
particular sort of thing: he plays saxophone. But what of a sentence
like
(3) Phlogiston was thought to be the cause of combustion.
Assuming that there is not and never was such a thing as
phlogiston, how can we understand such a sentence? If the meaning of those
expressions is their referent, then this sentence should strike us as
meaningless. Meinong (1904) suggested that such expressions denoted entities
that existed, but did not "subsist," by which he granted them a sort of reality,
albeit one outside the actual universe. The majority of philosophers treated
this with suspicion. Others suggested that the expression above denotes the
concept or idea of "phlogiston." The difficulty facing such responses comes into
sharper relief with consideration of negative existentials.
(4) Atlantis does not exist.
If Atlantis does not exist, the expression "Atlantis" does
not refer to anything and would have no meaning. One could say that "Atlantis"
refers not to a sunken city, but to our concept of a sunken city. But this has
the paradoxical result of making (4) false, since the concept is there for us to
refer to, thus rendering it impossible to deny. This might even entail that we
could not truthfully deny the existence of anything of which we could conceive,
which seems implausible.
The second serious problem for referential theories of
meaning, noted by Frege
(1892), was the informativeness of some identity sentences. Sentences of
self-identity are true purely in virtue of their logical form, and we may affirm
them even when we do not know what the expression refers to. For instance,
anyone could affirm
(5) Mt. Kilimanjaro is Mt. Kilimanjaro.
even if they do not know what Mt. Kilimanjaro is. Making this
statement in such a case would not inform our understanding of the world in any
significant way. However, a sentence like
(6) Mt. Kilimanjaro is the tallest mountain in Africa.
would certainly be informative to those who first heard it.
But remember that according to referential theories of meaning, "Mt.
Kilimanjaro" and "the tallest mountain in Africa" refer to the same thing and
hence mean the same thing according to these theories; therefore, (5) and (6)
say the same thing and one should be no more or less informative than the other.
Where we grasp the meaning of an expression or a sentence, philosophers have
traditionally taken it that this should make some sort of cognitive difference,
for example, we should be able to perform an action, make an inference, recognize
something, and so on. Thus differences in the meanings of expressions should be
reflected by some difference in cognitive significance between the
expressions. But if expressions refer to the same thing, and their meaning
consists solely in their picking out a referent, then there should be no such
cognitive difference even if there is apparently a difference in meaning. Simple
referential theories do not offer us an obvious solution to this problem and
therefore fail to capture important intuitions about meaning.
b. Frege on Sense and Reference
To address these problems, Frege proposed that we should
think of expressions as having two semantic aspects: a sense and a
reference. The sense of an expression would be its "mode of
presentation," as Frege put it, that conveyed information to us in its own
distinct way. That information would in turn determine a referent for each
expression. This led to a credo pervasive in analytical philosophy: sense
determines reference. This solved problems of reference by shifting the
emphasis to the sense of expressions first and to their reference later.
Negative existential sentences were intelligible because the sense of an
expression like "largest prime number" or "Atlantis" could be logically analyzed
or made explicit in terms of other descriptions, even if the set of things
specified by this information was, in fact, empty. Our sense that these
sentences and expressions were meaningful was a consequence of grasping their
senses, even when we realized this left them without a referent. As Frege put
it:
"It can perhaps be granted that an expression has a sense if
it is formed in a grammatically correct manner and stands for a proper name. But
as to whether there is a denotation corresponding to the connotation is hereby
not decided… [T]he grasping of a sense does not with certainty warrant a
corresponding nominatum. [that is, referent]" (1892: p. 153 in Beaney
(1997))
The informativeness of some identity claims also became more
clear. In a sentence like (5), we are simply stating self-identity, but in a
sentence like (6), we express something of real cognitive significance,
containing extensions of our knowledge that cannot generally be shown
a priori. This would not be
a trivial matter of logical form like "A=A," but a discovery that two very
different senses determined the same referent, which would suggest important
conceptual connections between different ideas, inform further inferences, and
thus enlighten us in various ways. Even if "Mt. Kilimanjaro" and "the tallest
mountain in Africa" refer to the same thing, it would be informative to learn
that they do, and we would augment our understanding of the world by learning
this.
Frege
also noted expressions that shared their referents could generally be
substituted for one another without changing the truth value of a sentence. For
instance, "Elvis Costello" and "Declan McManus" refer to the same object, and so
if "Elvis Costello was born in Liverpool" is true, so is, "Declan McManus was
born in Liverpool." Anything that we might predicate of the one, we may
predicate of the other, so long as the two expressions co-refer. However, Frege
realized that there were certain contexts in which this substitutability failed,
or at least could not be guaranteed. For instance,
(7) Liz knows that Elvis Costello was born in Liverpool.
may be true, even when
(8) Liz knows that Declan McManus was born in Liverpool.
is false, especially in cases where Liz does not know
that Elvis Costello is Declan McManus, or never learns the latter name at all.
What has happened here? Note that (7) and (8) both include strings of words that
could be sentences in their own right ("Elvis Costello was born in Liverpool"
and "Declan McManus was born in Liverpool") and "Liz knows that…" expresses
something about those propositions (namely, Liz's attitude towards them). Frege
suggested that in these cases, the reference of those embedded sentences is not
a truth value, as it would customarily be, but is rather the sense of the
sentence itself. Someone might grasp the sense of one sentence but not
another, and hence sentences like (7) and (8) could vary in their truth values.
Frege called these "indirect" contexts, and Quine would later dub such cases
"opaque" contexts.
Rudolf
Carnap would later replace the term "sense" with "intension" and "reference"
with "extension" and Carnap's terminology became prevalent in formal analysis of
semantics by the 1950s, though it was Frege's original insights that drove the
field. Significant worries remained for the Fregean notion of sense, however.
Names and other expressions in natural languages rarely have fixed sets of
descriptions that are universally acknowledged as Frege's senses would have to
be. Frege might reply that he had no intention of making sense a matter of
public consensus or psychological regularity, but this makes the status of a
sense all the more mysterious, as well as our capacity to grasp them. Analytical
philosophers of language would struggle with this for decades to come.
Still, Frege had effectively redrawn
the map for philosophy. By introducing senses as a focal point of analysis, he
had carved out a distinct territory for philosophical inquiry. Senses were not
simply psychological entities, since they were both commonly accessible by
different speakers and had a normative dimension to them, prescribing correct
usage rather than simply describing performance. (See Frege (1884) for a
thorough attack on psychologistic accounts of meaning.) Nor were they the causal
and mechanical objects of natural science, reducible to accounts of lawlike
regularity. They were entities playing a logical and cognitive role, and would
be both explanatory of conceptual content and universal across natural
languages, unlike the empirical details of linguistics and anthropology. Thus,
there was a project for philosophy to undertake, separate from the natural
sciences, and it was the logical analysis of the underlying structure of
meaning. Though naturalistic concerns would be reasserted in the development of analytical philosophy,
Frege's project would come to dominate Anglo-American philosophy for much of the
next century.
c. Russell
An important bridge between Frege and the English-speaking
world was Bertrand Russell's "On Denoting" (1905). Both men were mathematicians
by training and shared a concern with the foundations of arithmetic. However,
Russell shared a sense with some earlier philosophers that at least some
expressions were meaningful in virtue of direct reference, contra Frege.
Still, Russell saw the potential in Frege's work and undertook an analysis of
singular definite descriptions - complex expressions that purport to single out
a particular referent by description, for example, "the President of the USA," "the
tallest person in this room right now." Thus, Russell wondered how
(9) The present King of France is bald.
could be meaningful, given the absence of a present King of
France. Russell's solution was to analyze the logical role of such descriptions.
Although a select few expressions referred directly to objects, most were either
descriptions that picked out a referent by offering a list of properties, or
disguised abbreviations of such descriptions. Russell even suggested that most
proper names were abbreviated
descriptions. Strictly speaking, descriptions would not refer at all; they
would be quantified phrases that had or lacked extensions. What was needed was
an account that could explain the meaning of descriptions in terms of the
propositions that they abbreviated. Russell (1905) analyzed sentence (9) as
implying three things that jointly gave us a definition of propositions
involving descriptions. (A more succinct presentation comes in Russell (1919).)
A sentence like "the author of Waverley was Scotch" involves three
logical constituents:
(10) "x wrote Waverley" is not always false (i.e at least
one person wrote Waverley)
(11) "if x and y wrote Waverley , x and y are identical" is always true (that
is, at most one person wrote Waverley)
(12) "if x wrote Waverley, x was Scotch" is always true (that is,
whoever wrote Waverley was Scotch)
The first two here effectively assert the existence and
uniqueness of the referent of this expression, respectively. We may generalize
them and express them as a single proposition of the form "There is a term c
such that F x is true when x is c and
false when x is not c." (Thus, F is
held uniquely by c.) This asserts that there is a unique satisfier of the
description given or implied by an expression, and this may be true or false
depending on the expression at hand. We can then tack on an additional condition
expressing whatever property is attributed to the referent (being bald, Scotch,
and so on) in the form "c has the property Y." If nothing has the property F thus analyzed, (such as "being the present
King of France" in (9) above) then "c has the property Y" is false, and we have a means to analyze
non-denoting expressions. Such expressions are actually to be understood as
quantified phrases and we may understand them as having objects over which they
quantify or lacking such objects; the grasp of the logical structure of those
phrases is what constitutes our understanding of them. While we grasp each of
the parts abbreviated by the expression, we also understand that one of them is
false—there is no unique satisfier of "the present King of France"—and thus
we can understand the sentence even though one of its terms does not refer. That
expression can have a significant occurrence once we understand it as an
"incomplete" or "complex" symbol whose meaning is derived from its constituents.
Most proper names, and indeed almost
all expressions in a natural language, would submit to such an analysis and
Russell's work thus kick-started analytical philosophy in the
English-speaking world. (Significant contributions were also made by
G.E. Moore in the fields of
epistemology and ethics and hence he is often mentioned along with Russell, but
his achievements are largely outside the scope of our focus here.)
2. Early Analytical Philosophy of Language
The achievements of Russell and Frege in setting an agenda for
analytical philosophers that promised to both resolve longstanding philosophical
difficulties and preserve a role for philosophy on an equal footing with the
natural sciences electrified European and American academic philosophers. The
following section focuses on three points of interest in the early phases of
this tradition: (1) the early work of Ludwig Wittgenstein; (2) the
Logical Positivists; and (3) Tarski's theory of truth.
a. The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Ludwig
Wittgenstein came to read Frege and Russell out of an
interest in the foundations of mathematics and went to Cambridge to study with
Russell. He studied there, but left to serve in the Austro-Hungarian army in
1914. While being held as a prisoner of war, he wrote drafts of a text that many
saw as the high-water mark of early analytical philosophy, the
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In it, he wrote seven propositions and
made extensive comments on six of them, with extensive comments on the comments,
and so forth. He laid out a parsimonious and ambitious plan to systematically
realize Frege and Russell's aspirations of analyzing the logical structure of
language and thought.
Through logical analysis, Wittgenstein held that we could
arrive at a conception of language as consisting of elementary propositions
related by the now-familiar elements of first-order logic. Any sentence with a
sense could have that sense perspicuously rendered in such a system, and any
sentence that did not yield to such analysis would not have a sense at all.
"Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that
can be said can be said clearly." (1922, §4.116) Wittgenstein's claim here is
not that we cannot string together words in unclear ways; indeed, we do that all
the time. Rather, in doing so, we do not express anything that has a sense. What
we say may get nods of approval from fellow speakers, and we may even be
grasping at something important, but what we say does not convey anything
meaningful.
In part, this reflects Wittgenstein's early view that
propositions "pictured" the world. This is not to say that a written inscription
or a verbal utterance of a sentence visually resembles that state of affairs it
expresses. "Elvin Jones played drums for John Coltrane" looks like neither Elvin
Jones, nor John Coltrane, nor a drum set. Rather, the form of a proposition
resembled the form of some fact of the world. What was required to understand
this as a picture of the world was just what was needed in the case of actual
pictures—a coordination of the elements in the picture with objects outside
itself. (Logical truths would be true in virtue of relations among their
propositions.) Where we could do this, the language was stating something
clearly; where we could not, despite our best efforts, the words were not saying
anything at all. However, this was not to say that everything about meaning and
our understanding of the world was a matter of explicit definition, that is,
something we could say. Rather than being said with our language, many
things can only be shown. For instance, think of a logical expression
like "and." Any attempt to explain its sense, like putting two things side by
side, or using another term like "both," only recapitulates the structure of
"and," thus adding nothing. The form of our propositions shows how
it works and we cannot say anything more informative about it.
Wittgenstein also espoused a number of views at the end of the Tractatus
on solipsism, the will and ethics, and what could be said about them, but these
remain some of the most difficult and contested points of interpretation in his
work. Wittgenstein took himself to have prescribed the limits of what philosophy
could say, and closed the Tractatus without further comment by saying,
"Whereof we cannot speak, we must remain silent." (1922, §7)
b. The Vienna Circle and the Logical Positivists
Beginning in 1907, a group of European professors originally
known as the Ernst Mach Society began to meet regularly for discussions on
matters of logic, philosophy and science under the guidance of Moritz Schlick.
They later took to calling themselves the Vienna Circle and their ongoing
conversations became the nascence of a movement known as Logical Positivism,
which would include Carl
Hempel, Rudolf Carnap, and
Hans Reichenbach, among many others. They rejected the Hegelian idealism
prevalent in European academic circles, espoused the austere precision of
science, particularly physics, as a model for their methods, and took the
phenomenalist strains of British empiricism as a more suitable epistemological
foundation for such goals. Carnap adopted the insights of Frege's work and brought
tremendous sophistication to the analytical enterprise, particularly in his
The Logical Structure of the World (1928). The Logical Positivists also
took inspiration from Wittgenstein's
Tractatus, but their fidelity to his more abstruse aims is tenuous at
best. They shared Wittgenstein's view that logical proofs were true in virtue of
internal relations among their propositions, not by virtue of any actual facts
about the world, and parsed this as support for a renewed version of the
analytic/synthetic distinction. Analytic sentences were those true solely in
virtue of the meanings of their constituent expressions ("All bachelors are
unmarried") while synthetic sentences were true partly in virtue of empirical
facts beyond the meanings of their constituent terms ("Flynn is a bachelor").
Analytic sentences would be confirmed by logical analysis, while synthetic
sentences would be confirmed by appeal to observation sentences, or to
sense-data in even more rigorous accounts.
This led the Positivists to the Verificationist Theory of
Meaning. Analytic sentences would be true in virtue of the meanings of their
terms, while all synthetic sentences would have to admit to some sort of
empirical verification criteria. Any sentence that could not be verified by one
or the other of these means was deemed meaningless. This excluded claims with
mystical or occult import, but also large areas of ethics and metaphysics as
practiced by many philosophers. Schlick (1933) put it boldly, saying:
[A] proposition has a statable meaning only if it makes a
verifiable difference whether it is true or false. A proposition which is such
that the world remains the same whether it is true or false simply says nothing
about the world; it is empty and communicates nothing; I can give it no meaning.
We have a verifiable difference, however, only when it is a difference in the
given… (Ayer 1959, p. 88)
By "given" here, Schlick alluded to the stream of sense-data
that come before us. Few if any sentences were understood in such ways by most
speakers, so the work of philosophy was logical analysis and definition of the
concepts of the natural sciences into verificationist terms. While one could
imagine empirical verification of many things in the physical sciences (for
example,
laboratory results, predictions with observable consequences), it would be far
more difficult in fields like psychology and ethics. In these cases, the
Positivists favored a type of logical reductionism for the pertinent sentences
in the discourse. All sentences and key concepts in psychology would be reduced
to empirically verifiable sentences about the behavior of thinking subjects, for
instance. A sentence about a mental state like anger would be reduced to
sentences about observable behavior such as raising one's voice, facial
expressions, becoming violent, and so on. This would require "bridge laws" or
sentences of theoretical identity to equate the entities of, say, psychology
with the entities of the physical sciences and thus translate the terms of older
theories into new ones. (Again, in some cases the preferred mode would be to
equate them directly with sense-data.) Where this could not be done, the
Positivists took it that the sentences in question were meaningless, and they
advocated the elimination of many canonical concepts, sentences and theories,
derisively lumped under the term "metaphysics." A sentence like "God exists
outside of space and time" was certainly not true in virtue of the meanings of
its terms and did not admit to any sort of empirical test, so it would be
dismissed as gibberish.
The Verificationist theory of meaning ran into great
difficulty almost immediately, often due to objections among the Positivists.
For one, any sentence stating the theory itself was neither analytical, nor
subject to empirical verification, so it would seem to be either self-refuting
or meaningless. Universal generalizations including scientific laws like "All
electrons have a charge of 1.6x10-19 coulombs" were also problematic,
since they were not deducible from finite sets of observation sentences. (See
Hempel (1950), esp. §2.1) Counterfactual sentences, such as "If we dropped this
sugar cube in water, it would dissolve," present similar problems. Efforts at
refinement continued, though dissatisfaction with the whole program was growing
by mid-century.
c. Tarski's Theory of Truth
In two seminal works (1933 and 1944), Alfred Tarski made a great leap
forward for the rigorous analysis of meaning, showing that semantics could be
treated just as systematically as syntax could. Syntax, the rules and structures
governing the recombination of words and phrases into sentences, had been
analyzed with some success by logicians, but semantic notions like "meaning" or
"truth" defied such efforts for many years.
Tarski sought an analysis of the concept of truth that would
contain no explicit or implicit appeals to inherently semantic notions, and
offered a definition of it in terms of syntax and set theory. He began by
distinguishing metalanguage and object language; an object language is the
language (natural or formal) that is our target for analysis, while the
metalanguage is the language in which we conduct our analysis. Metalanguage is
the language that we use to study another language, and the object language is
the language that we study. For instance, children learning a second language
typically take classes conducted in their mother tongue that treat the second
language as an object to be studied. Thus, copies of all the sentences of the
object language should be included in the metalanguage and the metalanguage
should include sufficient resources to describe the syntax of the object
language, as well. In effect, an object language would not contain its own truth
predicate—this could only occur in a metalanguage, since it requires speakers
to talk about sentences themselves, rather than actually using them. There is
great controversy about the shape that a metalanguague would have to take to
enable analysis of a natural language, and Tarski openly doubted that these
methods would transfer easily from formal to natural languages, but we will not
delve into these issues here.
Tarski argued that a definition of truth would have to be
"formally correct" or as he put it:
(14) For all x, True(x) iff Fx.
or a sentence provably equivalent to this, where "true" was
not part of F. This much was a largely
formal condition, but Tarski added a more robust call for "material adequacy" or
a sense that our definition had succeeded in capturing the sorts of
correspondence between states of affairs and sentences classically associated
with truth. So, for instance, our truth definition had to imply a sentence
like:
(15) "Snow is white" is true iff snow is white.
Note that the quotes here make the first half of this
metalanguage sentence about the object language sentence "Snow is white"; the
second half of the metalanguage sentence is about snow itself. Tarski then
offered a definition of truth
"A sentence is true if it is satisfied by all objects and
false otherwise." (1944, p. 353)
where satisfaction is a relation between arbitrary objects
and sentential functions, and sentential functions are expressions with a formal
structure much like ordinary sentences, but which contain free variables, for
example,
"x is blue" or "x is greater than y." Tarski thought we might indicate which
objects satisfied the simplest sentential functions and then offer a further set
of conditions under which compound functions were satisfied in terms of those
simple functions. (Further refinements were made to a 1956 edition of the paper
to accommodate certain features of model theory that we will not discuss here.)
Once Tarksi added an inductive definition of the other operators of first-order
logic, a definition of truth had apparently been given without appeal to
inherently semantic notions, though Field (1972) would argue that "designation"
and "satisfaction" were semantic notions as well. Whether this should be read as
a deflationary account of truth or an analysis of a robust correspondence theory
was a point of great debate among analytical philosophers, but much like Frege's earlier work, it played
the far more momentous role of convincing further generations of logicians and
philosophers that the analysis of traditionally intractable philosophical
notions with the tools of modern logic was both within their grasp and immensely
rewarding.
3. Mid-century Revolutions
By the middle of the 20th century, the approach
spawned by Frege, Moore and Russell had taken root
with the Logical Positivists. The Second World War did a great deal to scatter
the most talented philosophers from the Continent, and many settled at
universities in Great Britain and the United States, spreading their views and
influencing generations of philosophers to come. However, the analytical
tradition always had a robust streak of criticism from within, and some of the
pillars of the early orthodoxy were already under some suspicion from members of
the Vienna Circle like Otto
Neurath (see his (1933)) and gadflies like Karl Popper. The next section
addresses the work of two figures, Quine and the later Wittgenstein, who challenged
received views in the philosophy of language and served as transitional figures
for contemporary views.
a. Quine and the Analytic/Synthetic Distinction
W.V.O. Quine (1953) went after the very core of Logical
Positivism, and in effect analytical philosophy, by
attacking the analytic/synthetic distinction. The Positivists had been happy to
admit a distinction between sentences that were true in virtue of the meanings
of their terms and those that were true in virtue of the facts, but Quine
brought a certain skepticism about the meanings of individual expressions to the
table. Much like the Positivists, he was wary of anything that would not admit
to empirical confirmation and saw meaning as one more such item.
Quine dismissed the idea of a meaning as a real item somehow
present in our minds beyond the ways in which it manifests itself in our
behavior. He later dubbed this "the myth of the museum"—a place "in which the
exhibits are the meanings and the words are the labels." (1969, p. 27) In a
strongly empiricist spirit, he argued that we have no access to such things in
our experience, thus they could not explain our linguistic behavior, and
therefore they had no rightful place in our account. Quine wondered whether
there was a principled distinction between analytic and synthetic statements at
all. In reviewing the prevailing ideas of analyticity, he found each one
inadequate or question-begging. Analyticity was a dogma, an article of faith
among empiricists (especially Logical Positivists) and one that could not stand
closer scrutiny. Moreover, the Positivists paired analyticity with a second
dogma, empirical reductionism, the view that each sentence or expression could
be assigned its own distinctive slice of empirical content from our experience.
Quine's claim was not that we should not be empiricists or worry about such
empirical content, but rather that no individual sentence or expression could be
allotted such content all on its own. The sentences of our language operate in
conjunction with one another to "face the tribunal of experience" as a whole.
This holism entailed a certain egalitarianism among the sentences to which we
commit ourselves, as well. Any claim could be held true, come what may, if we
were willing to revise other parts of our "web of belief" to accommodate it, and
any claim—even one we took to be a claim about meaning before, like "all
bachelors are unmarried"—could be revised if conditions demanded it. (1953,
p.43) Some sentences would have a relatively strong immunity from revision,
for example, the laws of logic, but they enjoy that status only because of their
centrality in our present ways of thinking. Other, less central claims could be
revised more easily, perhaps with only passing interest, for example, claims about the
number of red brick houses on Elm St. This wide-open revisability came to set a
tone for epistemology in analytical philosophy during
the latter half of the 20th century.
Without tidy parcels of empirical content or analytic truths
to anchor an account of meaning, Quine saw little use for meaning at all.
Instead, his work focused on co-reference and assent among speakers. In Word
and Object (1960), he suggested that our position as speakers is much like
that of a field linguist attempting to translate a newly discovered language
with no discernible connections to other local languages. He dubbed this
approach "radical translation." Faced with such a situation, we would search for
recurring expressions and attempt to secure referents for them. In his classic
example, we stand around with the locals, notice that rabbits occasionally run
by and that the locals mutter "Gavagai" when the rabbits pass; we might be moved
by this to translate their utterances as our own word "rabbit." Thinking of the
translatability of one utterance with another thus achieves the same sort of
theory-building effect that talk of shared meaning did, but without appeal to
abstract objects like meanings. However, this also led to Quine's thesis of the
"indeterminacy of translation." When we form such hypotheses based on
observations of speakers' behavior, that evidence always underdetermines our
hypothesis, and the evidence could be made to fit other translations, even if
they start to sound a bit strange to us. Hence, "gavagai" might also be
translated as "dinner" (if the locals eat rabbits) or "Lo, an undetached rabbit
part!" We might narrow the plausible translations a bit with further
observation, though not to the logical exclusion of all others. Direct queries
of the local speakers might also winnow the set of plausible translations a bit,
but this presumes a command of a great deal of abstract terminology that we share with those
speakers, and this command would presumably rest upon a shared understanding of
the simpler sorts of vocabulary with which we started. Hence, nothing that we
can observe about those speakers will completely determine the correctness of
one translation over all competitors and translation is always indeterminate.
This is not to say that we should not prefer some translations over others, but
our grounds for doing so are usually pragmatic concerns about simplicity and
efficiency, We should also note that each speaker is in much the same position
when it comes to understanding other speakers even in her mother tongue; we have
only the observable behaviors of other speakers and familiarity with our own
usage of such terms, and we must make ongoing assessments of other speakers in
conversation in just these ways. Donald Davidson, Quine's student, would
continue to develop these ideas even further in Quine's wake, emphasizing that
the interpretation we do on an everyday basis was no less radical than his
mentor was suggesting of the field linguist (see his 1984).
Quine's work inspired many, but also came under sharp attack.
The behaviorism at the heart
of his account has fallen out of favor with the majority of philosophers and
cognitive scientists. Much of Noam Chomsky's (1959) critique of B.F Skinner may
be said to apply to Quine's work. The emphasis on innateness and tacit knowledge in Chomsky's work has been
subject to intense criticism as well, but this criticism has not pointed
philosophers and linguists back towards the sort of strongly behaviorist
empiricism on which Quine's account was founded. Still, most contemporary
philosophers of language owe some debt to Quine for dismantling the dogmas of
early analytical philosophy and opening new avenues of inquiry.
b. The Later Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein left Cambridge in
the early 1920s and pursued projects outside academia for several years. He
returned in 1929 and began doing very different sorts of work. It is a matter of
great debate, even among Wittgenstein acolytes, how much affinity there is
between these stages. Many philosophers of language will speak of "the later
Wittgenstein" as though the earlier views were wholly different and
incompatible, while others insist that there is strong continuity of themes and
methods. Though his early work was widely misunderstood at the time, there can
be little doubt that some important changes took place, and these are worth
noting here.
In the posthumously published Philosophical
Investigations (1953), Wittgenstein broke with some of the theoretical
aspirations of analytical
philosophy in the first half of the century. Where analytical philosophers
of language had strived for elegant, parsimonious logical systems, the
Investigations suggested that language was a diverse, mercurial
collection of "language games"—goal-directed social activities for which words
were just so many tools to get things done, rather than fixed and eternal
components in a logical structure. Representation, denotation and picturing were
some of the goals that we might have in playing a language game, but they were
hardly the only ones. This turn in Wittgenstein's philosophy ushered in a new
concern for the "pragmatic" dimensions of language usage. To speak of the
pragmatic significance of an expression in this sense is to consider how
grasping it might be manifested in actions, or the guiding of actions, and thus
to turn our attention to usage rather than abstract notions of logical form
common to earlier forms of analytical philosophy. (Speech
act theorists will also distinguish between pragmatics and semantics in a
slightly more restrictive sense, as we shall see in §4.2.) The view that "meaning is use" (1953, p.43) was often
attributed to him, though interpretations of this view have varied widely.
Wright (1980 and 2001) read this as a call to social conventionalism about
meaning, McDowell (1984) explicitly rejected such a conclusion and Brandom
(1994) took it as an entry point into an account of meaning that is both
normative and pragmatic (that is, articulated in terms of obligations and
entitlements to do things in certain ways according to shared practices). But it
can be safely said that Wittgenstein rejected a picture of language as a
detached, logical sort of picturing of the facts and inserted a concern for its
pragmatic dimensions. One cannot look at the representational dimension of
language alone and expect to understand what meaning is.
A second major development in the later Wittgenstein's work
was his treatment of rules and rule-following. Meaning claims had a certain hold
over our actions, but not the sort that something like a law of nature would.
Claims about meaning reflect norms of usage and Wittgenstein argued that this
made the very idea of a "private language" absurd. By this, he means it would
not be possible to have a language whose meanings were accessible to only one
person, the speaker of that language. Much of modern philosophy was built on
Cartesian models that grounded public language on a foundation of private
episodes, which implied that much (perhaps all) of our initial grasp of language
would also be private. The problem here, said Wittgenstein, is that to follow a
rule for the use of an expression, appeal to something private will not suffice.
Thus, a language intelligible to only one person would be impossible because it
would be impossible for that speaker to establish the meanings of its putative
signs.
If a language were private, then the only way to establish
meanings would be by some form of private ostension, for example, concentrating on
one's experiences and privately saying, "I shall call this sensation
'pain'." But to establish a sign's meaning, something must impress upon the
speaker a way of correctly using that sign in the future, or else the putative
ostension is of no value. Assuming we began with such a private episode, what
could be happening on subsequent uses of the term? We cannot simply say that it
feels the same to us as it did before, or strikes us the same way,
for those sorts of impressions are common even when we make errors and therefore
cannot constitute correctness. One might say that one only has to remember how
one used the sign in the past, but this still leaves us wondering. What
is one remembering in that case? Until we say how a private episode could
establish a pattern of correct usage, memory is beside the point. To alleviate
this difficulty, Wittgenstein turned his attention to the realm of public
phenomena, and suggested that those who make the same moves with the rules share
a "lebensform" or "form of life," which most have taken to be one's culture or
the sum total of the social practices in which one takes part. Kripke (1982)
offered a notable interpretation of Wittgenstein's private language argument,
though opinions vary on its fidelity to Wittgenstein's work. Subsequent
generations of philosophers on both sides of the Atlantic would be profoundly
influenced by this argument and struggle with its implications for decades to
come.
4. Major Areas in the Contemporary Field
After the seminal works of Quine and Wittgenstein at mid-century,
the majority of views expressed in the field may be broadly lumped into two
groups: those emphasizing truth conditions for sentences in a theory of meaning
and those emphasizing use. Truth-conditional theories continue the formal
analysis of Frege, Carnap and Tarski, minus Positivism's more
radical assumptions, while use theories and speech act theory take
Wittgenstein's emphasis on the pragmatic to heart. A brief overview of major
figures and issues in each of these follows.
a. Truth-Conditional Theories of Meaning
The majority of philosophers of language working in the
analytical tradition share Frege's intuition that we know
the meaning of a word when we know the role it plays in a sentence and we know
the meaning of a sentence when we know the conditions under which it would be
true. Davidson (1967) and
Lewis (1972) argued for such an approach and stand as watersheds in its
development. Truth-conditional theories generally begin with the assumption that
something is a language or a linguistic expression if and only if its
significant parts can represent the facts of the world. Sentences represent
facts or states of affairs in the world, names refer to objects, and so forth.
The central focus of a theory of meaning remains sentences though, since it is
sentences that apparently constitute the most basic units of information. For
instance, an utterance of the name "John Coltrane" does not seem to say anything
until we point to someone and say, "This is John Coltrane" or assert "John
Coltrane was born in North Carolina" and so on. This view of the sentence as the
most basic units of meaning is compatible with compositionality, the view that
sentences are composed of a finite stock of simpler elements that may be reused
and recombined in novel ways, so long as we understand the meanings of those
subsentential expressions as contributions to the meanings of sentences. We
might understand names and other referring expressions as "picking out" their
referents, to which the rest of a sentence attributes something, very roughly
speaking. Truth-conditional theories of meaning have also been attractive to
those who would prefer a naturalistic and reductionist semantics, appealing to
nothing outside the natural world as an explainer of meaning. Strongly
naturalistic accounts are also given by Evans (1983), Devitt (1981), and Devitt
and Sterelny (1999).
Much attention in this area in the last twenty-five years has
been directed at theories of reference, given the importance of explicating
their contribution to truth-theoretical accounts. The view, often attributed to Frege, that the sense of
proper names was a function of a set of
descriptions led many philosophers seeking a truth-conditional account to
include such descriptions in the truth conditions for sentences in which they
occurred as a means of explaining their reference. However, a new wave of
interest in more direct forms of reference began in the 1970s. The enthusiasm
for this approach grew out of Kripke's Naming and Necessity (1980) and a
series of articles by Hilary Putnam. (1973 and 1975) There, they attacked the
notion that identity statements expressed synonymies, known a priori at the time of
their introduction. If we (or whoever introduces the term) stipulate that
Aristotle is the author of Nicomachean Ethics, tutor of Alexander, and so
on,
it would seem to be known a
priori that this was true of the referent of that name. The referent is
just that thing which satisfies all or most of the "cluster of descriptions"
that express the sense of that name. But if we discovered that much or all of
this was false of the person we had called "Aristotle," would this imply that
Aristotle did not exist, or that someone else was Aristotle? Much the same could
be said of natural kind terms: we took whales to be fish, but those big
cetaceans have lungs and mammary glands, so are there no whales after all?
Instead, Putnam and Kripke suggested that proper names and natural kind terms (and
descriptions like "the square root of 289") were rigid designators, or
expressions that referred to the same objects or kinds in every possible world
without that relation being mediated by some form of descriptive content. Other
pieces of descriptive content are actually associated with those expressions—we do say that Aristotle wrote Nicomachean Ethics and that whales are
mammals, and so on—but their reference is fixed at the time of their introduction
and our use preserves that reference, not the descriptive content. The
descriptions associated with a rigid designator ("the author of Nicomachean
Ethics," and so on) are thus always revisable. This has been seen as a form of
externalism in semantics, whereby the
meanings of words are not entirely determined by psychological states of the
speakers who use them, or as Putnam famously quipped, "meanings just ain't in
the head" (1975, p. 227). Notable recent works in this field include Kitcher and
Stanford (2000), Soames (2002) and Berger (2002). Several accounts have
suggested that while rigid designation in itself has some plausibility, the
reductionist elements of these theories leave us with an implausibly direct and
unmediated account of reference that must be refined or replaced (Dummett
(1974), MacBeth (1995) and Wolf (2006)).
b. Meaning and Use
Verificationist theories fell out of favor after Quine, but
were reinvigorated by Michael
Dummett's work on meaning and logic as well as his extensive exegetical work
on Frege. (See his 1963,
1974, 1975 and 1976.) Dummett shared the Positivists' concern with the cognitive
significance of a statement, which he interpreted as Frege's real concern in
talking about sense in the first place. Many read Frege as a Platonist about
meaning, but Dummett challenged the need for such ontological extensions and
their plausibility as explainers of semantic facts in general. Dummett's
position was less a product of a priori ontological
stinginess than a continuation of Wittgensteinian themes. Dummett argued that a
model of meaning is a model of our understanding when we know such meanings. We
are sometimes able to express this understanding explicitly, but a model of
meaning could not include such a criterion of explicitness on pain of an
infinite regress. (Note Wittgenstein's Private Language
Argument on this point.) Thus, the knowledge that generally constitutes
understanding must be implicit knowledge and we can only ascribe such implicit
knowledge when we have some sort of observable criteria by which to do so. These
observable criteria will be matters of the use of sentences and expressions.
(See Dummett 1973, pp. 216ff.)
While such a mix of usage and verification may be
straightforward for sentences and conditions that occasionally obtain, it is
quite another matter in cases in which they do not. We can grasp the meaning of
a sentence whose truth conditions never actually obtain or can never
(practically speaking) be verified, for example, "every even number is the sum of two
primes." Knowing what it is for some condition to obtain and knowing that a
particular case exemplifies this are separable conditions, so meaning cannot be
the simple verification of placing someone in a certain condition and seeing
what sentences they utter. Dummett expanded his account by the inclusion of
conditions like providing correct inferential consequences of a sentence,
correct novel use of a sentence and judgments about sufficient or probable
evidence for the truth or falsity of a sentence. He maintains that some form of
self-verifying presentations will support these demands and allow us to derive
all the features of language use and meaning, though this remains a sticking
point for many who are skeptical of such episodes and epistemic foundationalism
in general.
Dummett's reading of Wittgenstein's emphasis on use has not
been the only one, though. Following Sellars (1967), theorists like Harman (1982
and 1987), Block (1986 and 1987), and Brandom (1994) have all pursued an
"inferential role" or "conceptual role" semantics that characterized a grasp of
the meaning of sentences as a grasp of the inferences one would make to and from
that sentence. Block and Harman have explicitly taken this as a basis of a
functionalist account of mental content in psychology, as well. Brandom has not
pursued such causal explanatory strategies, but instead has emphasized the
rational dimension of linguistic competence and the importance of inference to
such an account. We grasp the meaning of a sentence when we understand other
sentences as relevant to it and infer to and from them in the course of giving
and asking for reasons for the claims that we make. A substantial extension of
this work, offering a robustly normative account of meaning in sharp contrast to
the causal reductionism mentioned above, is offered in Lance and O'Leary-Hawthorne (1997).
c. Speech Act Theory and Pragmatics
Wittgenstein's later work
sparked interest in the pragmatic dimensions of language use among some British
philosophers working not long after his death, but a number grew exasperated
with the more deflationary and "ordinary language" approaches of Wittgenstein's
acolytes, who saw almost no role for theoretical accounts in describing language
at all. Some opted instead to pursue what has come to be known as speech act
theory, led initially by the work of John Austin. (See Grice (1975), Austin
(1962) and Searle (1969).) These philosophers sought an account of language by
which sentences were tools for doing things, including a taxonomy of uses to
which pieces of the language could be put. While conventional meaning remained
important, speech act theorists extended their focus to an examination of the
different ways in which utterances and inscriptions of sentences might play a
role in achieving various goals. For instance, the sentence
(16) It is sunny outside.
could be a report, an admonition not to take an umbrella, a
lie (if it's not sunny), practicing English, a taunt and many other things
depending on the scenario in which it is put to use.
To see clearly how speech act theorists might address these
issues, we should take note of one of its central doctrines, the
pragmatics/semantics distinction. We may state this generally by saying that
semantic information pertains to linguistic expressions (such as words and
sentences), while pragmatic information pertains to utterances and the facts
surrounding them. The study of pragmatics thus
includes no attention to features like truth or the reference of words and
expressions, but it does include attention to information about the context in
which a speaker made the utterance and how those conditions allow the speaker to
express one proposition rather than another. This strongly contextual element of
pragmatics often leads to special attention to the goals that a speaker might
achieve by uttering a sentence in a particular way in that context and why she
might have done so. Thus, what a speaker means in saying something is often
explained by an emphasis on the speaker's intentions: to reveal to the hearer
that the speaker wants the hearer to respond in a certain way and thus to get
the hearer to respond in this way. However, there may be cases in which these
intentions have nothing to do with the meaning of the sentence. I might say, "It
is raining outside," with the intention of getting you to take your umbrella,
but that's not what the sentence means. Likewise, I might have said, "The
Weather Channel is predicting rain this afternoon," with those intentions, but
this does not entail that those two sentences mean the same thing.
Those intentions whose success is entirely a matter of
getting a hearer's recognition of the actual intention itself are called
illocutionary intentions; those intentions whose success is entirely a
matter of getting the hearer to do something (above and beyond understanding the
semantic content of what is said) are called perlocutionary intentions.
Perlocutionary intentions must be achieved through illocutionary acts, for
example,
making you aware of my intentions to get you to realize something about the
weather leads you to think of your umbrella and take it. Following Bach and Harnish (1979), speech act theorists typically characterize speech acts by four
analytical subcomponents of speech acts: (1) utterance acts, that is, the very
voicing or inscribing of words and sentences; (2) propositional acts, that is,
referring to things and predicating properties and relations of them; (3)
illocutionary acts, by which speakers interact with other speakers and the
utterances constitute moves in that interaction, for example, promises and commands; and
(4) perlocutionary acts, by which speakers bring about or achieve something in
others by what they say, for example, convincing or persuading someone. Some theorists would also add "meaning intention" and
"communicative intention" to this list to emphasize shared understanding of the
conventional meanings attached with words and the intersubjectivity of speech
acts. As these categories might imply, speech act theory has also incorporated
far more consideration of conversational features of discourse and the social
aspects of communications than other branches of the philosophy of language. For
this reason, it offers promising points of connection between sophisticated
semantic accounts and the empirical research of social scientists.
Grice (1975) also suggested that philosophy must consider
the ways in which speakers go beyond what is strictly, overtly said by their
utterances to consider what is contextually implicated by them. By "implicated,"
here, we are considering the ways in which the things a speaker says may invite
another speaker to some further set of conclusions, but not in the strict
logical sense of entailment or a purely formal matter of conventional meanings.
Grice divided these implicatures into two large categories: conventional
implicatures and conversational implicatures. Conventional implicatures are
those assigned to utterances based on the conventional meanings of the words
used, though not in the ways familiar from ordinary logical entailments. For
instance:
(17) Michael is an Orioles fan, but he doesn't live in
Baltimore.
(18) Michael is an Orioles fan, and he doesn't live in
Baltimore.
(19) Michael's being an Orioles fan is unexpected, given that
he doesn't live in Baltimore.
Here, (19) is implied by (17), but not by (18). This failure
is not a matter of differences in what makes (17) and (18) true, but in the way
in which conventions and conversational principles allow speakers to convey such
information. Roughly, the word "but" is used by English speakers to emphasize
contrast and surprise, as a speaker would in saying (17).
Conversational implicatures are assigned based on a series of
maxims and assumptions by which speakers in conversation cooperate with one
another, according to Grice. He suggests maxims of quantity (make your
contribution informative but not excessively so), quality (make your
contribution true), relation (be relevant), and manner (be perspicuous). To get
a sense of how to apply these, consider one of Grice's (1975) examples:
(20) Smith doesn't seem to have a girlfriend these days.
(21) He has been paying a lot of visits to New York
lately.
Imagine two people having a conversation, with A saying (20)
and B saying (21). B implicates that Smith might have a girlfriend in New York,
assuming that B is following the maxims mentioned above. If not, say,
because B is saying something false or irrelevant, then speakers cannot
cooperate and communication collapses. Grice contends that these conversational
implicatures are calculable given the right sorts of contextual and background
information, along with the linguistic meaning of what is said and the speakers'
adherence to the cooperative maxims described earlier, and much of the
literature on conversational implicature has attempted to make good on this
notion. Many philosophers working on these aspects of pragmatics worry that
these maxims will not suffice as an account of implicature however, and readers
should consult Davis (1998) for the most current set of objections to classic
Gricean accounts.
Attention to both forms of implicature has drawn
philosophers' attention to matters of presupposition, as well. As the
name would suggest, the discussion of this subject focuses on the sorts of
information required as background for various sorts of logical and
conversational features to obtain. The well-worn example, "Have you stopped
robbing liquor stores?" presupposes that you have been robbing liquor stores.
Implicatures of both forms thus involve various sorts of presupposition, for
example
the conventional implicature of "but" in (17) presupposes a proposition about
the demographics of Orioles fans, and much recent work in pragmatics has been
devoted to developing typologies of presupposition at work in conversation. The
two most serious questions for theorists are (1) how presuppositions
are introduced into or "triggered" in the sentences in which they play a role and
(2) how they are "projected" or carried from the clauses and parts of sentences
in which they appear up into the higher-level sentences. The origin of much of
the work on this is Langendoen and Savin (1971), and a vast literature has
developed in light of it in linguistics and formal semantics.
5. Future Directions and Emerging Debates
While linguistic analysis does not dominate thinking in
analytical philosophy as it did for much of the twentieth century, it remains a
vibrant field that continues to develop. As in the early days of analytical
philosophy, there is great interest in parallels between the content of
utterances and the attribution of content to mental states, but many cognitive
scientists have moved away from the classic analytical assumption that thoughts
had a symbolic or sentence-like content. Following the directions mapped out in
Rumelhart and McClelland (1986) some cognitive scientists have embraced
connectionism, a view that emphasizes the dynamic interaction between large sets
of interconnected nodules (much like neurons in the brain), as a model for
cognition. Thought would thus not be symbol processing, akin to an internal
monologue, and the scope of traditional accounts of language and meaning would
be greatly diminished. Readers may consult Tomberlin (1995) for an overview of
the field and Churchland (1995) for one of its most ardent proponents. A defense
of more traditional symbol-processing approaches has also developed, notably in
the work of Fodor and Lepore (1999), complemented by even more radical
challenges to symbol processing in the form of dynamic systems theory (see van
Gelder 1995 and Rockwell 2005).
Much recent work in the philosophy of language has also been
concerned with the context sensitivity of expressions and sentences. This has
been driven in no small part by an increasing emphasis on context sensitivity in
epistemology (DeRose 1998; Lewis 1996) and meta-ethics (Dancy 1993). Of course,
much more emphasis had been put on context over the last fifty years by use and
speech act theories. Recently, some have come out in favor of context
insensitivity as the predominant mode of natural languages. Cappelen and Lepore
(2005) do not argue that there are no context sensitive words or sentences, but
rather for semantic minimalism, the view that there are relatively few and they
are familiar categories like pronouns and indexicals. They combine this with new
work on speech act content to mount a substantial challenge to a great many
contemporary philosophers. This debate between minimalists and contextualists
promises to be a lively one in the philosophy of language over the next few
years.
6. References and Further Reading
(Works are listed first by their original dates of
publication, with more recent and widely available editions included in some
entries.)
Austin, J. L.
(1962) How To Do Things With Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bach, K. and
Harnish, R. (1979) Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts. Cambridge,
MA: The MIT Press.
Berger, Alan.
(2002) Terms and Truth: Reference Direct and Anaphoric. Cambridge, MA:
The MIT Press.
Block, N.
(1986) "Advertisement For a Semantics for Psychology." In P. French, T. Uehling
and H. Wettstein (Eds.). Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 10, pp.
615-678. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Block, N.
(1987) "Functional Role and Truth Conditions," Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society 61, 157-181.
Brandom, R.
(1994) Making It Explicit. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Cappelen, H.
and Lepore, E. (2005) Insensitive Semantics. Oxford: Basil Blackwell
Pub.
Carnap, R.
(1928) The Logical Structure of the World (Die Logische Aufbau der Welt).
George, E. (trans.) New York: Open Court Classics, 1999.
Chomsky, N.
(1959) "A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior." In Language,
35(1), 26-58.
Churchland, P.
(1995) Engine of Reason, Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey Into the
Brain. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Dancy, J.
(1993) Moral Reasons. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Pub.
Davidson, D.
(1967) "Truth and Meaning." In Davidson (1984), pp. 17-36.
Davidson, D.
(1984) Inquiries Into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Davis, W.
(1998) Implicature: Intention, Convention and Principle in the Failure of
Gricean Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
DeRose K.
(1995) "Solving the Skeptical Problem." The Philosophical Review
104(1), 1-7, 17-52.
Devitt,
Michael. (1981) Designation. New York: Columbia University Press.
Devitt, M. and
Sterelny, K. (1999) Language and Reality. Cambridge, MA: The MIT
Press.
Dummett, M.
(1963) "Realism." In Dummett (1978), pp. 145-165.
Dummett, M.
(1973) "The Philosophical Basis of Intuitionistic Logic." In Dummett (1978), pp.
215-247.
Dummett, M.
(1974) "The Social Character of Meaning." In Dummett (1978), pp. 420-430.
Dummett, M.
(1975) "Frege's Distinction Between Sense and Reference." In Dummett (1978), pp.
116-144.
Dummett, M.
(1976) "What Is a Theory of Meaning? (II)" In Truth and Meaning: Essays in Semantics. G. Evans and J. McDowell. (Eds.) Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
Dummett, M.
(1978) Truth and Other Enigmas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Evans, G.
(1983) The Varieties of Reference. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Field, H.
(1972) "Tarski's Theory of Truth." Journal of
Philosophy 69, 347-75.
Field, H.
(1977) "Logic, Meaning and Conceptual Role" Journal of Philosophy
74, 379-408.
Fodor, J and E.
Lepore. (1999) "All at Sea in Semantic Space: Churchland on Meaning Similarity."
Journal of Philosophy 96, 381-403.
Frege, G.
(1892) "On Sense and Reference." In The Frege Reader. Beaney, M. (Ed.)
London: Penguin Press, 1997.
Frege, G.
(1884) The Foundations of Arithmetic: A Logico-Mathematical Enquiry into the
Concept of Number. J. Austin (Trans.) Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1980.
Grice, P.
(1975) "Logic and Conversation." In Studies in the Way of Words, pp.
22-40. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Harman, G.
(1982) "Conceptual Role Semantics." Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic
23, 242-56.
Harman, G.
(1987) "(Non-solipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics." In New Directions in
Semantics. E. Lepore. (Ed.) London: Academic Press.
Hempel, C.
(1950) "Problems and Changes in the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning." Revenue
Internationale de Philosophie 11, 41-63.
Kitcher, P. and
M. Stanford. (2000) "Refining the Causal Theory of Reference for Natural Kind
Terms." Philosophical Studies 97, 99-129.
Kripke, S.
(1972) Naming and Necessity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kripke, S.
(1982) Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Lance, M. and
O'Leary-Hawthorne, J. (1997) The Grammar of Meaning. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
Langendoen,
D.T. and Savin, H.B. (1971) "The Projection Problem for Presuppositions." In
C.J. Fillmore and D.T. Langendoen (Eds.) Studies in Linguistic Semantics.
New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston.
Lewis, D.
(1972) "General Semantics." In G. Harman and D. Davidson (Eds.) Semantics of
Natural Language. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Pub.
Lewis, D.
(1996) "Elusive Knowledge." Australasian Journal of Philosophy
74(4), 549-67.
Locke, J.
(1690) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. P. Nidditch. (Ed.)
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.
MacBeth, D.
(1995) "Names, Natural Kinds and Rigid Designation." Philosophical Studies
79, 259-281.
McDowell, J. (1984) "Wittgenstein on Following a Rule."
Synthese 58(3), 325-364.
Meinong, A. (1904) "Über Gegenstandstheorie." In A. Meinong (ed.),
Untersuchungen zur
Gegenstandstheorie und Psychologie, Leipzig: Barth.
Mill, J.S.
(1843) System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive. Stockton, CA:
University Press of the Pacific, 2002.
Neurath, O.
(1933) "Protocol Sentences." G. Shick. (Trans.) In A. Ayer (Ed.) Logical
Positivism, pp. 199-208. New York: The Free Press, 1959.
Putnam, H. (1973) "Meaning and
Reference." The Journal of Philosophy 70,
699-711.
Putnam, H.
(1975) "The Meaning of Meaning." In Mind, Language and Reality, pp.
215-271. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rockwell, T.
(2005) "Attractor Spaces as Modules: A Semi-Eliminative Reduction of Symbolic AI
to Dynamic Systems Theory." Minds and Machines 15(1), 23-95.
Rumelhart, D.
and McClelland, J. and the PDP Research Group. (2006) Parallel Distributed
Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition, Vol. 2:
Psychological and Biological Models. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Russell, B.
(1905) "On Denoting." Mind 14, 479-493.
Russell, B.
(1919) "Descriptions." In Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy pp.
167-180. London: George Allen and Unqin Ltd.
Quine, W.V.O.
(1953) "Two Dogmas of Empiricism." In From a Logical Point of View, pp.
20-46. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Quine, W.V.O.
(1960) Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Quine, W.V.O.
(1969) "Ontological Relativity." In Ontological Relativity and Other Essays,
pp 26-68. New York: Columbia University Press.
Schlick, M.
(1933) "Positivism and Realism." D. Rynin. (Trans.). In A.
Ayer (Ed.) Logical Positivism, pp. 82-107. New York: The Free Press,
1959.
Searle, J.
(1969) Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press.
Sellars, W.
(1967) Science and Metaphysics. Atascasdero, CA: Ridgeview Press.
Soames, S.
(2002) Beyond Rigidity: The Unfinished Semantic Agenda of Naming and
Necessity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tarski, A. (1933) "The concept of truth in the languages of the
deductive sciences." In A. Tarski. Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics, papers
from 1923 to 1938, pp. 152-278. Corcoran, J. (Ed.). Indianapolis : Hackett
Publishing Company, 1983.
Tarski, A.
(1944) "The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics."
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 4, 341-375
Tomberlin, J.
(Ed.) (1995) Philosophical Perspectives 9: AI, Connectionism and
Philosophical Psychology. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Press.
Van Gelder, T.
(1995) "What Might Cognition Be If Not Computation?" Journal of
Philosophy 92, 345-381.
Wittgenstein,
L. (1922) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. C. Ogden. (Trans.) New York:
Dover Pub., 1999.
Wittgenstein,
L. (1953) Philosophical Investigations: The German Text, With a Revised
English Translation. Anscombe, G. and Anscombe, E. (Trans.). Oxford: Basil
Blackwell Pub., 2002.
Wolf, M. (2006)
"Rigid Designation and Anaphoric Theories of Reference." Philosophical
Studies 130(2), 351-375.
Wright, C.
(1980). Wittgenstein on the Foundations of Mathematics. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Wright, C.
(2001). Rails to Infinity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
|
