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Taught for 1-on-1 University

Philosophers of language try to give theories about languages. The “founding fathers” of philosophy of language—such as Frege, Russell, and Tarski—were concerned with non-natural, formal languages (e.g., the languages of math or formal logic), but gradually the field has moved towards studying natural languages (e.g., English, Spanish, Russian).

We can distinguish between two different projects within the philosophy of language. The first project asks foundational questions. Some of these questions are about concepts associated with language. These are questions like: What is meaning? What is truth? What is a language? Some of these questions are programmatic. These are questions like: What does an adequate theory of language look like? What is a theory of language supposed to explain? And some of these questions are about the grounds of language. What determines the meaning of a word? What is it about the world that gives rise to meaning? What makes it the case that some sentence is true or false? Is meaning prior to language or vice versa? Can we have thought without language?

The second project within the philosophy of language asks questions about the details of a particular theory of meaning. Scholars who both work within this second project and are concerned with natural language are formal semanticists, housed either in philosophy or linguistics departments. These thinkers adopt a particular theoretical framework in which to study meaning (usually, one indebted to Noam Chomsky and a man called Richard Montague) and work on matching natural language expressions with meaning-values within that theory. But many logicians, computer scientists, scientists investigating AI, and mathematicians also pursue some version of this second project.

In this course, we’re going to look primarily at the first project within the philosophy of language. We will do this by reading through some of the foundational texts within the philosophy of language.