Philosophy of Language

The Philosophy of Language is a specialization of Epistemology, which is a major branch of Philosophy. The Philosophy of Language is about understanding how Language relates to the Mind and Society. How the source and structure of Language affects or influences our thinking, and how we use Language to control and interact with each other as well as the World is a philosophical pursuit. Linguistics, by contrast, is the detailed study of the actual structural features of Language in Syntax and Semantics. Linguistics also studies differences and similarities between all the World's languages. Both Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language are concerned with how Language functions as modes of our Communication, two overlapping areas of the same Science focused on the Production and Semiotics of Language.

History and Development

The emergence of the Philosophy of Language was the theory that our philosophical questions were actually Language problems, and they could be clarified through Logical-Linguistic Analysis, hence, Analytic Philosophy. By all accounts, this work originated with Gottlob Frege, and was eventually called “The Linguistic Turn” in Philosophy.^[1]

In the first phase of this “turn”, Frege wanted to clarify Language by using the rules of Logic, which also spun off another specialization in the Philosophy of Logic. The goal was to remove psychological considerations from linguistic analysis in order to disassociate Words from Mental States or Mental Pictures. This turn of the Twentieth Century work blossomed with Bertrand Russell, George Edward Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolf Carnap, and Willard Van Orman Quine, becoming “Logicism”, an effort to formalize Propositions to show how Language mirrors the World. This put Linguistics squarely into the realm of philosophical Truth and the age-old debate between Empiricism and Rationalism.^[2]

A second, third, and even fourth phase from the 1930s was carried by Wittgenstein, and then in the 1960s by Peter Strawson, John Austin, and John Searle. While this work diversified, the key developments were to theorize that Natural Language, or “Ordinary Language” is needed to understand how Language functions, as well as to posit that Ordinary Language performs Actions, or “Speech Acts”. So, the Logicism had given way to more of a straight Linguistics and Semiotics. By the 1970s, a third wave moved in two new directions, with a focus on “Indexicals”, Proper Names, and Natural Words by Saul Kripke, David Lewis, Hilary Putnam, and David Kaplan, while Paul Grice worked on the Rationality of Language and Communication, which was no longer Empiricism, and tied in with the Philosophy of Mind. This became a focus on the Intention, Perspective, and Cognitive Nature of Language and Discourse, with Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson. After the 1980s, Robert Brandom and Charles Travis developed even more “Contextualism” and “Inferentialism”, where Truth and Reference are no longer Semantic, but Pragmatic, with emphasis on a Commitment we make when wer speak together.^[2]

Philosophy of Language Today

As with a few other specializations in Philosophy, the Philosophy of Language is not what it once was in its heyday of the mid-to-late Twentieth Century, making up a major portion, if not all of Analytic Philosophy. That movement, still pushed today in English-speaking academia, has little to offer compared to the “sexy” philosophers we all remember who have mostly been Continental, that is, French and German. This is ironic given the heavy influence of the German Frege on Anglo-American Analytic Philosophy. Due to the rapid rise of “Brain Sciences”, Neurological Science and Experimental Psychology, much of the project of Analytic Philosophy, and thus, the Philosophy of Language, has been rendered moot, one could say. It has become purely academic to pontificate on how we use Language and Semiotics in general to refer to the World, because it begs the question as to literally how we do it, and that question is studied and addressed by the Brain Sciences. Nevertheless, we must remember that Science itself is properly a branch of Metaphysics, so it's not that philosophers aren't a part of the discussion, it's just that rigidly formalizing how we use Language did almost nothing to answer the larger questions, and often became just another name for Linguistics, which is usually found in the English Department.

References

1. Godart-Wendling, Béatrice. “History of Analytic Philosophy of Language”, a detailed history of the Philosophy of Language..
2. Ibid..
3. Ibid..