Philosophy Department

Philosophy of Language (PHLU 3655)

Bryan Frances
 

Some marks and noises have meaning. How do they do it? That is, how do some marks and noises come to count as meaningful bits of language while others do not? Is it a matter of having a link to objects in the world, as ‘dog’ refers to dogs and ‘Aristotle’ refers to Aristotle? Maybe; perhaps that is what meaning consists in. But first, that doesn’t seem to work for some words, e.g., ‘and’. And anyway how do some marks and noises come to refer (to objects)? For instance, how do proper names such as ‘Albert Einstein’ do their own special job of referring? More generally, what gives whole sentences the meanings that they have? Do they get their meanings from the ideas we have in our minds when we use those sentences? Or is it sometimes the other way round: we get the ideas in our minds from the language we are taught?

Do sentences get their meanings in virtue of expressing certain abstract, mind and language independent propositions—e.g., the common meaning expressed by ‘London is pretty’ and ‘Londres est Jolie’? What is a proposition? Or are the meanings of sentences constructed from the ways we use the sentences in practice, or from what we are trying to do when we use them? That is, do sentences get their meanings from the ways we use them in our social interactions with one another? How is this answer different from the previous answers? On many occasions we say one thing and mean something else entirely. I say to you, ‘Oh, he’s a genius for sure,’ thereby conveying my disregard for his intelligence. More generally, there are all sorts of rules governing conversation that have little or nothing to do with the literal meanings of words. Very roughly, literal meaning = semantics, non-literal meaning and linguistic rules = pragmatics. How are these related?

Finally, there are some unbelievably good arguments in the philosophy of language for some truly unbelievable claims. For instance, no one has been able to figure out what’s wrong with a certain argument which concludes that our assertions have ridiculously exacting truth conditions; e.g., Fred’s assertion to his daughter in a perfectly ordinary context ‘The Earth is super-duper old’ has an incredibly discriminating truth condition: perhaps it’s true if the Earth is at least 347,342,343 years, 2 days, and 17.343432434 nanoseconds old, and it’s false if the Earth is even a billionth of a nanosecond younger. And then there are the so-called semantic paradoxes, which seem to show that the notion of truth is incoherent (so nothing is true or false, including what we just said). This is just a sample of the fascinating questions to be tackled in this course.