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Overview

What’s New in… Philosophy of Language

The 20th century saw the complex relationship between language, mind and world become absolutely central to philosophy. Steven Geisz guides us through the debates, the different positions and the latest thinking.

We can see philosophy of language as beginning with two broad questions: (1) What is the relationship between language and the world?; (2) What is the relationship between language and the mind?

Regarding the first question, there are, obviously, numerous connections between language and the world. For instance, speakers use language to describe how the world is, and both language and language users are themselves parts of the world. Typically, the use of language to describe the world is glossed by saying that language is a type of representation, and that words or sentences refer to the world (or chunks of it). The word ‘dog,’ for example, can represent a particular furry creature, and the sentence ‘That dog is mangy’ can represent the fact that the creature in question is a mangy one.

Traditionally, questions about representation and reference have been taken as a starting point for philosophical questions about the language-world relationship, such as: What is linguistic representation? How do words refer to anything at all? Or in more ordinary terms: What gives words their meanings, and what is it for a word to even have a meaning?

Turning to the language-mind relationship, there are myriad connections between language and mentality.

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