Philosophy of language

Philosophy of language, in the analytical tradition, explored logic, the nature of meaning, and accounts of the mind.If the claim of philosophers to be unbiased were all it pretends to be, it would also have to take account of language and its whole significance in relation to speculative philosophy ... Language is partly something originally given, partly that which develops freely. And just as the individual can never reach the point at which he becomes absolutely independent ... so too with language.• Unilalianism Philosophy of language, in the analytical tradition, explored logic, the nature of meaning, and accounts of the mind. Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell were pivotal figures. These writers were followed by Wittgenstein (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus), the Vienna Circle as well as the logical positivists, and Quine. A foundational work was Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale, published posthumously in 1916. Philosophy of Language may investigate the relations between language, language users, and the world. The scope of Philosophy of Language may include inquiry into the origins of language, the nature of meaning, the usage and cognition of language. It overlaps to some extent with the study of Epistemology, Logic, Philosophy of Mind and other fields (including linguistics and psychology). In a broader sense it may be said that the philosophy of language explores the relationship between language and reality. In particular, philosophy of language studies issues that cannot be addressed by other fields, like linguistics, or psychology. Major topics in the philosophy of language include the nature of meaning, intentionality, reference, the constitution of sentences, concepts, learning, and thought. In the West, inquiry into language stretches back to the 5th century BC with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. Both in India and in Greece, linguistic speculation predates the emergence of grammatical traditions of systematic description of language, which emerged around the 5th century BC in India (see Yāska), and around the 3rd century BC in Greece (see Rhianus). In the dialogue Cratylus, Plato considered the question of whether the names of things were determined by convention or by nature. He criticized conventionalism because it led to the bizarre consequence that anything can be conventionally denominated by any name. Hence, it cannot account for the correct or incorrect application of a name. He claimed that there was a natural correctness to names. To do this, he pointed out that compound words and phrases have a range of correctness. He also argued that primitive names had a natural correctness, because each phoneme represented basic ideas or sentiments. For example, for Plato the letter l and its sound represented the idea of softness. However, by the end of the Cronic, he had admitted that some social conventions were also involved, and that there were faults in the idea that phonemes had individual meanings. Aristotle interested himself with the issues of logic, categories, and meaning creation. He separated all things into categories of species and genus. He thought that the meaning of a predicate was established through an abstraction of the similarities between various individual things. This theory later came to be called nominalism. However, since Aristotle took these similarities to be constituted by a real commonality of form, he is more often considered a proponent of 'moderate realism'. The Stoic philosophers made important contributions to the analysis of grammar, distinguishing five parts of speech: nouns, verbs, appellatives (names or epithets), conjunctions and articles. They also developed a sophisticated doctrine of the lektón associated with each sign of a language, but distinct from both the sign itself and the thing to which it refers. This lektón was the meaning (or sense) of every term. The completelektón of a sentence is what we would now call its proposition. Only propositions were considered 'truth-bearers' or 'truth-vehicles' (i.e., they could be called true or false) while sentences were simply their vehicles of expression. Different lektá could also express things besides propositions, such as commands, questions and exclamations. Medieval philosophers were greatly interested in the subtleties of language and its usage. For many scholastics, this interest was provoked by the necessity of translating Greek texts into Latin. There were several noteworthy philosophers of language in the medieval period. According to Peter J. King, (although this has been disputed), Peter Abelard anticipated the modern ideas of sense and reference. Also, William of Ockham's Summa Logicae brought forward one of the first serious proposals for codifying a mental language.