Language is one of the most distinctive and pervasive features of human life. But its theoretical foundations are still a matter of great controversy. These controversies often lie dormant in ordinary life, only coming to the fore we try to understand precisely how some piece of language works. (This happens a lot in philosophy, where the examination of arguments often involves teasing out the precise meaning of the sentences involved.)
The nature of meaning has been of interest to philosophers since Plato, but the development of precise theories of meaning really accelerated in the twentieth century. Formal semantics emerged in the 1960s and 1970s as logicians, philosophers, and linguists realized that formal languages might be used to understand – not merely refine – natural languages. This course lies squarely in this tradition of approaches to meaning, though it is not especially formal and the focus is on conceptual issues rather than developing formal treatments of any particularly recalcitrant bits of language.
Information about the course as delivered at Adelaide can be found in the Course Outline.
The course is structured into three main units each with a distinct topical focus. The course begins with the issue of lexical semantics, or the meanings of words, distinguishing various proposals (that the meanings of words are definitions, or concepts, or worldly referents), including a discussion of Frege’s distinction between Sinn and Bedeutung, and culminating in a discussion of the semantics of names. We will investigate the meanings of interesting classes of English expressions, such as: proper names (Alice), kind terms (gold), descriptions (the most diligent student), and indexicals and demonstratives (now, here, that). We turn then to sentence meaning, discussing the nature of propositions, the notion of entailment and semantic presupposition, and the notion of compositionality – the issue of how the meaning of a complex sentence may be determined by its structure and the meanings of its constituents. The third part of the course looks at pragmatic features of language in context of use: indexicals and demonstratives, implicature, and speech acts, focusing on how to understand what might be communicated by a sentence beyond its literal meaning. We also look in this part at some issues in the politics of language. Finally, we turn to the question of language and thought – does the language we speak constrain the thoughts we can think and the beliefs we can have? (Not so much.)
I welcome any feedback on the materials, as well as thoughts on omissions and ideas for additions.
Philosophy of Language by Antony Eagle is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0