Philosophy of language
These writers were followed by Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus), the Vienna Circle, logical positivists, and Willard Van Orman Quine.
The Stoics made important contributions to the analysis of grammar, distinguishing five parts of speech: nouns, verbs, appellatives (names or epithets), conjunctions and articles.
[9] The scholastics of the high medieval period, such as Ockham and John Duns Scotus, considered logic to be a scientia sermocinalis (science of language).
The phenomena of vagueness and ambiguity were analyzed intensely, and this led to an increasing interest in problems related to the use of syncategorematic words, such as and, or, not, if, and every.
Linguists of the Renaissance and Baroque periods such as Johannes Goropius Becanus, Athanasius Kircher and John Wilkins were infatuated with the idea of a philosophical language reversing the confusion of tongues, influenced by the gradual discovery of Chinese characters and Egyptian hieroglyphs (Hieroglyphica).
European scholarship began to absorb the Indian linguistic tradition only from the mid-18th century, pioneered by Jean François Pons and Henry Thomas Colebrooke (the editio princeps of Varadarāja, a 17th-century Sanskrit grammarian, dating to 1849).
In the early 19th century, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard insisted that language ought to play a larger role in Western philosophy.
[26] Bertrand Russell, in his later writings and for reasons related to his theory of acquaintance in epistemology, held that the only directly referential expressions are what he called "logically proper names".
The final candidate for explanation is the innatist perspective, which states that at least some of the syntactic settings are innate and hardwired, based on certain modules of the mind.
[39] Emergentist models focus on the notion that natural faculties are a complex system that emerge from simpler biological parts.
Reductionist models attempt to explain higher-level mental processes in terms of the basic low-level neurophysiological activity.
Another argument is that it is difficult to explain how signs and symbols on paper can represent anything meaningful unless some sort of meaning is infused into them by the contents of the mind.
[43] In any case, many philosophers of mind and language, such as Ruth Millikan, Fred Dretske and Fodor, have recently turned their attention to explaining the meanings of mental contents and states directly.
Donald Davidson, in his essay "Thought and Talk", argued that the notion of belief could only arise as a product of public linguistic interaction.
In studies conducted by Caitlin Fausey at Stanford University speakers of English, Spanish and Japanese watched videos of two people popping balloons, breaking eggs and spilling drinks either intentionally or accidentally.
David Kellogg Lewis proposed a worthy reply to the first question by expounding the view that a convention is a "rationally self-perpetuating regularity in behavior".
Metasemantics is a term used by philosopher of language Robert Stainton to describe all those fields that attempt to explain how semantic facts arise.
[35] One fruitful source of research involves investigation into the social conditions that give rise to, or are associated with, meanings and languages.
Etymology (the study of the origins of words) and stylistics (philosophical argumentation over what makes "good grammar", relative to a particular language) are two other examples of fields that are taken to be metasemantic.
Rhetoric is the study of the particular words that people use to achieve the proper emotional and rational effect in the listener, be it to persuade, provoke, endear, or teach.
In linguistics and philosophy of language, the classical model survived in the Middle Ages, and the link between Aristotelian philosophy of science and linguistics was elaborated by Thomas of Erfurt's Modistae grammar (c. 1305), which gives an example of the analysis of the transitive sentence: "Plato strikes Socrates", where Socrates is the object and part of the predicate.
Influential romantic accounts include Grimm's sound laws of linguistic evolution, Schleicher's "Darwinian" species-language analogy, the Völkerpsychologie accounts of language by Steinthal and Wundt, and Saussure's semiology, a dyadic model of semiotics, i.e., language as a sign system with its own inner logic, separated from physical reality.
[61] Instead, linguists opted for Chomsky's theory of universal grammar as an innate biological structure that generates syntax in a formalistic fashion, i.e., irrespective of meaning.
[62] The incompatibility with genetics and neuropsychology of Chomsky's innate grammar gave rise to new psychologically and biologically oriented theories of language in the 1980s, and these have gained influence in linguistics and cognitive science in the 21st century.
Some of the most prominent members of this tradition of formal semantics include Tarski, Carnap, Richard Montague and Donald Davidson.
Philosophers such as P. F. Strawson, John Langshaw Austin and Gilbert Ryle stressed the importance of studying natural language without regard to the truth-conditions of sentences and the references of terms.
[69] While the "ordinary language" movement basically died out in the 1970s, its influence was crucial to the development of the fields of speech-act theory and the study of pragmatics.
[75] He claimed that, in such a situation, it is impossible in principle to be absolutely certain of the meaning or reference that a speaker of the indigenous peoples language attaches to an utterance.
Inspired by Quine's discussion, Donald Davidson extended the idea of radical translation to the interpretation of utterances and behavior within a single linguistic community.
The specific instances of vagueness that most interest philosophers of language are those where the existence of "borderline cases" makes it seemingly impossible to say whether a predicate is true or false.
