Philosophy of language

1. Issues in the Philosophy of
Language
Dr. Samina Nadeem
Week-2

2. Issues in the Philosophy of Language
• Meaning Scepticism
• Vagueness / Fuzzy logic
• Enculturation and shared intentionality
• Reference, names and descriptions
• Idiosyncrasies and conventions
• Translation and interpretation
• Interpellation and censorship
• Tongues untied

3. Reflection – class activity
• Sentence as a reference: but / and ; dog / cur
{Change in tone not sense}
• Language permits construction of sentences
which determinate truth-conditions {essence
of language}
• Sentence should contain a description of state
of affairs that aim to have the command
obeyed

4. Reflection …… cont.
• Gottlob Frege (1848 – 1925):
-The unit of significance is not the word but the
sentence (eg: mean / lean)
- Words are for power of expressing ideas
- Combination of words – complex ideas
- For explanation is needed sense of sentence
- Recognition of sense – words are primary
- Linguistic acts, to know the conditions, is based
on sentence.
- It is only in a context of a sentence that there is a
meaning

5. Meaning Skepticism
• Disbelief in contemporary philosophic
solutions, rejecting the reality
• Agnosticism – truth values of claims (God,
metaphysics) are unknown or unknowable.
“ Contextual determinacy is achieved when the
participants in communication narrow down
the set of admissible semantic interpretation
through a process of negotiation in which
different interpretations are tacitly or
explicitly rejected.”

6. Vagueness / Fuzzy logic
• Vagueness: Borderline cases …..inquiry
resistant (eg; tall – a relative term)
• Peirce (1902, 748)
“By intrinsically uncertain we mean not
uncertain in consequence of any ignorance of
the interpreter, but because the speaker’s
habits of language were indeterminate.”
• Fuzzy Logic: One proposition may be more
true than the other. (Lotfi Zadeh, 1965)

7. Enculturation and shared intentionality
• A process – acquiring culture, internalization (not
an innovative process?)
• Herskovits – process of novel change and inquiry
– 2 phases; unconscious stage of early years, the
conscious stage of later years (innovation may be
included)
• Shared Intentionality (early years): a. gaze
following into joint attention, b. social
manipulation into cooperative communication, c.
group activity into collaboration, d. social
learning into instructed learning

8. Reference, names and descriptions
• Donnellan, K. (1931 at UCLA)
- Rejected the claim that Proper names hold reference
relationship (Socrates etc) called descriptivism by
Bertrand Russell (1910)
- Definite descriptions – reference use & attributive use
(closer to Russell’s theory)
- Most influential developments of the Causal-Historical
view of Reference
- Eg; Santa Claus does not exist but there is a Santa
Claus.
• Kripke S. (1970) published Naming and Necessity – a
series of three lectures {every name has a cluster of
properties…}

9. Idiosyncrasies and conventions
• The notion is inextricable from the history of
culture production – 20th century obsession
with deconstructions of the self, from the
fragmented self of modern self to the empty
self of existentialism ………. This level does not
co-relate with anything common or inter-subjectively
shared

10. Translation and interpretation
• Interpretative negotiations: to understand how
reference, sense and truth become entangled /
how to navigate their complex relationship. Two
philosophical models: a. neo- empiricist account
(analytic tradition); b. hermeneutic approach
• Quine (1951): Analytic statements – true or false
by virtue of their meaning; synthetic statements –
knowledge of language and knowledge of world;
methodology of interpretation by examining the
practice of translation – different language of the
interpreter – stimulus meaning (sensory
stimulation associated with words and sentences.

11. Interpellation and censorship
• Althusser, A. (2001): identity through the
address of the other. E.g. “Hey, you there!”
the hailed individual will turn around and
become a subject.
• Butler (1998): Censorship establishes “ what
must remain unspeakable for contemporary
regimes of discourse to continue to exercise
their power”

12. Tongues untied
• Gloria Anzaldua:
Communities and cultures always speak in many
voices - polyphonic

13. References
• Dummett, M. 1973 Philosophy of language,
Harper & Row, Publishers, New York
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Oxford Scholarship online