The document explores the philosophy of language, addressing the origins, nature, and meaning of language, as well as its relationship with thought and reality. It discusses various theories on linguistic meaning, such as idea, truth-conditional, use, and reference theories, while also examining the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which posits that language influences thought and perception. Additionally, it highlights the debates around language learning and the interplay between language and culture.

1. Philosophy
of
Language
Sherilyn E. Nuesca
Anda Integrated School
JHS Teacher

2. What is in a name?
 What’s in a name? That which we call a
rose by any other name would smell as
sweet.”
--Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
 “A riddle of symbols” -Wittgenstein
 “An explanation of concepts” –Russell
 “Many unneeded problems” --Ryle

3. “What we say will be easy,
but to know why we say it
will be very difficult.”
L. Wittgenstein

5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPIGkWd9_Dk&t=10s

6. Philosophy of Language
Philosophy of language is the reasoned
inquiry into the:
 origins of language.
 nature of meaning
 usage and cognition of language
 relationship between language
and reality.

9.  It overlaps to some extent with the study
of Epistemology, Logic, Philosophy of Mind and other fields
(including linguistics and psychology), although for
many Analytic Philosophers it is an important discipline in
its own right.
It asks questions like
 "What is meaning?”
 "How does language refer to the real world?”
 "Is language learned or is it innate?”
 "How does the meaning of a sentence emerge
out of its parts?"
Philosophy of Language

10. The Nature of Language
 One of the most fundamental
questions asked in Philosophy of
Language is "What is language (in general
terms)?"
 According to semiotics (the study of sign
processes in communication, and of how
meaning is constructed and understood),
language is the mere manipulation and
use of symbols in order to draw attention
to signified content, in which case
humans would not be the sole possessors
of language skills.

11. The Nature of Meaning
 As we have seen, then, the answer to the question,
"What is meaning?", is not immediately obvious.
 "Meaning" can be described as the content carried
by the words or signs exchanged by people
when communicating through language. Arguably,
there are two essentially different types of linguistic
meaning: conceptual meaning (which refers to
the definitions of words themselves, and the
features of those definitions, which can be treated
using semantic feature analysis) and associative
meaning (which refers to the individual mental
understandings of the speaker, and which may be
connotative, collocative, social, affective, reflected or
thematic).

12. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmwgmt7wcv8&t=9s

13. Approaches to linguistic "meaning"
 Idea theories: which claim that meanings
are purely mental contents provoked
by signs. This approach is mainly
associated with the
British Empiricist tradition of John
Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume,
although interest in it has been renewed
by some contemporary theorists under the
guise of semantic internalism.

14. Approaches to linguistic "meaning"
 Truth-conditional theories: which hold
meaning to be the conditions under
which an expression may be true or false.
This tradition goes back to Gottlob Frege,
although there has also been much
modern work in this area.

15. Approaches to linguistic "meaning"
 Use theories: which understand meaning
to involve or be related to speech
acts and particular utterances, not the
expressions themselves. This approach
was pioneered by Ludwig
Wittgenstein and his Communitarian view
of language.

16. Approaches to linguistic "meaning"
 Reference theories (or semantic
externalism): which view meaning to be
equivalent to those things in the world that
are actually connected to signs. Tyler
Burge (1946 - ) and Saul Kripke (1940 - )
are the best known proponents of this
approach.

17. Language and Thought
 Perhaps because we typically think in words,
language and thought seem completely
intertwined. Indeed, scholars in various fields --
psychology, linguistics, anthropology -- as well
as laypeople have entertained these questions:
Is thought possible without language? Does the
structure of our language shape our thinking?
Does our perception/cognition shape the
structure of language? Are our abilities to learn
and use language part of our general
intelligence?

21. Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
 The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as we know it
today can be broken down into two basic
principles: linguistic determinism and
linguistic relativity

22. Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
 Linguistic Determinism
*Language determines thought
*Different languages impose different
conceptions of reality
 Linguistic Relativity
*Language influences thinking
*Linguistic differences between cultures
are associated with cultural differences in
thinking

23. Criticism on Linguistic
Determinism
 Linguistic Determinism is far too strong a claim and thus
false.
 “Peoples’ thoughts and perceptions are not determined by
the words and structures of their language. We are not
prisoners of our linguistic systems” (Fromkin et al. 2007)
 May not have the exact word but are able to express their
ideas and thoughts using other words or word combinations
 The Dani tribe, who have only a 2 colour system,
black/dark and white/light, were successfully trained to
identify and name different shades of red
 Inuit just have a greater need for more vocabulary of types
of snow that us – it is arguable whether their perception is
affected

24. Evidence for Linguistic
Relativism
 More evidence to suggest that Linguistic Relativism
is valid and has influence on thought and perception
 Language differences Politically Correct Vocabulary
 “Friendlyfire”–theaccidentalkillingofonesownsoldiers
“Mentally challenged” – as opposed to “mentally
retarded”
 Puttingpositivemeaningonnegativeideas/concepts
 If there were no words that were sexist or racist,
would our society become less sexist or racist?

25. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-dWGvNJI54

26. 3 Schools of Learning and Thought
 1. Behaviourism: which holds that the
bulk of language is learned
via conditioning.
 2. Hypothesis testing: which holds that
learning occurs through
the postulation and testing of hypothese
s, through the use of the general faculty
of intelligence.
 3. Innatism: which holds that at
least some of the syntactic settings
are innate and hardwired, based on
certain modules of the mind.

27. 3 Contentions between Language and
Thought
 1. Edward Sapir (1884 - 1939), Benjamin
Whorf (1897 - 1941) and Michael
Dummett (1925 - 2011), among others,
maintain that language is
analytically prior to thought.

28. 3 Contentions between Language and
Thought
 2. Paul Grice (1913 - 1988) and Jerry
Fodor (1935 - ), on the other hand, believe that
thought and mental content has priority over
language, and that spoken and written
language derive their intentionality and
meaning from an internal language encoded in
the mind, especially given that the structure of
thoughts and the structure of language seem to
share a compositional, systematic character.

29. 3 Contentions between Language and
Thought
 3. A third school of thought maintains that
there is no way of explaining one without
the other.

30. What is the Relationship
Between
Language and Thought?

31. The Whorfian Hypothesis
 What is a hypothesis?
 Whorf attempted to provide examples of
language differences and not simply
made the claim.
 Whorf actually claimed that some
languages may be superior to European
languages.
 SAE

32. Hopi V SAE
 By comparison with many American languages, the formal systematization of ideas in English,
German, French or Italian seems poor and jejune. Why, for instance, do we not, like the Hopi, use
a different way of expressing the relation of channel of sensation (seeing) to result in
consciousness, as between 'I see that it is red' and 'I see that it is new?' We fuse the two quite
different types of relationships into a vague sort of connection expressed by 'that', whereas the
Hopi indicates that in the first case seeing presents a sensation 'red', and in the second that
seeing presents unspecified evidence from which is drawn the inference of newness. If we
change the form to 'I hear that is red' or 'I hear that it is new,' we European speakers still cling to
our lame 'that', but the Hopi now uses still another relater and makes no distinction between 'red'
and 'new' since, in either case, the significant presentation to consciousness is that of a verbal
report, and neither a sensation per se nor inferential evidence. Does the Hopi language show
here a higher plane of thinking, a more rational analysis of situations, than our vaunted English?
Of course it does. In this field and in various others, English compared to Hopi is like a bludgeon
compared to a rapier. We even have to think and boggle over the question for some time, or have
it explained to us, before we can see the difference in the relationships expressed by 'that' in the
above examples, whereas the Hopi discriminates these relationships with effortless ease, for the
forms of his speech have accustomed him to do so.
 Whorf, Language Thought and Reality, PP 140

33. Habitual Thought
 By "habitual thought" and "thought world" I mean
more than simply language, i.e., than the linguistic
patterns themselves. I include all the analogical and
suggestive value of the patterns (e.g., our "imaginary
space and its distant implications), and all the give-
and-take between language and the culture as a
whole, wherein is a vast amount that is not linguistic
but yet shows the shaping influence of language. In
brief, this "thought world" is the microcosm that each
man carries about within himself, by which he
measure and understands what he can of the
macrocosm.

34. Whorf’s Questions
 Are our concepts of time, space and matter given in
substantially the same form by experience to all men
[sic], or are they in part conditioned by the structure
of particular languages?
 Ans: This is the Whorfian Hypothesis
 Are there traceable affinities between cultural and
behavioral norms and large scale linguistic patterns?
 Ans: “I [Whorf] would be the last to pretend that there
is anything so definite as a correlation between
culture and language and especially between
ethnological rubrics such as agricultural, hunting etc,
and linguistic ones like inflected, synthetic and
isolating.

35. Does language affect
thought?
 Do speakers/signers of different languages
view the world differently?
 Yes: (Sapir-)Whorf hypothesis/linguistic
relativity

36. Linguistic relativity
hypothesis
 Franz Boas (1858-1942)
 Race  culture  language
 Edward Sapir (1884-1939)
 “Language is a particular how of thought.”
 Benjamin Whorf (1897-1941)
 “users of markedly different
grammars…must arrive at somewhat
different views of the world”

37. Sapir and Whorf not the only
ones to wonder about this
This stuff is not in my
brain.
http://burgersmoke.wordpress.com/

38. Testing Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis
 “The Whorf Hypothesis can be difficult to test,
because it can be difficult to identify tasks that
really are language- and culture-neutral.”
 Pirahã tribe (Brazil)
 the language lacks numbers
 attempts to get Pirahã to count unsuccessful
 because the language lacks numbers, or problems
with teaching technique?
 http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/1094492/D
C1

39. Problems on
Universals
and
Compositions

40. Locke on General Terms
“It is not enough for
the perfection of
language, that
sounds can be made
signs of ideas,
unless those signs
can be so made use
of as to comprehend
several particular
things…”

41. Locke on General Terms
“…for the
multiplication of
words would have
perplexed their use,
had every particular
thing need of a
distinct name to be
signified by…”

42. Locke on General Terms
“To remedy this
inconvenience,
language had yet a
further improvement
in the use of general
terms, whereby one
word was made to
mark a multitude of
particular
existences.”

43. Particular Terms
Locke

44. General Terms
Dog

45. Abstract Ideas
If we accept the idea theory, then, we have
to accept that there are “abstract ideas”– not
mental pictures of a particular person, but
mental pictures that resemble equally a
group of things.
These abstract ideas are the meanings of
general terms.

46. Berkeley vs. Abstract Ideas
Berkeley, however, argues that abstract
ideas are impossible. The abstract idea of a
man is supposed to apply equally to a tall
man and a short man; a black man and a
white man; a skinny man and a fat man;
well-dressed man and a pauper, etc. But no
picture resembles equally all such men, as
any picture of a man depicts him as either
skinny or fat, but not both and not neither.

47. Berkeley
Again, this didn’t lead Berkeley to reject the
idea theory, only to (once again) place a severe
limit on what we can have ideas of.
Just as we can’t have ideas of non-ideas
(because non-ideas can’t resemble ideas) we
can’t have ideas of abstract things, because
mental pictures are always determinate and
never abstract (like regular pictures).