This document discusses several key issues in the philosophy of language over multiple pages. It covers topics like meaning skepticism, vagueness, reference, translation, interpretation, and more. It provides overview explanations of these concepts with examples and references the works of thinkers like Frege, Russell, Quine, Wittgenstein, and others. It also includes short summaries of the views of different philosophers on specific issues like reference, proper names, and vagueness.

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