Card 6.10 · Root VI — The Philosophy of X Family
Philosophy of Language
How do noises come to be about things?
Philosophy of language asks how sounds and marks come to mean anything, and what the relation is between language, thought and the world.
On this card
Where it sits
Under VI. Philosophy of X. Contains 6.10.1 Reference, 6.10.2 Speech acts. Borders 1.3.3 Intentionality, 4.1.2 Predicate logic, 6.31 Philosophy of culture.
New to the fields of philosophy? Read the guide
Narrower questions under this one:
- 6.10.1 Reference What makes your word for a thing refer to that thing?
- 6.10.2 Speech Acts How does saying "I promise" make a promise?
Major theories and approaches to meaning
These approaches address different questions — what sentences mean, what speakers convey, what fixes truth conditions, what inferential role a term has — and need not all be mutually exclusive.
| Approach | Core idea |
|---|---|
| Referential | What the expression stands for |
| Ideational | Meaning is mediated by ideas or mental representations |
| Truth-conditional | The conditions under which a sentence would be true (principally an account of sentence meaning) |
| Use theory | What the expression does in a practice |
| Gricean | Speaker meaning: what the speaker intends the hearer to recognise as intended, distinguished from conventional sentence meaning |
| Inferentialist | Its role in inference — what follows from it and what it follows from |
| Apoha | Signification through exclusion of the other (anyapoha): a term applies by ruling out what it does not apply to |
Where do you stand?
How do noises come to be about things?
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Key figures
| Figure | Dates | Tradition | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bhartrhari | c. 5th c. CE | Indian | The sentence and its unitary meaning are primary; words are abstracted for analysis |
| Dignāga | c. 480–540 | Indian Buddhist | Apoha: meaning through exclusion |
| Gottlob Frege | 1848–1925 | Analytic | Sense and reference distinguished |
| Ferdinand de Saussure | 1857–1913 | Swiss | Sign as arbitrary; meaning from systematic difference |
| Ludwig Wittgenstein | 1889–1951 | Analytic | Meaning as use; language games |
| Paul Grice | 1913–1988 | Analytic | Speaker meaning; conversational implicature |
| Kūkai | 774–835 | Japanese | Sound, sign and reality internally related; language as manifestation of the real (the cosmos as Dharma-expression) rather than a label for it |
| Jacques Derrida | 1930–2004 | Continental | Différance: meaning is deferred and never fully present in a sign |
Talk about it here
Conversations about this question in Meaning & language:
- How do you choose a translation when you can’t read the original? 6 replies
- Is the logician’s ‘if’ what a contract means by ‘if’? 6 replies
- Translating wu wei as “effortless action” does more harm than good; better to leave it untranslated 6 replies
- Twenty years of translating have convinced me that meaning is use 6 replies
- Does translating philosophy change the philosophy? 5 replies
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Connections
→ 6.10.1, 6.10.2 · ↔ 1.3.3, 4.1.2, 1.1.2, 6.31 · ◇ use theory, truth-conditional semantics, apoha · ○ Classical; Modern; Table 3
→ depends on · ↔ borders: genuine overlap, neither prior · ◇ answered by: points from question to answers · ○ appears in: points to the timeline and the comparisons
The full card is in the book
In The Coordinates of Thought this card goes on to a worked example that sets the answers against one case, and to where the question touches daily life — page 286.