PHILOSOPHIXIA

Consider the following sentences:

1. “sataa ulkona ja vittu etta ma vihaan etta”

3. “11001011001101011”

4. “it is raining outside, and i fucking hate that”

5. “raining hate is fucking it and outside that i”

What is the difference between the above sentences?

How are we able to understand sentence (4), but not the other ones?

How is a computer able to understand (3), but not the other ones?

How is it possible that we are able to mean and understand stuff through language?

Somewhere around the beginning of the twentieth century, philosophers, especially in the Anglo-Saxon parts of the world, took a “linguistic turn”, making language a central issue in the subject matter and methodology of their philosophy. In the words of three representatives of this analytical school of philosophy:

Richard Rorty: “I shall mean by ʻlinguistic philosophyʼ the view that philosophical problems are problems which may be solved (or dissolved) either by reforming language, or by understanding more about the language we presently use.” 

A.J. Ayer:  “The philosopher, as an analyst, is not directly concerned with the physical properties of things. He is concerned only with the way in which we speak about them. In other words, the propositions of philosophy are not factual, but linguistic in character - that is, they do not describe the behavior of physical, or even mental, objects; they express definitions, or the formal consequences of definitions.”

Michael Dummett: “Only with Frege was the proper object of philosophy finally established: namely, first, that the goal of philosophy is the analysis of the structure of thought: secondly, that the study of thought is to be sharply distinguished from the study of the psychological process of thinking; and, finally, that the only proper method for analyzing thought consists in the analysis of language. The acceptance of these three tenets is common to the entire analytical school.”

The herald of this linguistic turn to analytic philosophy was Gottlob Frege. The big project of this german philosopher and mathematician was to provide a logical foundation for arithmetic (a project that was notoriously undermined by Russell’s paradox). In working on this project, Frege had to assign linguistic expressions (such as names) to certain mathematical entities (such as numbers), which brought up the question of how linguistic expressions do refer to non-linguistic entities, such as numbers or objects. And thus, philosophy of language was born. 

Another reason for the linguistic turn to analytic philosophy is this. Before philosophy of language it was epistemology that was in the driver’s seat of philosophy, and before epistemology it was metaphysics (and right now it is probably philosophy of mind). The central issue of metaphysics was to get an account of what reality ultimately looks like. Next, epistemology tried to get around this metaphysical question by asking whether and how we can have knowledge of this reality in the first place. Philosophy of language, in turn, tried to get around this epistemological question by asking what is meant by “reality” and “knowledge” in the first place.  

And, finally, a related reason for the linguistic turn is this. Philosophy is ultimately concerned with truth. Philosophers basically want to find out what is true. Truth, however, is intrinsically linked with our minds and the way we think about things. So, in order to get to truth, it is useful to study the structure of human thought. Unfortunately, thoughts are not readily accessible as an object of study. It seems that the only way to study the architecture of our minds is by studying language, the vehicle by which our thoughts occur. The hope is, therefore, that by studying language we can learn some important stuff about our conceptual framework; and that by learning important stuff about our conceptual framework we can get some insight in the notion of truth and how we can get there. 

So, there you go. Those are the main reasons for the linguistic turn and the reason why philosophers nowadays are so primarily concerned with language. To round things up, here are some of the central questions and issues in the philosophy of language: 

The Puzzle of Meaning. How do words, sentences, and other linguistic expressions get their meaning? How are we able to mean something with certain linguistic expressions, and how are we able to understand certain linguistic expressions?

The Puzzle of Reference. How do words, sentences, and other linguistic expressions refer to something beyond, or outside of that linguistic expression? How are we able to refer with language to something that is non-linguistic? 

The Puzzle of Identity (Frege’s puzzle). Suppose that we have a certain linguistic expression “a”, and a certain linguistic expression “b”. Further, suppose that “a” is synonymous with, or identical to “b”, so that “a=b” is true. Then, what is the difference between “a=a” and “a=b”? 

The Puzzle of Proper Names. How do names work semantically? Where do names get their meanings from? How are we able to refer with a name, like “Barack Obama”, to a person? And how are we able to understand a name, like “Sherlock Holmes”, that does not refer to a person?  

The Puzzle of Predicates. How do predicates work semantically? Where do predicates get their meanings from? How are we able to refer with a predicate, like “green”, to the color of a certain object? And how do we know what predicate to use?

The Puzzle of Rules. Being able to speak and understand a language involves being able to follow certain rules. But how are we able to follow rules? And how do we know what rule to follow? 

The Puzzle of Translation. We are able to translate a certain language into another language, and understanding other people is also a form of translation. But how are we able to do this? How do we know which expressions of the one language stand for expressions of the other language? 

The Puzzle of the Definition. To give a true definition of something is to exhaust all the possible occurrences of that something in a linguistic expression. With such a definition, you have given the true meaning of that something. But how is this possible, given the large amount of occurrences, and the variety of how language is used? How can you cover this whole domain by a linguistic expression? (To see that this is seemingly impossible, try to define the word “game”; remember, you have only given a true definition of the word “game” if there are no usages of the word “game” that escape your definition.) And if this is impossible, how can we give the exact meanings of linguistic expressions? And if we can’t give the exact meanings of linguistic expressions, how are we able to speak and understand a language? 

There are a lot of other interesting problems and issues at work in the philosophy of language, but these are the most easily explained. In sum, philosophy of language is the attempt to figure out how we are able to do the things with language that we so carelessly do. At first sight, speaking and understanding a language seem to be very unproblematic phenomena. Even children can do it perfectly. But what it is that we are able to do so unproblematically is thereby not explained. And that is the puzzle of the philosophy of language.