Philosophy of language

Philosophy of language is the branch of philosophy that studies the nature of language in its most general and fundamental aspects: what meaning is, how words relate to what they refer to, and how language is connected with thought, with its users and with the world.

Its roots go back to antiquity. In the dialogue Cratylus, Plato asked whether the names of things are conventional or natural, and pointed to a difficulty that remains alive: if the link between word and thing is arbitrary, it is hard to explain how language can give us knowledge of the world. Aristotle analysed the formation of meaning through the abstraction of similarities among individual things, and the Stoics clearly distinguished the sign, the thing it designates and the meaning it expresses, anticipating the notion of the proposition. In India, the Mīmāṃsā and Nyāya schools and the grammatical tradition of Bhartṛhari debated how sentences convey sense. In the Middle Ages, scholastic thinkers developed fine distinctions, such as the theory of the supposition of terms, which anticipate the modern difference between use and mention.

In modern philosophy, John Locke treated the meaning of words as tied to the ideas in the mind, and Gottlob Frege, at the end of the nineteenth century, separated sense from reference, which transformed the field. Bertrand Russell and the early Ludwig Wittgenstein drove the so-called "linguistic turn" of analytic philosophy, according to which many philosophical problems become clearer when language is analysed. Later, Wittgenstein argued that meaning depends on use within shared practices, while the logical positivists linked the sense of a sentence to the procedures for verifying it.

Today several theories of meaning are distinguished: the theory of ideas, truth-conditional theories, referentialist theories, use theories, verificationist, intentional and pragmatic accounts. Semantics studies the relation between expressions and meanings, while pragmatics studies how speakers use language to ask, order, promise or thank. A simple example: the sentence "Venus is larger than Mercury" seems to depend on conventions about its words, but once its meaning is fixed, its truth depends on how the world is.

Current debate centres on whether meaning is mental or external to the speaker, whether it can be explained without invoking further linguistic terms, and what the relation is between language, thought and reality. Authors such as Carnap, with his formal semantics, or Ajdukiewicz, with model theory, sought precise logical tools; others, such as García Calvo, stressed that language can be an instrument of domination, but also reveal that reality is not exhausted by it.