refer to work within the field of Anglo-American analytical philosophy
and its roots in German and Austrian philosophy of the early 20th
century. Many philosophers outside this tradition have views on the
nature and use of language, and the border between "analytical" and
"continental" philosophy is becoming more porous with time, but most
who speak of this field are appealing to a specific set of traditions,
canonical authors and methods. The article takes this more narrow
focus in order to describe a tradition's history, but readers should
bear in mind this restriction of scope.
The history of the philosophy of language in the analytical tradition
begins with advances in logic and with tensions within traditional
accounts of the mind and its contents at the end of the 19th century.
A revolution of sorts resulted from these developments, often known as
the "Linguistic Turn" in philosophy. However, its early programs ran
into serious difficulties by mid-century, and significant changes in
direction came about as a result. Section 1 below addresses the
precursors and early stages of the "Linguistic Turn," while Section 2
addresses its development by the Logical Positivists and others.
Section 3 outlines the sudden shifts that resulted from the works of
Quine and Wittgenstein, and Section 4 charts the major approaches and
figures that have followed from mid-century to the present.
1. Frege, Russell and the Linguistic Turn
a. Referential Theories of Meaning
Much of the stage-setting for the so-called "Linguistic Turn" in
Anglo-American philosophy took place in the mid 19th century.
Attention turned to language as many came to see it as a focal point
in understanding belief and representation of the world. Language came
to be seen as the "medium of conceptualization," as Wilfrid Sellars
would later put it. Idealists working in Kant's wake had developed
more sophisticated "transcendental" accounts of the conditions for the
possibility of experience, and this evoked strong reactions from more
realist philosophers and those sympathetic to the natural sciences.
Scientists also made advances in describing cognitive functions like
speech production and comprehension as natural phenomena, including
the discovery of Broca's area and Wernicke's area, two neural centers
of linguistic activity, in the 1860s and 70s.
John Stuart Mill's work around this time reinvigorated British
empiricism and included an approach to language that traced the
meanings of individual words to the objects to which they referred
(see 1843, 1, 2, sec. 5). Mill's empiricism led him to think that for
meaning to have any significance for our thought and understanding, we
must explain it in terms of our experience. Thus, meaning should
ultimately be understood in terms of words standing for sets of sense
impressions. Not all those concerned with language shared Mill's
empiricist leanings, though most shared his sense that denotation,
rather than connotation, should be at the center of an account of
meaning. A word denotes something by standing for it, as my name
stands for me, or "Baltimore" stands for a particular city on
America's East Coast; a word connotes something when it "implies an
attribute" in Mill's terms, as "professor" generally implies an expert
in an academic field and someone with certain sorts of institutional
authority. For most expressions, philosophers thought that to grasp
their meaning was to know what they stood for, as we often think of
proper names serving simply as labels for the things they denote.
(Mill also tended to use "meaning" in talking about connotation, and
might have reservations with saying that proper names had "meanings,"
though this is not to deny that they denote things.) Thus,
(1) The cat sat on the refrigerator.
should be understood as a complex arrangement of signs. "The cat"
denotes or refers to a particular furry domesticated quadruped, "the
refrigerator" denotes something, and so forth. Some further
elaboration would be needed for verbs, logical vocabulary and other
categories of terms, but most philosophers took the backbone of an
account of meaning to be denotation, and language use to be a process
of the management of signs. These signs might denote objects directly,
or they might do so indirectly by standing for something within our
minds, following Locke, who described words as "signs of ideas" (1690,
III, 1).
Accounts that emphasized the reference of terms as constitutive of the
meaning of most expressions faced two serious problems, however.
First, they failed to explain the possibility of non-referring terms
and negative existential sentences. On such a referential picture of
meaning, the meaning of most expressions would simply be their
bearers, so an existential sentence like
(2) John Coltrane plays saxophone.
was easy to analyze. Its subject term, "John Coltrane," referred to a
particular person and the sentence says of him that he does a
particular sort of thing: he plays saxophone. But what of a sentence
like
(3) Phlogiston was thought to be the cause of combustion.
Assuming that there is not and never was such a thing as phlogiston,
how can we understand such a sentence? If the meaning of those
expressions is their referent, then this sentence should strike us as
meaningless. Meinong (1904) suggested that such expressions denoted
entities that existed, but did not "subsist," by which he granted them
a sort of reality, albeit one outside the actual universe. The
majority of philosophers treated this with suspicion. Others suggested
that the expression above denotes the concept or idea of "phlogiston."
The difficulty facing such responses comes into sharper relief with
consideration of negative existentials.
(4) Atlantis does not exist.
If Atlantis does not exist, the expression "Atlantis" does not refer
to anything and would have no meaning. One could say that "Atlantis"
refers not to a sunken city, but to our concept of a sunken city. But
this has the paradoxical result of making (4) false, since the concept
is there for us to refer to, thus rendering it impossible to deny.
This might even entail that we could not truthfully deny the existence
of anything of which we could conceive, which seems implausible.
The second serious problem for referential theories of meaning, noted
by Frege (1892), was the informativeness of some identity sentences.
Sentences of self-identity are true purely in virtue of their logical
form, and we may affirm them even when we do not know what the
expression refers to. For instance, anyone could affirm
(5) Mt. Kilimanjaro is Mt. Kilimanjaro.
even if they do not know what Mt. Kilimanjaro is. Making this
statement in such a case would not inform our understanding of the
world in any significant way. However, a sentence like
(6) Mt. Kilimanjaro is the tallest mountain in Africa.
would certainly be informative to those who first heard it. But
remember that according to referential theories of meaning, "Mt.
Kilimanjaro" and "the tallest mountain in Africa" refer to the same
thing and hence mean the same thing according to these theories;
therefore, (5) and (6) say the same thing and one should be no more or
less informative than the other. Where we grasp the meaning of an
expression or a sentence, philosophers have traditionally taken it
that this should make some sort of cognitive difference, for example,
we should be able to perform an action, make an inference, recognize
something, and so on. Thus differences in the meanings of expressions
should be reflected by some difference in cognitive significance
between the expressions. But if expressions refer to the same thing,
and their meaning consists solely in their picking out a referent,
then there should be no such cognitive difference even if there is
apparently a difference in meaning. Simple referential theories do not
offer us an obvious solution to this problem and therefore fail to
capture important intuitions about meaning.
b. Frege on Sense and Reference
To address these problems, Frege proposed that we should think of
expressions as having two semantic aspects: a sense and a reference.
The sense of an expression would be its "mode of presentation," as
Frege put it, that conveyed information to us in its own distinct way.
That information would in turn determine a referent for each
expression. This led to a credo pervasive in analytical philosophy:
sense determines reference. This solved problems of reference by
shifting the emphasis to the sense of expressions first and to their
reference later. Negative existential sentences were intelligible
because the sense of an expression like "largest prime number" or
"Atlantis" could be logically analyzed or made explicit in terms of
other descriptions, even if the set of things specified by this
information was, in fact, empty. Our sense that these sentences and
expressions were meaningful was a consequence of grasping their
senses, even when we realized this left them without a referent. As
Frege put it:
"It can perhaps be granted that an expression has a sense if it is
formed in a grammatically correct manner and stands for a proper name.
But as to whether there is a denotation corresponding to the
connotation is hereby not decided… [T]he grasping of a sense does not
with certainty warrant a corresponding nominatum. [that is, referent]"
(1892: p. 153 in Beaney (1997))
The informativeness of some identity claims also became more clear. In
a sentence like (5), we are simply stating self-identity, but in a
sentence like (6), we express something of real cognitive
significance, containing extensions of our knowledge that cannot
generally be shown a priori. This would not be a trivial matter of
logical form like "A=A," but a discovery that two very different
senses determined the same referent, which would suggest important
conceptual connections between different ideas, inform further
inferences, and thus enlighten us in various ways. Even if "Mt.
Kilimanjaro" and "the tallest mountain in Africa" refer to the same
thing, it would be informative to learn that they do, and we would
augment our understanding of the world by learning this.
Frege also noted expressions that shared their referents could
generally be substituted for one another without changing the truth
value of a sentence. For instance, "Elvis Costello" and "Declan
McManus" refer to the same object, and so if "Elvis Costello was born
in Liverpool" is true, so is, "Declan McManus was born in Liverpool."
Anything that we might predicate of the one, we may predicate of the
other, so long as the two expressions co-refer. However, Frege
realized that there were certain contexts in which this
substitutability failed, or at least could not be guaranteed. For
instance,
(7) Liz knows that Elvis Costello was born in Liverpool.
may be true, even when
(8) Liz knows that Declan McManus was born in Liverpool.
is false, especially in cases where Liz does not know that Elvis
Costello is Declan McManus, or never learns the latter name at all.
What has happened here? Note that (7) and (8) both include strings of
words that could be sentences in their own right ("Elvis Costello was
born in Liverpool" and "Declan McManus was born in Liverpool") and
"Liz knows that…" expresses something about those propositions
(namely, Liz's attitude towards them). Frege suggested that in these
cases, the reference of those embedded sentences is not a truth value,
as it would customarily be, but is rather the sense of the sentence
itself. Someone might grasp the sense of one sentence but not another,
and hence sentences like (7) and (8) could vary in their truth values.
Frege called these "indirect" contexts, and Quine would later dub such
cases "opaque" contexts.
Rudolf Carnap would later replace the term "sense" with "intension"
and "reference" with "extension" and Carnap's terminology became
prevalent in formal analysis of semantics by the 1950s, though it was
Frege's original insights that drove the field. Significant worries
remained for the Fregean notion of sense, however. Names and other
expressions in natural languages rarely have fixed sets of
descriptions that are universally acknowledged as Frege's senses would
have to be. Frege might reply that he had no intention of making sense
a matter of public consensus or psychological regularity, but this
makes the status of a sense all the more mysterious, as well as our
capacity to grasp them. Analytical philosophers of language would
struggle with this for decades to come.
Still, Frege had effectively redrawn the map for philosophy. By
introducing senses as a focal point of analysis, he had carved out a
distinct territory for philosophical inquiry. Senses were not simply
psychological entities, since they were both commonly accessible by
different speakers and had a normative dimension to them, prescribing
correct usage rather than simply describing performance. (See Frege
(1884) for a thorough attack on psychologistic accounts of meaning.)
Nor were they the causal and mechanical objects of natural science,
reducible to accounts of lawlike regularity. They were entities
playing a logical and cognitive role, and would be both explanatory of
conceptual content and universal across natural languages, unlike the
empirical details of linguistics and anthropology. Thus, there was a
project for philosophy to undertake, separate from the natural
sciences, and it was the logical analysis of the underlying structure
of meaning. Though naturalistic concerns would be reasserted in the
development of analytical philosophy, Frege's project would come to
dominate Anglo-American philosophy for much of the next century.
c. Russell
An important bridge between Frege and the English-speaking world was
Bertrand Russell's "On Denoting" (1905). Both men were mathematicians
by training and shared a concern with the foundations of arithmetic.
However, Russell shared a sense with some earlier philosophers that at
least some expressions were meaningful in virtue of direct reference,
contra Frege. Still, Russell saw the potential in Frege's work and
undertook an analysis of singular definite descriptions – complex
expressions that purport to single out a particular referent by
description, for example, "the President of the USA," "the tallest
person in this room right now." Thus, Russell wondered how
(9) The present King of France is bald.
could be meaningful, given the absence of a present King of France.
Russell's solution was to analyze the logical role of such
descriptions. Although a select few expressions referred directly to
objects, most were either descriptions that picked out a referent by
offering a list of properties, or disguised abbreviations of such
descriptions. Russell even suggested that most proper names were
abbreviated descriptions. Strictly speaking, descriptions would not
refer at all; they would be quantified phrases that had or lacked
extensions. What was needed was an account that could explain the
meaning of descriptions in terms of the propositions that they
abbreviated. Russell (1905) analyzed sentence (9) as implying three
things that jointly gave us a definition of propositions involving
descriptions. (A more succinct presentation comes in Russell (1919).)
A sentence like "the author of Waverley was Scotch" involves three
logical constituents:
(10) "x wrote Waverley" is not always false (i.e at least one person
wrote Waverley)
(11) "if x and y wrote Waverley , x and y are identical" is always
true (that is, at most one person wrote Waverley)
(12) "if x wrote Waverley, x was Scotch" is always true (that is,
whoever wrote Waverley was Scotch)
The first two here effectively assert the existence and uniqueness of
the referent of this expression, respectively. We may generalize them
and express them as a single proposition of the form "There is a term
c such that F x is true when x is c and false when x is not c." (Thus,
F is held uniquely by c.) This asserts that there is a unique
satisfier of the description given or implied by an expression, and
this may be true or false depending on the expression at hand. We can
then tack on an additional condition expressing whatever property is
attributed to the referent (being bald, Scotch, and so on) in the form
"c has the property Y." If nothing has the property F thus analyzed,
(such as "being the present King of France" in (9) above) then "c has
the property Y" is false, and we have a means to analyze non-denoting
expressions. Such expressions are actually to be understood as
quantified phrases and we may understand them as having objects over
which they quantify or lacking such objects; the grasp of the logical
structure of those phrases is what constitutes our understanding of
them. While we grasp each of the parts abbreviated by the expression,
we also understand that one of them is false—there is no unique
satisfier of "the present King of France"—and thus we can understand
the sentence even though one of its terms does not refer. That
expression can have a significant occurrence once we understand it as
an "incomplete" or "complex" symbol whose meaning is derived from its
constituents. Most proper names, and indeed almost all expressions in
a natural language, would submit to such an analysis and Russell's
work thus kick-started analytical philosophy in the English-speaking
world. (Significant contributions were also made by G.E. Moore in the
fields of epistemology and ethics and hence he is often mentioned
along with Russell, but his achievements are largely outside the scope
of our focus here.)
2. Early Analytical Philosophy of Language
The achievements of Russell and Frege in setting an agenda for
analytical philosophers that promised to both resolve longstanding
philosophical difficulties and preserve a role for philosophy on an
equal footing with the natural sciences electrified European and
American academic philosophers. The following section focuses on three
points of interest in the early phases of this tradition: (1) the
early work of Ludwig Wittgenstein; (2) the Logical Positivists; and
(3) Tarski's theory of truth.
a. The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Ludwig Wittgenstein came to read Frege and Russell out of an interest
in the foundations of mathematics and went to Cambridge to study with
Russell. He studied there, but left to serve in the Austro-Hungarian
army in 1914. While being held as a prisoner of war, he wrote drafts
of a text that many saw as the high-water mark of early analytical
philosophy, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In it, he wrote seven
propositions and made extensive comments on six of them, with
extensive comments on the comments, and so forth. He laid out a
parsimonious and ambitious plan to systematically realize Frege and
Russell's aspirations of analyzing the logical structure of language
and thought.
Through logical analysis, Wittgenstein held that we could arrive at a
conception of language as consisting of elementary propositions
related by the now-familiar elements of first-order logic. Any
sentence with a sense could have that sense perspicuously rendered in
such a system, and any sentence that did not yield to such analysis
would not have a sense at all. "Everything that can be thought at all
can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said
clearly." (1922, §4.116) Wittgenstein's claim here is not that we
cannot string together words in unclear ways; indeed, we do that all
the time. Rather, in doing so, we do not express anything that has a
sense. What we say may get nods of approval from fellow speakers, and
we may even be grasping at something important, but what we say does
not convey anything meaningful.
In part, this reflects Wittgenstein's early view that propositions
"pictured" the world. This is not to say that a written inscription or
a verbal utterance of a sentence visually resembles that state of
affairs it expresses. "Elvin Jones played drums for John Coltrane"
looks like neither Elvin Jones, nor John Coltrane, nor a drum set.
Rather, the form of a proposition resembled the form of some fact of
the world. What was required to understand this as a picture of the
world was just what was needed in the case of actual pictures—a
coordination of the elements in the picture with objects outside
itself. (Logical truths would be true in virtue of relations among
their propositions.) Where we could do this, the language was stating
something clearly; where we could not, despite our best efforts, the
words were not saying anything at all. However, this was not to say
that everything about meaning and our understanding of the world was a
matter of explicit definition, that is, something we could say. Rather
than being said with our language, many things can only be shown. For
instance, think of a logical expression like "and." Any attempt to
explain its sense, like putting two things side by side, or using
another term like "both," only recapitulates the structure of "and,"
thus adding nothing. The form of our propositions shows how it works
and we cannot say anything more informative about it. Wittgenstein
also espoused a number of views at the end of the Tractatus on
solipsism, the will and ethics, and what could be said about them, but
these remain some of the most difficult and contested points of
interpretation in his work. Wittgenstein took himself to have
prescribed the limits of what philosophy could say, and closed the
Tractatus without further comment by saying, "Whereof we cannot speak,
we must remain silent." (1922, §7)
b. The Vienna Circle and the Logical Positivists
Beginning in 1907, a group of European professors originally known as
the Ernst Mach Society began to meet regularly for discussions on
matters of logic, philosophy and science under the guidance of Moritz
Schlick. They later took to calling themselves the Vienna Circle and
their ongoing conversations became the nascence of a movement known as
Logical Positivism, which would include Carl Hempel, Rudolf Carnap,
and Hans Reichenbach, among many others. They rejected the Hegelian
idealism prevalent in European academic circles, espoused the austere
precision of science, particularly physics, as a model for their
methods, and took the phenomenalist strains of British empiricism as a
more suitable epistemological foundation for such goals. Carnap
adopted the insights of Frege's work and brought tremendous
sophistication to the analytical enterprise, particularly in his The
Logical Structure of the World (1928). The Logical Positivists also
took inspiration from Wittgenstein's Tractatus, but their fidelity to
his more abstruse aims is tenuous at best. They shared Wittgenstein's
view that logical proofs were true in virtue of internal relations
among their propositions, not by virtue of any actual facts about the
world, and parsed this as support for a renewed version of the
analytic/synthetic distinction. Analytic sentences were those true
solely in virtue of the meanings of their constituent expressions
("All bachelors are unmarried") while synthetic sentences were true
partly in virtue of empirical facts beyond the meanings of their
constituent terms ("Flynn is a bachelor"). Analytic sentences would be
confirmed by logical analysis, while synthetic sentences would be
confirmed by appeal to observation sentences, or to sense-data in even
more rigorous accounts.
This led the Positivists to the Verificationist Theory of Meaning.
Analytic sentences would be true in virtue of the meanings of their
terms, while all synthetic sentences would have to admit to some sort
of empirical verification criteria. Any sentence that could not be
verified by one or the other of these means was deemed meaningless.
This excluded claims with mystical or occult import, but also large
areas of ethics and metaphysics as practiced by many philosophers.
Schlick (1933) put it boldly, saying:
[A] proposition has a statable meaning only if it makes a verifiable
difference whether it is true or false. A proposition which is such
that the world remains the same whether it is true or false simply
says nothing about the world; it is empty and communicates nothing; I
can give it no meaning. We have a verifiable difference, however, only
when it is a difference in the given… (Ayer 1959, p. 88)
By "given" here, Schlick alluded to the stream of sense-data that come
before us. Few if any sentences were understood in such ways by most
speakers, so the work of philosophy was logical analysis and
definition of the concepts of the natural sciences into
verificationist terms. While one could imagine empirical verification
of many things in the physical sciences (for example, laboratory
results, predictions with observable consequences), it would be far
more difficult in fields like psychology and ethics. In these cases,
the Positivists favored a type of logical reductionism for the
pertinent sentences in the discourse. All sentences and key concepts
in psychology would be reduced to empirically verifiable sentences
about the behavior of thinking subjects, for instance. A sentence
about a mental state like anger would be reduced to sentences about
observable behavior such as raising one's voice, facial expressions,
becoming violent, and so on. This would require "bridge laws" or
sentences of theoretical identity to equate the entities of, say,
psychology with the entities of the physical sciences and thus
translate the terms of older theories into new ones. (Again, in some
cases the preferred mode would be to equate them directly with
sense-data.) Where this could not be done, the Positivists took it
that the sentences in question were meaningless, and they advocated
the elimination of many canonical concepts, sentences and theories,
derisively lumped under the term "metaphysics." A sentence like "God
exists outside of space and time" was certainly not true in virtue of
the meanings of its terms and did not admit to any sort of empirical
test, so it would be dismissed as gibberish.
The Verificationist theory of meaning ran into great difficulty almost
immediately, often due to objections among the Positivists. For one,
any sentence stating the theory itself was neither analytical, nor
subject to empirical verification, so it would seem to be either
self-refuting or meaningless. Universal generalizations including
scientific laws like "All electrons have a charge of 1.6×10-19
coulombs" were also problematic, since they were not deducible from
finite sets of observation sentences. (See Hempel (1950), esp. §2.1)
Counterfactual sentences, such as "If we dropped this sugar cube in
water, it would dissolve," present similar problems. Efforts at
refinement continued, though dissatisfaction with the whole program
was growing by mid-century.
c. Tarski's Theory of Truth
In two seminal works (1933 and 1944), Alfred Tarski made a great leap
forward for the rigorous analysis of meaning, showing that semantics
could be treated just as systematically as syntax could. Syntax, the
rules and structures governing the recombination of words and phrases
into sentences, had been analyzed with some success by logicians, but
semantic notions like "meaning" or "truth" defied such efforts for
many years.
Tarski sought an analysis of the concept of truth that would contain
no explicit or implicit appeals to inherently semantic notions, and
offered a definition of it in terms of syntax and set theory. He began
by distinguishing metalanguage and object language; an object language
is the language (natural or formal) that is our target for analysis,
while the metalanguage is the language in which we conduct our
analysis. Metalanguage is the language that we use to study another
language, and the object language is the language that we study. For
instance, children learning a second language typically take classes
conducted in their mother tongue that treat the second language as an
object to be studied. Thus, copies of all the sentences of the object
language should be included in the metalanguage and the metalanguage
should include sufficient resources to describe the syntax of the
object language, as well. In effect, an object language would not
contain its own truth predicate—this could only occur in a
metalanguage, since it requires speakers to talk about sentences
themselves, rather than actually using them. There is great
controversy about the shape that a metalanguague would have to take to
enable analysis of a natural language, and Tarski openly doubted that
these methods would transfer easily from formal to natural languages,
but we will not delve into these issues here.
Tarski argued that a definition of truth would have to be "formally
correct" or as he put it:
(14) For all x, True(x) iff Fx.
or a sentence provably equivalent to this, where "true" was not part
of F. This much was a largely formal condition, but Tarski added a
more robust call for "material adequacy" or a sense that our
definition had succeeded in capturing the sorts of correspondence
between states of affairs and sentences classically associated with
truth. So, for instance, our truth definition had to imply a sentence
like:
(15) "Snow is white" is true iff snow is white.
Note that the quotes here make the first half of this metalanguage
sentence about the object language sentence "Snow is white"; the
second half of the metalanguage sentence is about snow itself. Tarski
then offered a definition of truth
"A sentence is true if it is satisfied by all objects and false
otherwise." (1944, p. 353)
where satisfaction is a relation between arbitrary objects and
sentential functions, and sentential functions are expressions with a
formal structure much like ordinary sentences, but which contain free
variables, for example, "x is blue" or "x is greater than y." Tarski
thought we might indicate which objects satisfied the simplest
sentential functions and then offer a further set of conditions under
which compound functions were satisfied in terms of those simple
functions. (Further refinements were made to a 1956 edition of the
paper to accommodate certain features of model theory that we will not
discuss here.) Once Tarksi added an inductive definition of the other
operators of first-order logic, a definition of truth had apparently
been given without appeal to inherently semantic notions, though Field
(1972) would argue that "designation" and "satisfaction" were semantic
notions as well. Whether this should be read as a deflationary account
of truth or an analysis of a robust correspondence theory was a point
of great debate among analytical philosophers, but much like Frege's
earlier work, it played the far more momentous role of convincing
further generations of logicians and philosophers that the analysis of
traditionally intractable philosophical notions with the tools of
modern logic was both within their grasp and immensely rewarding.
3. Mid-century Revolutions
By the middle of the 20th century, the approach spawned by Frege,
Moore and Russell had taken root with the Logical Positivists. The
Second World War did a great deal to scatter the most talented
philosophers from the Continent, and many settled at universities in
Great Britain and the United States, spreading their views and
influencing generations of philosophers to come. However, the
analytical tradition always had a robust streak of criticism from
within, and some of the pillars of the early orthodoxy were already
under some suspicion from members of the Vienna Circle like Otto
Neurath (see his (1933)) and gadflies like Karl Popper. The next
section addresses the work of two figures, Quine and the later
Wittgenstein, who challenged received views in the philosophy of
language and served as transitional figures for contemporary views.
a. Quine and the Analytic/Synthetic Distinction
W.V.O. Quine (1953) went after the very core of Logical Positivism,
and in effect analytical philosophy, by attacking the
analytic/synthetic distinction. The Positivists had been happy to
admit a distinction between sentences that were true in virtue of the
meanings of their terms and those that were true in virtue of the
facts, but Quine brought a certain skepticism about the meanings of
individual expressions to the table. Much like the Positivists, he was
wary of anything that would not admit to empirical confirmation and
saw meaning as one more such item.
Quine dismissed the idea of a meaning as a real item somehow present
in our minds beyond the ways in which it manifests itself in our
behavior. He later dubbed this "the myth of the museum"—a place "in
which the exhibits are the meanings and the words are the labels."
(1969, p. 27) In a strongly empiricist spirit, he argued that we have
no access to such things in our experience, thus they could not
explain our linguistic behavior, and therefore they had no rightful
place in our account. Quine wondered whether there was a principled
distinction between analytic and synthetic statements at all. In
reviewing the prevailing ideas of analyticity, he found each one
inadequate or question-begging. Analyticity was a dogma, an article of
faith among empiricists (especially Logical Positivists) and one that
could not stand closer scrutiny. Moreover, the Positivists paired
analyticity with a second dogma, empirical reductionism, the view that
each sentence or expression could be assigned its own distinctive
slice of empirical content from our experience. Quine's claim was not
that we should not be empiricists or worry about such empirical
content, but rather that no individual sentence or expression could be
allotted such content all on its own. The sentences of our language
operate in conjunction with one another to "face the tribunal of
experience" as a whole. This holism entailed a certain egalitarianism
among the sentences to which we commit ourselves, as well. Any claim
could be held true, come what may, if we were willing to revise other
parts of our "web of belief" to accommodate it, and any claim—even one
we took to be a claim about meaning before, like "all bachelors are
unmarried"—could be revised if conditions demanded it. (1953, p.43)
Some sentences would have a relatively strong immunity from revision,
for example, the laws of logic, but they enjoy that status only
because of their centrality in our present ways of thinking. Other,
less central claims could be revised more easily, perhaps with only
passing interest, for example, claims about the number of red brick
houses on Elm St. This wide-open revisability came to set a tone for
epistemology in analytical philosophy during the latter half of the
20th century.
Without tidy parcels of empirical content or analytic truths to anchor
an account of meaning, Quine saw little use for meaning at all.
Instead, his work focused on co-reference and assent among speakers.
In Word and Object (1960), he suggested that our position as speakers
is much like that of a field linguist attempting to translate a newly
discovered language with no discernible connections to other local
languages. He dubbed this approach "radical translation." Faced with
such a situation, we would search for recurring expressions and
attempt to secure referents for them. In his classic example, we stand
around with the locals, notice that rabbits occasionally run by and
that the locals mutter "Gavagai" when the rabbits pass; we might be
moved by this to translate their utterances as our own word "rabbit."
Thinking of the translatability of one utterance with another thus
achieves the same sort of theory-building effect that talk of shared
meaning did, but without appeal to abstract objects like meanings.
However, this also led to Quine's thesis of the "indeterminacy of
translation." When we form such hypotheses based on observations of
speakers' behavior, that evidence always underdetermines our
hypothesis, and the evidence could be made to fit other translations,
even if they start to sound a bit strange to us. Hence, "gavagai"
might also be translated as "dinner" (if the locals eat rabbits) or
"Lo, an undetached rabbit part!" We might narrow the plausible
translations a bit with further observation, though not to the logical
exclusion of all others. Direct queries of the local speakers might
also winnow the set of plausible translations a bit, but this presumes
a command of a great deal of abstract terminology that we share with
those speakers, and this command would presumably rest upon a shared
understanding of the simpler sorts of vocabulary with which we
started. Hence, nothing that we can observe about those speakers will
completely determine the correctness of one translation over all
competitors and translation is always indeterminate. This is not to
say that we should not prefer some translations over others, but our
grounds for doing so are usually pragmatic concerns about simplicity
and efficiency, We should also note that each speaker is in much the
same position when it comes to understanding other speakers even in
her mother tongue; we have only the observable behaviors of other
speakers and familiarity with our own usage of such terms, and we must
make ongoing assessments of other speakers in conversation in just
these ways. Donald Davidson, Quine's student, would continue to
develop these ideas even further in Quine's wake, emphasizing that the
interpretation we do on an everyday basis was no less radical than his
mentor was suggesting of the field linguist (see his 1984).
Quine's work inspired many, but also came under sharp attack. The
behaviorism at the heart of his account has fallen out of favor with
the majority of philosophers and cognitive scientists. Much of Noam
Chomsky's (1959) critique of B.F Skinner may be said to apply to
Quine's work. The emphasis on innateness and tacit knowledge in
Chomsky's work has been subject to intense criticism as well, but this
criticism has not pointed philosophers and linguists back towards the
sort of strongly behaviorist empiricism on which Quine's account was
founded. Still, most contemporary philosophers of language owe some
debt to Quine for dismantling the dogmas of early analytical
philosophy and opening new avenues of inquiry.
b. The Later Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein left Cambridge in the early 1920s and pursued projects
outside academia for several years. He returned in 1929 and began
doing very different sorts of work. It is a matter of great debate,
even among Wittgenstein acolytes, how much affinity there is between
these stages. Many philosophers of language will speak of "the later
Wittgenstein" as though the earlier views were wholly different and
incompatible, while others insist that there is strong continuity of
themes and methods. Though his early work was widely misunderstood at
the time, there can be little doubt that some important changes took
place, and these are worth noting here.
In the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953),
Wittgenstein broke with some of the theoretical aspirations of
analytical philosophy in the first half of the century. Where
analytical philosophers of language had strived for elegant,
parsimonious logical systems, the Investigations suggested that
language was a diverse, mercurial collection of "language
games"—goal-directed social activities for which words were just so
many tools to get things done, rather than fixed and eternal
components in a logical structure. Representation, denotation and
picturing were some of the goals that we might have in playing a
language game, but they were hardly the only ones. This turn in
Wittgenstein's philosophy ushered in a new concern for the "pragmatic"
dimensions of language usage. To speak of the pragmatic significance
of an expression in this sense is to consider how grasping it might be
manifested in actions, or the guiding of actions, and thus to turn our
attention to usage rather than abstract notions of logical form common
to earlier forms of analytical philosophy. (Speech act theorists will
also distinguish between pragmatics and semantics in a slightly more
restrictive sense, as we shall see in §4.2.) The view that "meaning is
use" (1953, p.43) was often attributed to him, though interpretations
of this view have varied widely. Wright (1980 and 2001) read this as a
call to social conventionalism about meaning, McDowell (1984)
explicitly rejected such a conclusion and Brandom (1994) took it as an
entry point into an account of meaning that is both normative and
pragmatic (that is, articulated in terms of obligations and
entitlements to do things in certain ways according to shared
practices). But it can be safely said that Wittgenstein rejected a
picture of language as a detached, logical sort of picturing of the
facts and inserted a concern for its pragmatic dimensions. One cannot
look at the representational dimension of language alone and expect to
understand what meaning is.
A second major development in the later Wittgenstein's work was his
treatment of rules and rule-following. Meaning claims had a certain
hold over our actions, but not the sort that something like a law of
nature would. Claims about meaning reflect norms of usage and
Wittgenstein argued that this made the very idea of a "private
language" absurd. By this, he means it would not be possible to have a
language whose meanings were accessible to only one person, the
speaker of that language. Much of modern philosophy was built on
Cartesian models that grounded public language on a foundation of
private episodes, which implied that much (perhaps all) of our initial
grasp of language would also be private. The problem here, said
Wittgenstein, is that to follow a rule for the use of an expression,
appeal to something private will not suffice. Thus, a language
intelligible to only one person would be impossible because it would
be impossible for that speaker to establish the meanings of its
putative signs.
If a language were private, then the only way to establish meanings
would be by some form of private ostension, for example, concentrating
on one's experiences and privately saying, "I shall call this
sensation 'pain'." But to establish a sign's meaning, something must
impress upon the speaker a way of correctly using that sign in the
future, or else the putative ostension is of no value. Assuming we
began with such a private episode, what could be happening on
subsequent uses of the term? We cannot simply say that it feels the
same to us as it did before, or strikes us the same way, for those
sorts of impressions are common even when we make errors and therefore
cannot constitute correctness. One might say that one only has to
remember how one used the sign in the past, but this still leaves us
wondering. What is one remembering in that case? Until we say how a
private episode could establish a pattern of correct usage, memory is
beside the point. To alleviate this difficulty, Wittgenstein turned
his attention to the realm of public phenomena, and suggested that
those who make the same moves with the rules share a "lebensform" or
"form of life," which most have taken to be one's culture or the sum
total of the social practices in which one takes part. Kripke (1982)
offered a notable interpretation of Wittgenstein's private language
argument, though opinions vary on its fidelity to Wittgenstein's work.
Subsequent generations of philosophers on both sides of the Atlantic
would be profoundly influenced by this argument and struggle with its
implications for decades to come.
4. Major Areas in the Contemporary Field
After the seminal works of Quine and Wittgenstein at mid-century, the
majority of views expressed in the field may be broadly lumped into
two groups: those emphasizing truth conditions for sentences in a
theory of meaning and those emphasizing use. Truth-conditional
theories continue the formal analysis of Frege, Carnap and Tarski,
minus Positivism's more radical assumptions, while use theories and
speech act theory take Wittgenstein's emphasis on the pragmatic to
heart. A brief overview of major figures and issues in each of these
follows.
a. Truth-Conditional Theories of Meaning
The majority of philosophers of language working in the analytical
tradition share Frege's intuition that we know the meaning of a word
when we know the role it plays in a sentence and we know the meaning
of a sentence when we know the conditions under which it would be
true. Davidson (1967) and Lewis (1972) argued for such an approach and
stand as watersheds in its development. Truth-conditional theories
generally begin with the assumption that something is a language or a
linguistic expression if and only if its significant parts can
represent the facts of the world. Sentences represent facts or states
of affairs in the world, names refer to objects, and so forth. The
central focus of a theory of meaning remains sentences though, since
it is sentences that apparently constitute the most basic units of
information. For instance, an utterance of the name "John Coltrane"
does not seem to say anything until we point to someone and say, "This
is John Coltrane" or assert "John Coltrane was born in North Carolina"
and so on. This view of the sentence as the most basic units of
meaning is compatible with compositionality, the view that sentences
are composed of a finite stock of simpler elements that may be reused
and recombined in novel ways, so long as we understand the meanings of
those subsentential expressions as contributions to the meanings of
sentences. We might understand names and other referring expressions
as "picking out" their referents, to which the rest of a sentence
attributes something, very roughly speaking. Truth-conditional
theories of meaning have also been attractive to those who would
prefer a naturalistic and reductionist semantics, appealing to nothing
outside the natural world as an explainer of meaning. Strongly
naturalistic accounts are also given by Evans (1983), Devitt (1981),
and Devitt and Sterelny (1999).
Much attention in this area in the last twenty-five years has been
directed at theories of reference, given the importance of explicating
their contribution to truth-theoretical accounts. The view, often
attributed to Frege, that the sense of proper names was a function of
a set of descriptions led many philosophers seeking a
truth-conditional account to include such descriptions in the truth
conditions for sentences in which they occurred as a means of
explaining their reference. However, a new wave of interest in more
direct forms of reference began in the 1970s. The enthusiasm for this
approach grew out of Kripke's Naming and Necessity (1980) and a series
of articles by Hilary Putnam. (1973 and 1975) There, they attacked the
notion that identity statements expressed synonymies, known a priori
at the time of their introduction. If we (or whoever introduces the
term) stipulate that Aristotle is the author of Nicomachean Ethics,
tutor of Alexander, and so on, it would seem to be known a priori that
this was true of the referent of that name. The referent is just that
thing which satisfies all or most of the "cluster of descriptions"
that express the sense of that name. But if we discovered that much or
all of this was false of the person we had called "Aristotle," would
this imply that Aristotle did not exist, or that someone else was
Aristotle? Much the same could be said of natural kind terms: we took
whales to be fish, but those big cetaceans have lungs and mammary
glands, so are there no whales after all?
Instead, Putnam and Kripke suggested that proper names and natural
kind terms (and descriptions like "the square root of 289″) were rigid
designators, or expressions that referred to the same objects or kinds
in every possible world without that relation being mediated by some
form of descriptive content. Other pieces of descriptive content are
actually associated with those expressions—we do say that Aristotle
wrote Nicomachean Ethics and that whales are mammals, and so on—but
their reference is fixed at the time of their introduction and our use
preserves that reference, not the descriptive content. The
descriptions associated with a rigid designator ("the author of
Nicomachean Ethics," and so on) are thus always revisable. This has
been seen as a form of externalism in semantics, whereby the meanings
of words are not entirely determined by psychological states of the
speakers who use them, or as Putnam famously quipped, "meanings just
ain't in the head" (1975, p. 227). Notable recent works in this field
include Kitcher and Stanford (2000), Soames (2002) and Berger (2002).
Several accounts have suggested that while rigid designation in itself
has some plausibility, the reductionist elements of these theories
leave us with an implausibly direct and unmediated account of
reference that must be refined or replaced (Dummett (1974), MacBeth
(1995) and Wolf (2006)).
b. Meaning and Use
Verificationist theories fell out of favor after Quine, but were
reinvigorated by Michael Dummett's work on meaning and logic as well
as his extensive exegetical work on Frege. (See his 1963, 1974, 1975
and 1976.) Dummett shared the Positivists' concern with the cognitive
significance of a statement, which he interpreted as Frege's real
concern in talking about sense in the first place. Many read Frege as
a Platonist about meaning, but Dummett challenged the need for such
ontological extensions and their plausibility as explainers of
semantic facts in general. Dummett's position was less a product of a
priori ontological stinginess than a continuation of Wittgensteinian
themes. Dummett argued that a model of meaning is a model of our
understanding when we know such meanings. We are sometimes able to
express this understanding explicitly, but a model of meaning could
not include such a criterion of explicitness on pain of an infinite
regress. (Note Wittgenstein's Private Language Argument on this
point.) Thus, the knowledge that generally constitutes understanding
must be implicit knowledge and we can only ascribe such implicit
knowledge when we have some sort of observable criteria by which to do
so. These observable criteria will be matters of the use of sentences
and expressions. (See Dummett 1973, pp. 216ff.)
While such a mix of usage and verification may be straightforward for
sentences and conditions that occasionally obtain, it is quite another
matter in cases in which they do not. We can grasp the meaning of a
sentence whose truth conditions never actually obtain or can never
(practically speaking) be verified, for example, "every even number is
the sum of two primes." Knowing what it is for some condition to
obtain and knowing that a particular case exemplifies this are
separable conditions, so meaning cannot be the simple verification of
placing someone in a certain condition and seeing what sentences they
utter. Dummett expanded his account by the inclusion of conditions
like providing correct inferential consequences of a sentence, correct
novel use of a sentence and judgments about sufficient or probable
evidence for the truth or falsity of a sentence. He maintains that
some form of self-verifying presentations will support these demands
and allow us to derive all the features of language use and meaning,
though this remains a sticking point for many who are skeptical of
such episodes and epistemic foundationalism in general.
Dummett's reading of Wittgenstein's emphasis on use has not been the
only one, though. Following Sellars (1967), theorists like Harman
(1982 and 1987), Block (1986 and 1987), and Brandom (1994) have all
pursued an "inferential role" or "conceptual role" semantics that
characterized a grasp of the meaning of sentences as a grasp of the
inferences one would make to and from that sentence. Block and Harman
have explicitly taken this as a basis of a functionalist account of
mental content in psychology, as well. Brandom has not pursued such
causal explanatory strategies, but instead has emphasized the rational
dimension of linguistic competence and the importance of inference to
such an account. We grasp the meaning of a sentence when we understand
other sentences as relevant to it and infer to and from them in the
course of giving and asking for reasons for the claims that we make. A
substantial extension of this work, offering a robustly normative
account of meaning in sharp contrast to the causal reductionism
mentioned above, is offered in Lance and O'Leary-Hawthorne (1997).
c. Speech Act Theory and Pragmatics
Wittgenstein's later work sparked interest in the pragmatic dimensions
of language use among some British philosophers working not long after
his death, but a number grew exasperated with the more deflationary
and "ordinary language" approaches of Wittgenstein's acolytes, who saw
almost no role for theoretical accounts in describing language at all.
Some opted instead to pursue what has come to be known as speech act
theory, led initially by the work of John Austin. (See Grice (1975),
Austin (1962) and Searle (1969).) These philosophers sought an account
of language by which sentences were tools for doing things, including
a taxonomy of uses to which pieces of the language could be put. While
conventional meaning remained important, speech act theorists extended
their focus to an examination of the different ways in which
utterances and inscriptions of sentences might play a role in
achieving various goals. For instance, the sentence
(16) It is sunny outside.
could be a report, an admonition not to take an umbrella, a lie (if
it's not sunny), practicing English, a taunt and many other things
depending on the scenario in which it is put to use.
To see clearly how speech act theorists might address these issues, we
should take note of one of its central doctrines, the
pragmatics/semantics distinction. We may state this generally by
saying that semantic information pertains to linguistic expressions
(such as words and sentences), while pragmatic information pertains to
utterances and the facts surrounding them. The study of pragmatics
thus includes no attention to features like truth or the reference of
words and expressions, but it does include attention to information
about the context in which a speaker made the utterance and how those
conditions allow the speaker to express one proposition rather than
another. This strongly contextual element of pragmatics often leads to
special attention to the goals that a speaker might achieve by
uttering a sentence in a particular way in that context and why she
might have done so. Thus, what a speaker means in saying something is
often explained by an emphasis on the speaker's intentions: to reveal
to the hearer that the speaker wants the hearer to respond in a
certain way and thus to get the hearer to respond in this way.
However, there may be cases in which these intentions have nothing to
do with the meaning of the sentence. I might say, "It is raining
outside," with the intention of getting you to take your umbrella, but
that's not what the sentence means. Likewise, I might have said, "The
Weather Channel is predicting rain this afternoon," with those
intentions, but this does not entail that those two sentences mean the
same thing.
Those intentions whose success is entirely a matter of getting a
hearer's recognition of the actual intention itself are called
illocutionary intentions; those intentions whose success is entirely a
matter of getting the hearer to do something (above and beyond
understanding the semantic content of what is said) are called
perlocutionary intentions. Perlocutionary intentions must be achieved
through illocutionary acts, for example, making you aware of my
intentions to get you to realize something about the weather leads you
to think of your umbrella and take it. Following Bach and Harnish
(1979), speech act theorists typically characterize speech acts by
four analytical subcomponents of speech acts: (1) utterance acts, that
is, the very voicing or inscribing of words and sentences; (2)
propositional acts, that is, referring to things and predicating
properties and relations of them; (3) illocutionary acts, by which
speakers interact with other speakers and the utterances constitute
moves in that interaction, for example, promises and commands; and (4)
perlocutionary acts, by which speakers bring about or achieve
something in others by what they say, for example, convincing or
persuading someone. Some theorists would also add "meaning intention"
and "communicative intention" to this list to emphasize shared
understanding of the conventional meanings attached with words and the
intersubjectivity of speech acts. As these categories might imply,
speech act theory has also incorporated far more consideration of
conversational features of discourse and the social aspects of
communications than other branches of the philosophy of language. For
this reason, it offers promising points of connection between
sophisticated semantic accounts and the empirical research of social
scientists.
Grice (1975) also suggested that philosophy must consider the ways in
which speakers go beyond what is strictly, overtly said by their
utterances to consider what is contextually implicated by them. By
"implicated," here, we are considering the ways in which the things a
speaker says may invite another speaker to some further set of
conclusions, but not in the strict logical sense of entailment or a
purely formal matter of conventional meanings. Grice divided these
implicatures into two large categories: conventional implicatures and
conversational implicatures. Conventional implicatures are those
assigned to utterances based on the conventional meanings of the words
used, though not in the ways familiar from ordinary logical
entailments. For instance:
(17) Michael is an Orioles fan, but he doesn't live in Baltimore.
(18) Michael is an Orioles fan, and he doesn't live in Baltimore.
(19) Michael's being an Orioles fan is unexpected, given that he
doesn't live in Baltimore.
Here, (19) is implied by (17), but not by (18). This failure is not a
matter of differences in what makes (17) and (18) true, but in the way
in which conventions and conversational principles allow speakers to
convey such information. Roughly, the word "but" is used by English
speakers to emphasize contrast and surprise, as a speaker would in
saying (17).
Conversational implicatures are assigned based on a series of maxims
and assumptions by which speakers in conversation cooperate with one
another, according to Grice. He suggests maxims of quantity (make your
contribution informative but not excessively so), quality (make your
contribution true), relation (be relevant), and manner (be
perspicuous). To get a sense of how to apply these, consider one of
Grice's (1975) examples:
(20) Smith doesn't seem to have a girlfriend these days.
(21) He has been paying a lot of visits to New York lately.
Imagine two people having a conversation, with A saying (20) and B
saying (21). B implicates that Smith might have a girlfriend in New
York, assuming that B is following the maxims mentioned above. If not,
say, because B is saying something false or irrelevant, then speakers
cannot cooperate and communication collapses. Grice contends that
these conversational implicatures are calculable given the right sorts
of contextual and background information, along with the linguistic
meaning of what is said and the speakers' adherence to the cooperative
maxims described earlier, and much of the literature on conversational
implicature has attempted to make good on this notion. Many
philosophers working on these aspects of pragmatics worry that these
maxims will not suffice as an account of implicature however, and
readers should consult Davis (1998) for the most current set of
objections to classic Gricean accounts.
Attention to both forms of implicature has drawn philosophers'
attention to matters of presupposition, as well. As the name would
suggest, the discussion of this subject focuses on the sorts of
information required as background for various sorts of logical and
conversational features to obtain. The well-worn example, "Have you
stopped robbing liquor stores?" presupposes that you have been robbing
liquor stores. Implicatures of both forms thus involve various sorts
of presupposition, for example the conventional implicature of "but"
in (17) presupposes a proposition about the demographics of Orioles
fans, and much recent work in pragmatics has been devoted to
developing typologies of presupposition at work in conversation. The
two most serious questions for theorists are (1) how presuppositions
are introduced into or "triggered" in the sentences in which they play
a role and (2) how they are "projected" or carried from the clauses
and parts of sentences in which they appear up into the higher-level
sentences. The origin of much of the work on this is Langendoen and
Savin (1971), and a vast literature has developed in light of it in
linguistics and formal semantics.
5. Future Directions and Emerging Debates
While linguistic analysis does not dominate thinking in analytical
philosophy as it did for much of the twentieth century, it remains a
vibrant field that continues to develop. As in the early days of
analytical philosophy, there is great interest in parallels between
the content of utterances and the attribution of content to mental
states, but many cognitive scientists have moved away from the classic
analytical assumption that thoughts had a symbolic or sentence-like
content. Following the directions mapped out in Rumelhart and
McClelland (1986) some cognitive scientists have embraced
connectionism, a view that emphasizes the dynamic interaction between
large sets of interconnected nodules (much like neurons in the brain),
as a model for cognition. Thought would thus not be symbol processing,
akin to an internal monologue, and the scope of traditional accounts
of language and meaning would be greatly diminished. Readers may
consult Tomberlin (1995) for an overview of the field and Churchland
(1995) for one of its most ardent proponents. A defense of more
traditional symbol-processing approaches has also developed, notably
in the work of Fodor and Lepore (1999), complemented by even more
radical challenges to symbol processing in the form of dynamic systems
theory (see van Gelder 1995 and Rockwell 2005).
Much recent work in the philosophy of language has also been concerned
with the context sensitivity of expressions and sentences. This has
been driven in no small part by an increasing emphasis on context
sensitivity in epistemology (DeRose 1998; Lewis 1996) and meta-ethics
(Dancy 1993). Of course, much more emphasis had been put on context
over the last fifty years by use and speech act theories. Recently,
some have come out in favor of context insensitivity as the
predominant mode of natural languages. Cappelen and Lepore (2005) do
not argue that there are no context sensitive words or sentences, but
rather for semantic minimalism, the view that there are relatively few
and they are familiar categories like pronouns and indexicals. They
combine this with new work on speech act content to mount a
substantial challenge to a great many contemporary philosophers. This
debate between minimalists and contextualists promises to be a lively
one in the philosophy of language over the next few years.
6. References and Further Reading
* (Works are listed first by their original dates of publication,
with more recent and widely available editions included in some
entries.)
* Austin, J. L. (1962) How To Do Things With Words. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
* Bach, K. and Harnish, R. (1979) Linguistic Communication and
Speech Acts. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
* Berger, Alan. (2002) Terms and Truth: Reference Direct and
Anaphoric. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
* Block, N. (1986) "Advertisement For a Semantics for Psychology."
In P. French, T. Uehling and H. Wettstein (Eds.). Midwest Studies in
Philosophy, vol. 10, pp. 615-678. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
* Block, N. (1987) "Functional Role and Truth Conditions,"
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 61, 157-181.
* Brandom, R. (1994) Making It Explicit. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
* Cappelen, H. and Lepore, E. (2005) Insensitive Semantics.
Oxford: Basil Blackwell Pub.
* Carnap, R. (1928) The Logical Structure of the World (Die
Logische Aufbau der Welt). George, E. (trans.) New York: Open Court
Classics, 1999.
* Chomsky, N. (1959) "A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal
Behavior." In Language, 35(1), 26-58.
* Churchland, P. (1995) Engine of Reason, Seat of the Soul: A
Philosophical Journey Into the Brain. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
* Dancy, J. (1993) Moral Reasons. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Pub.
* Davidson, D. (1967) "Truth and Meaning." In Davidson (1984), pp. 17-36.
* Davidson, D. (1984) Inquiries Into Truth and Interpretation.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Davis, W. (1998) Implicature: Intention, Convention and
Principle in the Failure of Gricean Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
* DeRose K. (1995) "Solving the Skeptical Problem." The
Philosophical Review 104(1), 1-7, 17-52.
* Devitt, Michael. (1981) Designation. New York: Columbia University Press.
* Devitt, M. and Sterelny, K. (1999) Language and Reality.
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
* Dummett, M. (1963) "Realism." In Dummett (1978), pp. 145-165.
* Dummett, M. (1973) "The Philosophical Basis of Intuitionistic
Logic." In Dummett (1978), pp. 215-247.
* Dummett, M. (1974) "The Social Character of Meaning." In Dummett
(1978), pp. 420-430.
* Dummett, M. (1975) "Frege's Distinction Between Sense and
Reference." In Dummett (1978), pp. 116-144.
* Dummett, M. (1976) "What Is a Theory of Meaning? (II)" In Truth
and Meaning: Essays in Semantics. G. Evans and J. McDowell. (Eds.)
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
* Dummett, M. (1978) Truth and Other Enigmas. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
* Evans, G. (1983) The Varieties of Reference. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
* Field, H. (1972) "Tarski's Theory of Truth." Journal of
Philosophy 69, 347-75.
* Field, H. (1977) "Logic, Meaning and Conceptual Role" Journal of
Philosophy 74, 379-408.
* Fodor, J and E. Lepore. (1999) "All at Sea in Semantic Space:
Churchland on Meaning Similarity." Journal of Philosophy 96, 381-403.
* Frege, G. (1892) "On Sense and Reference." In The Frege Reader.
Beaney, M. (Ed.) London: Penguin Press, 1997.
* Frege, G. (1884) The Foundations of Arithmetic: A
Logico-Mathematical Enquiry into the Concept of Number. J. Austin
(Trans.) Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1980.
* Grice, P. (1975) "Logic and Conversation." In Studies in the Way
of Words, pp. 22-40. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.
* Harman, G. (1982) "Conceptual Role Semantics." Notre Dame
Journal of Formal Logic 23, 242-56.
* Harman, G. (1987) "(Non-solipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics."
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