Philosophy of Language

What it asks

A sound leaves one person and a thought arrives in another. Nothing about the sound resembles the thought, and the arrangement works anyway, at speed, with strangers, about things that are absent or do not exist.

Two questions come apart immediately. What is it for a word to REFER to something - what connects the name to the person? And what is it for a sentence to MEAN something - which cannot be a matter of reference alone, since a sentence can be meaningful and about nothing.

This branch has no parent. It became central in its own right because a great many philosophical problems turned out to be, or to look like, problems about how they had been stated.

The recurring problems

Sense and reference. Two names for one thing can differ in what they contribute: learning that the morning star is the evening star is learning something, though both name Venus. Frege's answer, that a name has a sense as well as a reference, is the foundation of the subject and has been disputed ever since.

Empty names. Sentences about Pegasus are meaningful and there is no Pegasus. Any theory that makes meaning depend on reference has to say something about this, and the options are all awkward.

Meaning and use. The later Wittgenstein argued that meaning is not a thing a word has but a matter of how it is used in a practice. That is either a profound reorientation or a refusal to answer the question, and reasonable people still divide on which.

What is said and what is conveyed. Almost every utterance communicates far more than it states. Grice showed the extra content follows systematically from the assumption that the speaker is cooperating, which raised the question of what belongs to meaning at all.

How it developed

Frege began it in 1892 by distinguishing sense from reference, in the course of solving a problem about identity statements. Russell's theory of descriptions in 1905 showed how a sentence's surface form can disguise its logical form, and was treated for decades as a paradigm of what philosophical analysis could achieve.

Wittgenstein's Tractatus proposed that sentences picture facts. His Philosophical Investigations, published in 1953, repudiated it and replaced picturing with use, rules and forms of life, and reoriented the field.

Austin then observed that many utterances do not describe anything at all: promising, naming, apologising and betting are acts performed in speaking. Speech act theory followed. Grice worked out the systematic relation between what is said and what is implied.

Kripke's Naming and Necessity in 1980 attacked the descriptive theory of names directly, arguing that a name refers through a causal chain reaching back to a baptism rather than through a description the speaker associates - a result whose consequences ran well beyond language, into metaphysics and philosophy of mind.

The positions within it

Descriptivism and the causal theory of reference; truth-conditional semantics and use theories; ideal language and ordinary language approaches; contextualism and semantic minimalism. All are in the Schools section.

Where it stands now

The field is more technical and less central than at its height. Its methods migrated into linguistics, where formal semantics is now a working science, and the grand claim that philosophy just is analysis of language did not survive.

The live work is at the edges: on how much of what a sentence says depends on context, on slurs and other expressions whose meaning seems to carry an attitude, and on the linguistic mechanisms of silencing and propaganda, which have made a technical field politically relevant in a way it was not.