Philosophy of Language

Alexander Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351265508
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Philosophy of Language provides a comprehensive, meticulous survey of twentieth-century and contemporary philosophical theories of meaning. Interweaving the historical development of the subject with a thematic overview of the different approaches to meaning, the book provides students with the tools necessary to understand contemporary analytic philosophy. Beginning with a systematic look at Frege's foundational theories on sense and reference, Alexander Miller goes on to offer a clear exposition of the development of subsequent arguments in the philosophy of language. Communicating a sense of active philosophical debate, the author confronts the views of the early theorists, taking in Frege, Russell, and logical positivism and going on to discuss the scepticism of Quine, Kripke, and Wittgenstein. The work of philosophers such as Davidson, Dummett, Searle, Fodor, McGinn, Wright, Grice, and Tarski is also examined in depth.

The third edition has been fully revised for enhanced clarity and includes:

· a short introduction for students, outlining the importance of the philosophy of language and the aims of the book;
· two substantial new sections on Philip Pettit's "ethocentric" account of rule-following and on Hannah Ginsborg's "partial reductionism" about rule-following and meaning;
· the addition of chapter summaries and study questions throughout, designed to promote greater understanding and engagement;
· updated guides to further reading at the end of every chapter.

This well-established and sophisticated introduction to the philosophy of language is an unrivalled guide to one of the liveliest and most challenging areas of philosophy and is suitable for use on undergraduate degrees and in postgraduate study.

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Chapter 1

Frege

Semantic value and reference¹

Philosophy of language is motivated in large part by a desire to say something systematic about our intuitive notion of meaning, and in the preface (to the first edition) we distinguished two main ways in which such a systematic account can be given. The most influential figure in the history of the project of systematising the notion of meaning (in both of these ways) is Gottlob Frege (1848–1925), a German philosopher, mathematician, and logician, who spent his entire career as a professor of mathematics at the University of Jena. In addition to inventing the symbolic language of modern logic,² Frege introduced some distinctions and ideas which are absolutely crucial for an understanding of the philosophy of language, and the main task of this chapter and the next is to introduce these distinctions and ideas, and to show how they can be used in a systematic account of meaning.

1.1 Frege’s logical language

Frege’s work in the philosophy of language builds on what is usually regarded as his greatest achievement, the invention of the language of modern symbolic logic. This is the logical language that is now standardly taught in university introductory courses on the subject. As noted in the introduction, a basic knowledge of this logical language will be presupposed throughout this book, but we’ll very quickly run over some of this familiar ground in this section.

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Logic is the study of argument. A valid argument is one in which the premises, if true, guarantee the truth of the conclusion: i.e. in which it is impossible for all of the premises to be true and yet for the conclusion to be false. An invalid argument is one in which the truth of the premises does not guarantee the truth of the conclusion: i.e. in which there are at least some possible circumstances in which all of the premises are true and the conclusion is false.³ One of the tasks of logic is to provide us with rigorous methods of determining whether a given argument is valid or invalid. In order to apply the logical methods, we have first to translate the arguments, as they appear in natural language, into a formal logical notation.⁴ Consider the following (intuitively valid) argument:

(1) If Jones has taken the medicine then he will get better;

(2) Jones has taken the medicine; therefore,

(3) He will get better.

This can be translated into Frege’s logical notation by letting the capital letters “P” and “Q” abbreviate the whole sentences or propositions out of which the argument is composed, as follows:

P:	Jones has taken the medicine
Q:	Jones will get better

The conditional “If . . . then . . .” gets symbolised by the arrow “. . .→. . .”. The argument is thus translated into logical symbolism as:

P → Q, P; therefore, Q.

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The conditional “→” is known as a sentential connective, since it allows us to form a complex sentence (P → Q) by connecting two simpler sentences (P, Q). Other sentential connectives are: “and”, symbolised by “&”; “or”, symbolised by “v”; “it is not the case that”, symbolised by “–”; “if and only if”, symbolised by “↔”. The capital letters “P”, “Q”, etc. are known as sentential constants, since they are abbreviations for whole sentences. For instance, in the example above, “P” is an abbreviation for the sentence expressing the proposition that Jones has taken the medicine, and so on. Given this vocabulary, we can translate many natural language arguments into logical notation. Consider:

(4) If Rangers won and Celtic lost, then Fergus is unhappy;

(5) Fergus is not unhappy; therefore

(6) Either Rangers didn’t win or Celtic didn’t lose.

We assign sentential constants to the component sentences as follows:

P:	Rangers won
Q:	Celtic lost
R:	Fergus is unhappy.

The argument then translates as:

(P & Q) → R, –R; therefore –P v – Q.

Now that we have translated the argument into logical notation we can go on to apply one of the logical methods for checking validity (e.g. the truth-table method) to determine whether the argument is valid or not.

The logical vocabulary described above belongs to propositional logic. The reason for this tab is obvious: the basic building blocks of the arguments are sentences expressing whole propositions, abbreviated by the sentential constants “P”, “Q”, “R” etc. However, there are many arguments in natural language which are intuitively valid, but whose validity is not captured by translation into the language of propositional logic. For example:

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(7) Socrates is a man;

(8) All men are mortal; therefore

(9) Socrates is mortal.

Since (7), (8), and (9) are different sentences expressing different propositions, this would translate into propositional logic as:

P, Q; therefore, R.

The problem with this is that whereas the validity of the argument clearly depends on the internal structure of the constituent sentences, the formalisation into propositional logic simply ignores this structure. For example, the proper name “Socrates” appears both in (7) and (9), and this is intuitively important for the validity of the argument, but is ignored by the propositional logic formalisation which simply abbreviates (7) and (9) by, respectively, “P” and “R”. In order to deal with this, Frege showed us how to extend our logical notation in such a way that the internal structure of sentences can also be exhibited. We take capital letters from the middle of the alphabet “F”, G”, “H”, and so on, as abbreviations for predicate expressions; and we take small case letters “m”, “n”, and so on, as abbreviations for proper names. Thus, in the above example we can use the following translation scheme:

m:	Socrates
F:	. . . is a man
G:	. . . is mortal.

(7) and (9) are then formalised as Fm and Gm respectively. But what about (8)? We can work towards formalising this in a number of stages. First of all, we can rephrase it as:

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For any object: if it is a man, then it is mortal.

Using the translation scheme above we can rewrite this as:

For any object: if it is F, then it is G.

Now, instead of speaking directly of objects, we can represent them by using variables “x”, “y”, and so on (in the same way that we use variables to stand for numbers in algebra). We can then rephrase (8) further as:

For any x: if x is F, then x is G

and then as

For any x: Fx → Gx

The expression “For any x” (or “For all x”) is called the universal quantifier, and it is represented symbolically as (∀x). The entire argument can now be formalised as:

Fm; (∀x)(Fx → Gx); therefore, Gm.

The type of logic which thus allows us to display the internal structure of sentences is called predicate logic, for obvious reasons (in the simplest case, it represents subject-predicate sentences as subject-predicate sentences). Note that predicate logic is not separate from propositional logic, but is rather an extension of it: predicate logic consists of the vocabulary of propositional logic plus the additional vocabulary of proper names, predicates, and quantifiers. Note also that in addition to the universal quantifier there is another type of quantifier. Consider the argument:

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(10) There is something which is both red and square; therefore

(11) There is something which is red.

Again, the validity of this intuitively depends on the internal structure of the constituent sentences. We can use the following translation scheme:

F:	. . . is red
G:	. . . is square.

We’ll deal with (10) first. Following the method we used when dealing with (8) we can first rephrase (10) as:

There is some x such that: it is F and G.

Or,

There is some x such that: Fx & Gx.

The expression “There is some x such that” is known as the existential quantifier, and is symbolised as (∃x). (10) can thus be formalised as (∃x)(Fx & Gx), and, similarly, (11) is formalised as (∃x)Fx. The whole argument is therefore translated into logical symbolism as:

(∃x)(Fx & Gx); therefore (∃x)Fx.

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That, then, is a brief recap on the language of modern symbolic logic, which in its essentials was invented by Frege. The introduction of this new notation, especially of the universal and existential quantifiers, constituted a huge advance on the syllogistic logic which had dominated philosophy since the time of Aristotle. It allowed logicians to formalise and prove intuitively valid arguments whose form and validity could not be captured in the traditional Aristo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Philosophy of Language
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface to the First Edition
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface to the Third Edition
• Acknowledgements, First Edition
• Acknowledgements, Second Edition
• Acknowledgements, Third Edition
• Introduction
• 1 Frege: Semantic Value and Reference
• 2 Frege and Russell: Sense and Definite Descriptions
• 3 Sense and Verificationism: Logical Positivism
• 4 Scepticism About Sense (I): Quine on Analyticity and Translation
• 5 Scepticism About Sense (Ii): Kripke’s Wittgenstein and the Sceptical Paradox
• 6 Saving Sense: Responses to the Sceptical Paradox
• 7 Sense, Intention, and Speech-Acts: Grice’s Programme
• 8 Sense and Truth: Tarski and Davidson
• 9 Sense, World, and Metaphysics
• Bibliography
• Index