Language philosophy
The philosophy of language is the branch of philosophy that studies language in its most general and fundamental aspects, such as the nature of meaning and reference, the relationship between language, thought and the world, the use of language (or pragmatics), interpretation, translation and the limits of language.
Philosophy of language differs from linguistics in that it uses non-empirical methods (such as thought experiments) to reach its conclusions. In addition, philosophy of language generally does not differentiate between spoken language, writing or any other of its manifestations, but what is common to all of them is studied. Finally, linguists in general study language for descriptive purposes, analyzing its forms, levels, and functions. Instead, the approach of language philosophers is more abstract and detached from the practical description of particular languages.
Semantics is the part of the philosophy of language (and linguistics) that deals with the relationship between language and the world. Some problems that fall under this field are the problem of reference, the nature of predicates, of representation and of truth. In the Cratylus, Plato pointed out that if the connection between words and the world is arbitrary or conventional, then it is difficult to understand how language can allow the knowledge about the world. For example, it is clear that the name "Venus" could have designated anything apart from the planet Venus, and that the planet Venus could have been called anything else. Then, when it is said that "Venus is larger than Mercury," the truth of this sentence is conventional, because it depends on our conventions about what "Venus," "Mercury," and the rest of the words involved mean. In another language, those same words could, by some coincidence, mean something very different and express something false. However, although the meaning of the words is conventional, once their meaning has been fixed, it seems that truth and falsehood do not depend on conventions, but on how the world is. This "fixing of meaning" is often called interpretation, and it is one of the central issues of semantics.
A further problem in this direction is that if an interpretation is given in linguistic terms (for example: «Venus is the name of the second planet from the Sun»), then there remains the doubt of how the words of the interpretation are to be interpreted. If they are interpreted by means of new words, then the problem resurfaces, and a threat of infinity regression, of circularity, or of arbitrary cutoff in reasoning (perhaps in words whose meaning is supposedly self-evident) becomes visible. But for some, this problem invites us to think about a non-linguistic form of interpretation, such as behaviorism or ostensive definition.
Pragmatics, on the other hand, is the part of the philosophy of language that deals with the relationship between language users and language. Some of the central questions of pragmatics are the elucidation of the language learning process. language, the rules and conventions that make communication possible, and the description of the many and varied uses given to language, among them: describing states of affairs, asking, ordering, joking, translating, begging, thanking, curse, greet, pray, etc.
The nature of meaning
What is the meaning of meaning? The answer to this question is not so obvious. A whole part of the philosophy of language tries to find an answer. In general there have been six different ways of trying to explain what linguistic meaning is. Each one has been associated with its own literary body.
- The theory of the ideas is associated with the British empirical tradition of Locke, Berkeley and Hume. They say that the content of meaning is purely mental, caused by signs. However, that view of meaning has been questioned by numerous problems from the beginning. The interest has been renewed by some contemporary theorists under the disguise of semantic internalism.
- The theory of Conditional truth He maintains that the meaning of an expression is given by its conditions of truth, that is to say the conditions under which that expression is true.
- The theory of use it argues that the meaning involves or is related to acts of language and its particular pronunciation, not to the expression itself. Wittgenstein helped create that theory of meaning.
- The theory reference, also called collectively semantic externalism, sees meaning as something equivalent to those things in the world that are connected with the signs.
- The theory verifying is generally associated with logical positivism (Xth century). The traditional formula of this theory is the method to see the meaning of a phrase. This is verification or falsehood.
- The theory pragmatic includes any theory by which the meaning of a phrase is determined by the consequence of its application.
Locke
Book III of the Essay on Human Understanding is the first work in which the semantic theses based on the Cartesian epistemological turn are systematically exposed.
It constitutes, to a certain extent, the first book on the philosophy of language because in it epistemological problems are explicitly addressed, linking them to semantic problems. Locke's essay constitutes one of the first works in which an awareness of logical-semantic investigations is manifested; are inextricably linked to solving philosophical problems
Words, in their primary meaning, mean nothing except the ideas that are in the mind of the user" Locke (Essay III, II, 2).
With the qualification, "in their primary meaning", Locke seemed to exclude first and foremost metalinguistic occurrences of words, that is, when words are used to refer to themselves, and furthermore, words syncategorises, of which he explicitly affirms that they serve to signify the connection that the mind establishes with the propositions, linking one to the other. With this, Locke was warned against criticism, which, however, was formulated later, which insisted on the need for each word to correspond to an idea, on pain of being considered meaningless.
Frege
Frege builds on the traditional idea that expressions like "Aristotle" or "the most eminent disciple of Plato" they have a reference (in these two cases, Aristotle). The main objective of the article is to show that, in addition to the reference, the meaning of these expressions includes something else, which Frege calls the sense of the expressions, then we have sense and reference.
Russell
Perhaps Russell's most significant contribution to the philosophy of language is his theory of descriptions, presented in his essay On Denoting, first published in 1905 in the philosophy journal Mind, the which the mathematician and philosopher Frank P. Ramsey described as "a paradigm of philosophy". The theory is usually illustrated using the phrase "The present King of France", as in "The present King of France is bald". What object is this proposition about, since there is currently no king of France? The same problem would arise if there were two kings of France today: which one is The King of France referring to?
Alexius Meinong had suggested that we must assume the existence of a realm of "non-existent entities" that we can assume about which we are referring when we use expressions like that; but this would be a strange theory, to say the least. Frege, using his distinction between sense and reference, suggested that such sentences, while significant, were neither true nor false. But some of those propositions, such as "If the present king of France is bald, then the present king of France has no hair on her head", seems not only true in value but obviously true indeed.
Leech
Geoffrey Leech has said that there are essentially two different types of linguistic meaning: the conceptual and the associative. For Leech the conceptual meaning of an expression has to do with the very definition of the words and the characteristics of their definitions. The type of meaning is treated using the technique called semantic feature analysis. The conceptual meaning of an expression inevitably involves both definition (also called “connotation” and “intent”) and extension (also called “denotation”).
The associative meaning of an expression has to do with what the individual mentally understands about the speaker. This associative meaning can be subdivided into six types: connotative, conlocative, social, affective, reflective, and thematic.
Phonetism or phonetization
In all the topics on the philosophy of language, especially on semantics, the word phonetics does not appear anywhere, this being a transcendental phenomenon of ordinary language, a fact that occurred in ancient times. Sumerian. It consisted in the identification of the written and spoken languages with the represented ideas: the written one gives it consistency and facilitates the analysis, while the spoken one gives it dynamism, which facilitates its synthesis.
The problem in terms of semantics lies in the dynamism of the words, reflected in the lexical change: a word can have many meanings, even exclusive ones at times. To fold a newspaper is to reduce its surface by half, while to double a bet is to multiply it by two. It's just an example. How is it possible that we can understand each other with language like this? Thanks to the pragmatic knowledge and the sense that we speakers usually have. However, this has to be explained somehow. Let's think of a joke in which a word is said in a context where it means one thing and then another context is offered where it means another that bounces off the first one, which is what provokes laughter. Why this can be so? For something that a Spanish philosopher today completely forgotten, Jaime Balmes, observed more than a century and a half ago: that we do not identify the content of a term at the very moment of hearing it, but rather later. This means that the human being can be autonomous at the moment of understanding, something that does not happen to the machine, which he identifies instantly, which makes it automatic. So the temporal mismatch between the moment of hearing a term and the moment of identifying the corresponding concept is what makes us able to do with the dynamism of ordinary language. And of course, this has been possible since phonetics was produced, since spoken language introduced time, which is where dynamism occurs and where each term can be understood with more than one meaning.
Conceptions of language
Both are pre-Aristotelian conceptions of language: naturalism and conventionalism. Naturalism is committed to the position of mimesis, in which language (linguistic and ontological components) offers a faithful reflection of reality, and therefore constitutes a heuristic method to achieve knowledge of reality. Conventionalism denies a direct connection in such a way that the use of names is by social convention (nomoi built by ethoi). Thus, it denies the ability of language to offer an accurate reflection of reality.
Meaning is a fundamental concept in the philosophy of language. The concept is looked at from a purely philosophical and sometimes psychological point of view. What individual words or sentences might mean is generally not studied, for which dictionaries and encyclopedias exist. So then, with respect to meaning, the following questions have arisen: What is the nature of meaning? What does the word "meaning"? mean? Why do expressions have the meanings they have and not another? Which expressions have the same meaning as others? and because?. How is it possible to compose the sentences in "everything" make sense? Do the parts of a sentence make sense? And how can the meanings of words be known by human beings?
In a similar theme arises the phenomenon of truth and its relationship with meaning. Rather than studying which sentences are actually true, this branch of philosophy studies what kinds of meanings can be true or false. Thus, then, questions such as: What does it mean for a sentence to be true? Can meaningless sentences be true or false? Can sentences that refer to things that do not exist be true or false? And are the sentences the ones that are true or false, or is it the use of the sentences that determines their truth value?
Regarding the use of language, from an area of linguistics called pragmatics, questions such as: What do we actually do with language? How is it that we use it > Socially? How does language relate to the world? and what is the purpose of language?
Referring to the learning and creation of language, it has been possible to ask, among other things: Is it possible to have some type of thoughts without having a vocabulary?, what types of thoughts need a vocabulary to exist?, what is the influence of language and the vocabulary in the knowledge of the world? and can someone think without using language?
Subsequently touching on the subject of thought and the mind, the question has also been asked: How is language related to the mind of the sender and that of the receiver? How is language related to the world? How does our language actually?
The philosophy of language is a vital part of a philosophy in general, because it can determine the notion of experience and the existence of the subject, as well as the notion of oneself.
Philosophers of Language
Some of the most important philosophers of language are Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Charles Williams Morris, Gadamer, John Langshaw Austin, and Mikhail Bakhtin.
Philosophers of language are not very concerned with the individual meaning of a word or sentence. The nearest dictionary or encyclopedia can solve the problem about the meaning of words and how to speak a language correctly by knowing what the meaning of most sentences is.
What interests philosophers most is the question: what meaning does an expression that means something mean? Why do expressions have the meaning they do? Which expressions have the same meaning as other expressions and why? How can the meaning be known? And the most basic question: what is 'mean' when we use the term "mean"?
In the same vein, philosophers marvel at the relationships between meaning and truth. Philosophers are less interested in knowing which sentences are really true, and more in what kinds of meanings can be false and which are true. Some examples of the truth-oriented questions that philosophers of language ask include: can meaningless sentences be true or false? What about sentences about things that don't exist? Are the sentences true or false? Is it the use of sentences that makes them such?
Language and truth are important not only because they are used in our daily lives, but because language shapes human development from early childhood and continues until death. Knowledge itself is intertwined with language. Notions of self, experience, and existence may depend entirely on how language is used and is learned through language.
The very subject of language learning leads us to interesting questions. Is it possible to have thoughts without having language? What kinds of thinking are needed for language to happen? How much does language influence knowledge of the world and how does it act in it? Is it possible, somehow, to reason without the use of language?
The philosophy of language is important for all the reasons mentioned above, and it is also important because it is inseparable from how one thinks and lives. People, in general, have a set of vital concepts, which are connected with signs and symbols, including all words (symbols): objects, love, good, God, masculine, feminine, art, government, etc. Incorporating “meaning”, each has formed a vision of the universe and how they -words- have meaning within it.
Areas of the philosophy of language
It is well known that there are different parts of language. A common sentence is made up of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and other words with grammatical significance. The most important question in this area, and perhaps the most important question for generative (formalist) and structuralist thinkers, is: "How does the meaning of the sentence emerge, as a result of each part?"
Many aspects of the problem of how sentences are formed are addressed to the linguistic area of syntax. Semantic philosophers tend to focus on the principle of compositionality, to explain the relationship between the meaning of the parts and the whole sentence. The principle of compositionality says that a sentence can be understood, based on the meaning of the parts of the sentence (for example: words, morphemes) together with the understanding of its structure (for example: syntax, logic).
Traditions of language study
In Western culture the study of language has been carried out by three distinct traditions of inquiry that can be characterized somewhat simplistically as the theological, philosophical, and scientific traditions. Most likely the oldest of these traditions is the theological and religious study of language. Both the Jewish and Christian traditions have always paid exceptional attention to the texts and their interpretations in their teachings. In particular, the stories of the creation of the world by the divine word, Adam's first activity in naming the animals or the story of the confusion of the languages of Babel have been a permanent source of reflection. "In the beginning was Word" understood the apostle John when he began the Gospel of him. The awareness of the limitation of human language to speak of God, the need to inculturate the salvific message in all languages or the pragmatic value of sacramental language are essential elements that allow us to notice the importance assigned to the study of language in the Christian tradition.
The oldest surviving philosophical debate on language is Plato's (c. 427-347 BC) dialogue entitled Cratylus. This is a discussion about the origins of language and the nature of meaning, in which Hermogenes holds the view that words are conventional and their relation to things is arbitrary, while Cratylus argues that "there is a correct name for natural way for each of the things: a name is not simply the one that various people agree to call a thing.
At the end of the XVII century, John Locke introduced some elements that would later be developed by analytical philosophy two centuries later. Locke analyzed in various parts of his Essay the role played by language in the problem of knowledge. According to William Alston, the ideational theory of language begins with Locke; According to this theory, language would be an instrument for the communication of thoughts, that is, words function as external signs to communicate our ideas or internal thoughts.
Since the end of the XVIII century, language and the diversity of languages attracted the attention of a number of specialists more and more elderly. This approach was first known as "Philology", focusing on the study of the historical development of language.
Linguists have frequently regarded their work as scientific and experimental in opposition to the speculations of the philosophical and theological traditions. But, increasingly from linguistics, the study of the foundations of linguistics and the determination of the nature of the linguistic theories that were the object of attention to religious language and its typical forms of expression have been approached in recent years. In this way, in our days the approximation between those three traditions of language study seems more and more convenient.
Current language philosophy is usually concerned with linguistic expressions, statements and sentences, familiar to all human beings. Sometimes mathematical language or specialized scientific languages are studied, but the normal thing since the European post-war period is that attention is focused on ordinary language. We are able to operate with language in the usual contexts in which we ordinarily find ourselves, but we are (Dummett has described) like soldiers in the midst of a battle, seeing enough to be able to play the role assigned to us, but at the same time At the same time we are totally in the dark about what is happening on a general scale.
Gottlob Frege, a logician, made several contributions to the influence philosophy of language. Investigations about how language interacts with the world are called reference theories. Gottlob Frege, was a proponent of mediated reference theory. Frege has divided the semantic content of each expression, including sentences, into two components: Sinn (usually translated as "sense") and Bedeutung (translated as "meaning", "denotation", "nominatum" and "of reference", among others). The meaning of a sentence is the thought it expresses. Such thought is abstract, universal and objective. The meaning of any propositional sub-expression consists in its contribution to the idea that its sentence is express embedding. Referents are the objects in the world that the words choose. Therefore, the referents of "the evening star" and "the morning star" they are the same, the planet Venus. But they are two different ways of presenting the same object and therefore have two different meanings. The senses of the sentences are thoughts, while their referents are the truth values (true or false).
John Stuart Mill proposes a different analysis of the relationship between meaning and reference. For him, although there are two elements to consider for most of the terms of a language (connotation and denotation), proper names, such as Bill Clinton, Bismarck or John Hodgman only have one denotation. Therefore, Mill's view is what is now called direct reference theory.
Bertrand Russell, in his later writings, and for reasons related to his knowledge of epistemological theory, held that referential expressions are only directly, what he calls, "logically proper names". Logically, the proper names terms such as I, now, here and other deictic. He regarded proper names of the type described above as 'abbreviated definite descriptions'. Thus Barack H. Obama may be an abbreviation for "the current President of the United States and the husband of Michelle Obama". Definite descriptions are denoting expressions (see The Designating), which are parsed by Russell into existentially quantified logical constructions. These phrases denote in the sense that there is an object that satisfies the description. However, these objects are not considered significant by themselves, but only make sense in the proposition expressed by the sentences of which they are a part. Therefore, they are not directly referential in the same way as logically proper names, for Russell.
Because of Frege, any expression that refers has a sense, as well as a referent. That "mediated reference" has some theoretical advantages over Mill's view. For example, co-referential names, such as Samuel Clemens and Mark Twain, cause problems in getting a direct referential view, because it is possible for someone to hear 'Mark Twain is Samuel'. Clemens", and you will be surprised - therefore their cognitive content seems different. Mill's views are also in trouble when dealing with names without bearers. The phrase "Pegasus is the winged horse of Greek mythology" seems to be perfectly useful, not even true, sentence. But, in Mill's opinion, "Pegasus" It doesn't make sense because it has no referent. Therefore, following the principle of compositionality, the sentence itself is neither true nor false and does not make sense. Various other difficulties have also been noted in the literature.
Despite the differences between the views of Frege and Russell, they generally group together as descriptivists about proper names. Such descriptivism was criticized in Naming and Necessity, by Saul Kripke.
Kripke put forth what has come to be known as "the modal argument" (argument or "from rigidity"). Consider the name Aristotle and the descriptions of "Plato's greatest disciple", "the founder of logic" and "Alejandro"s teacher". Aristotle obviously fits all the descriptions (and many others commonly associated with him), but it is not necessarily true that if Aristotle existed then, Aristotle was any, or all, of these descriptions. Aristotle may well have existed without doing a single thing for which he is known to posterity. It is possible that he existed and have not come to know of posterity at all or that he may have died in infancy. Suppose Aristotle is associated by Mary with the description "the last great philosopher of antiquity" and (the real) Aristotle died in infancy. Following the description of Mary, seems to refer to Plato. But this is deeply contradictory. Therefore, names are rigid designators, according to Kripke. That is, they refer to the same person in all possible worlds in which that person exists. In the same work, Kripke has articulated other arguments against 'Frege-Russell' descriptivism.
Linguistic relativism
Language and culture
Between language and culture there is a relationship of reciprocal exchange. On the one hand, language is a cultural product, which partly reflects a culture, but, on the other hand, language is a condition of culture and contributes to creating it. Language is a form of culture, perhaps the most universal of all and, in any case, the first that immediately and clearly distinguishes the human being from other beings.
The connection between language and culture was especially accentuated in the realm of German idealism. Language, in Hegel's view, is the "actuality of culture." Humboldt and, later, Karl Vossler stressed that linguistic activity represents an objectification of the subject who, when acting, shapes a cosmos for himself, and after having acted, contemplates his product as something other than himself, ready to be molded into new expressive acts. Language is considered as a creation, art made by a free spirit.
Language is a manifestation of a culture, since each language contains the knowledge, ideas and beliefs about the reality that a community shares. Language is the first way that the human being has to fix and objectify the knowledge of himself and the world. Through the word, which gives a name to things and objects, the world acquires the physiognomy of a human and familiar world.
Insofar as it constitutes transmissible knowledge, language is a cultural fact. In the lexicon of a language, sayings and expressions are reflected, which reflect the culture of previous generations. Within strict linguistics, Sapir and Whorf formulated the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which stated that thought itself could be affected by the abstract categories reflected in the speaker's language. After decades of discussion, this notion is rejected by most linguists and cognitive science researchers.
Humboldt and relativism
The Idea of linguistic relativity was not an original idea in Von Humboldt's time. It could be found implicit in many theories about language. Since John Locke, who already maintained the thesis of the untranslatability of languages and had been more or less expressed by various French authors (Condillac, Destutt de Tracy, Maupertuis, de Gernado) throughout the 18th century. But only in Von Humboldt does the thesis of linguistic relativity acquire the function of the central nucleus of a whole theory on language and on the human being. Only after his work did relativism become a recurring theme.
A central feature of von Humboldt's linguistic philosophy is his consideration of language in connection with the psychological processes of perception and conceptualization. Humboldt believed that language plays a constitutive role in thought processes, both individually and collectively. This psychological dimension was considered prior to the social dimension.
Language is conceived as an instrument of thought rather than as a communication system. First as a cognitive tool, and then as an information transmission system. Before language decomposes thought, there is only a flow of undifferentiated sensations, in which pure perceptions, feelings, desires, etc. are mixed. It is about the pre-articulated, indeterminate thought that Humboldt contrasts with conceptually organized thought.
Language is the instrument that allows the individual to make a qualitative leap from pre-articulated thought to conceptually organized thought. When it is said that Humboldt maintained that language was a condition of thought, it refers to articulated thought. "The principle that dominates the totality of language is articulation; its most important quality is the easy and consistent layout, but which presupposes the simple elements and in themselves inseparable. The essence of language consists in molding the material of the phenomenal world to give it the form of thought". (W.Humboldt).
The origin of language
A problem that was the subject of much philosophical speculation was the origin of language. That is, the problem of when it arose, from what it arose and how it evolved in its early phases. Related to that issue is whether human language originated in a small group of individuals or developed independently in diverse human groups (see Linguistic monogenesis and polygenesis).
Natism
The problem of nativism is whether human beings are born with an innate and specific capacity to acquire and develop a natural language if they receive the appropriate stimuli, or if, on the contrary, the blank tabula hypothesis is valid. i> according to which the brain at birth does not have specific structures to acquire a human language and, therefore, language acquisition depends on non-language specific general cognitive abilities. In general, within linguistic generativism, led by Noam Chomsky, various nativist-type positions have traditionally been defended, although some researchers such as psychologist Michael Tomasello have raised objections against some of these ideas.
History
Old Age
Questions about language take us back to the beginnings of Western philosophy with Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics.
In the Cratylus, Plato considers whether the question of naming things is determined by convention or by nature. He criticized conventions because they led him to strange consequences, since nothing can be conventionally named by any name. So convention should not be taken into account for the correct or incorrect application of names. Plato claimed that it was a natural property of names. To do that, he pointed out that compound words and phrases have a property range. For example, it is obviously wrong to say that the term "lake house" is fine when referring to saying a cat, because cats have no business in a house or on boats. He also mentioned that primitive names (or morphemes) have a natural property, because each phoneme represents basic ideas or feelings. For example, the sound of the letter L, for Plato represents the idea of softness. However, at the end of Cratylus he has to admit that social conventions were involved and that there were flaws in the idea that phonemes had individual meaning.
Aristotle was concerned with issues of logic, categories, and the creation of meaning. He separated things into categories of species and genus. He thought that the meaning of the predicate was established through an abstraction from the similarities between various individual things. That theory was later called nominalism.
The Stoic philosophers made an important contribution to grammatical analysis, distinguishing five parts in speech: the subject, the verb, the appellative, the conjunctions, and the articles. They also developed an important doctrine of the lekton associated with each sign of a language, but distinct both from the sign itself and from the sign as referred to. Lekton was the meaning (or meaning) of each term. The Lekton of a sentence is what today we might call a proposition. Only propositions were considered "truth-producing" (ie they could be considered true or false, while sentences were simply the vehicles of expression). Different Lekton could also express things other than propositions, such as commands, questions, and exclamations.
Middle Ages
This period is marked by the work of Saint Augustine and by the translation of De interpretatione by Boethius. As for Saint Augustine, several aspects of his theory of language deserve to be highlighted, either because of their importance in themselves or because of his influence on later scholastics. He has a philosophy of the sign that includes the definition of this as a material reality that evokes an alien reality in the understanding ( De doctrina cristiana ). The linguistic sign is constituted by an intrinsic union of sound and meaning (De Magistro). A sign without meaning (empty sound) is not conceivable. The core of the value or strength ( vis ) of the linguistic sign resides in the meaning, although it does not identify with them. Sign force is a broader notion that includes both signification and the different ways in which such signification affects an audience (principia dialectae). The impression produced by Saint Augustine's theory of the sign is that it advocates a direct connection between the sign and the significant thing.
Knowing the meaning of a word is knowing how to indicate the reality it invokes in the spirit. But it must be taken into account that he distinguishes between two planes in which the sign can be considered: one, the exterior plane, as a phonic reality (vox verbi); another as interior reality, authentic sign. The words belonging to this inner language are common to all languages and independent of their verbal translation into a specific language. In reality, the relationship between the two levels of language is a semiotic relationship: the exterior words are signs of the interior words.
Knowledge of the works of Aristotle in the 13th century encouraged the linguistic reflections of medieval philosophers. He promoted research on terminorum properties and sincategorimata, that is, on the semantic nature of terms and on the function and meaning of linguistic characteristics (William de Shyreswood, Pedro Hispano, Guillermo de Ockham). These authors distinguished two fundamental properties in the terms: the significatio and the supossitio.
The significatio is an essential property of categorical terms. It consists of the ability of the term to present the understanding of a thing under the formal aspect. It can be mediate (or through the mental image) or immediate (representing real properties of what is meant). The suppositio can be considered both a syntactic and a semantic notion.
While in the thirteenth century the philosophy of language that supported grammatical notions was fundamentally realistic (the Modus essendi of things determines the Modus intelligendi and this the Modus significando), Aristotelian, in the fourteenth century the nominalism of William of Ockham introduced a new bias in logical-semantic investigations. (Concepts are exemplified or instantiated by individuals, but will not constitute realities apart from these individuals.)
Medieval philosophers were frankly interested in the subtleties of language and its use. For many intellectuals, that interest was sparked by the need to translate Greek texts into Latin. There were several notable philosophers of language in the medieval period. According to Peter King, there were controversies and disputes, Pierre Abelard anticipating modern ideas of meaning and reference while he debated the question of universals. Also William of Ockham's Summa Logicae carried forward one of the first serious proposals in the codification of mental language.
Scholars of the medieval period, such as Ockham and John Duns Scot, considered it logical to make a Scientia Sermocinalis (science of language). The result of his studies was the elaboration of philosophical-linguistic notions, whose complexity and subtlety have only recently been appreciated.
Many of the most interesting problems in modern philosophy of language were anticipated by medieval thinkers. Phoneme vagueness and ambiguity were intensively analyzed and lead to increased interest in problems related to word use.
Anyway, philosophers have always argued about language, and it took a central role in philosophy in the early nineteenth century, especially in the English-speaking world and in parts of Europe. The philosophy of language was so pervasive that for a time, in analytic philosophical circles, philosophy as a whole was considered a matter of philosophy of language.
In the twentieth century, language became even more central, within most of the diverse traditions of philosophy. The phrase "the linguistic turn" was used to describe the valuable emphasis that philosophers in modern days gave to language.
Continental Philosophy
Within continental philosophy, the philosophy of language is not studied, as it is within analytic philosophy, as an independent discipline. However, reflections on language are fundamental in a multitude of philosophical branches traditionally labeled as belonging to continental philosophy, for example, semiotics, phenomenology, ontology, Heideggerianism, hermeneutics, deconstruction, structuralism, the existentialism or the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. In almost all these disciplines, the idea of language is referred to the concept of logos developed in ancient Greek philosophy, understood as discourse or dialectic. Language and concepts are observed as forming part of cultural history. The ancestors call language a fundamental part of a long and profitable life. Today we still have that same conception.
In the field of hermeneutics, that is, the theory of interpretation in general, reflections on language have played a fundamental role within continental philosophy throughout the 20th century, particularly within the line of reflection initiated by Martin Heidegger with his proposal for an ontological turn of understanding. Martin Heidegger combined the phenomenology developed by his teacher Edmund Husserl, the hermeneutics of Wilhelm Dilthey, and a large number of concepts inherited from Aristotle's philosophy to develop his particular conception of language. Heidegger considered that language is currently reified by the overuse of the most fundamental concepts and, therefore, these concepts are no longer suitable for undertaking an in-depth study of Being. For example, the word being itself has been loaded with a multitude of meanings. that make it unfit for expression. That is why Heidegger uses the ductility of his mother tongue, in which he wrote all his works, German to create new words that were not reified by their use that were used in the development of philosophy. of the. In this work of linguistic reinvention, Heidegger renounced fundamental concepts of the philosophical tradition, such as consciousness, ego, humanity, nature. Among the most important concepts generated by Heidegger are that of Being-in-the-world In-der-Welt-Sein, Seyn or Exsistence (according to the usual translations). In his famous work Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, also translated as Being and Time, disregarding the articles) Heidegger builds his philosophy of language around the concept Founder of Being-in-the-world, this philosophy focuses on speech, that is, on the use of language on a daily basis. Heidegger considers that writing is nothing more than a supplement to speech (in this he follows the Platonic consideration contained in the Phaedrus), this is because the reader builds his own internal speech while reading. The fundamental characteristic of language is that it is prior to speech, when we are thrown into the world, language is already there, with its culturally established meanings. Due to this event, Heidegger can speak of a certain pre-understanding of the world contained, a priori, in language. However, this pre-understanding only emerges once the thing has been named or articulated its intelligibility.
The German philosopher and disciple of Martin Heidegger, Hans Georg Gadamer popularized these ideas in his work Truth and Method (Wahrheit und Methode, 1960) in which he proposed a complete hermeneutic ontology. In this work, Gadamer considers that language is "the essence of the human being" and that as such it is the means through which it is possible for understanding to take place in the human being, what is more, all that can be understood is language. For Gadamer, the world is constituted linguistically and nothing can exist beyond language.
In another sense, the philosopher Paul Ricoeur proposes a hermeneutics that emphasizes the discovery of hidden meanings in the equivocal terms used in ordinary language. Other philosophers who have worked, within continental philosophy, issues related to language with great zeal and depth are: Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno or Herbert Marcuse.