The aim of this course is twofold: the first aim is skills-oriented. After this course students have improved their analytical skills and their writingskills. An astute awareness of the distinction between matters of fact and conceptual issues is required. These ‘tools for thinking’ are useful in all areas of philosophy. The second aim is to acquire knowledge about central ideas in the philosophy of language, especially as this subject has evolved in the 20th century in which it has dominated analytical philosophy.
|
|
Deze cursus is onderdeel van het verdiepingspakket Taal, geest en wereld.
LAS and TCS students who follow this course as part of the core curriculum of their major, need to complete a compulsory preparation course/assignment. See for more information: https://tcs.sites.uu.nl/
The central question to be addressed in this course is: what is meaning? Starting point for the development of the line of thought of this course is the opposition between two intuitions. The first intuition is that the basis of meaning is located in the mind. We will discuss and read the paradigm defense of this claim: Locke’s thesis that the meaning of words is the collections of ideas associated with that word in the mind of the speaker. The second intuition is that the meaning of language resides in the connection between language and items in the world. Both intuitions have their advantages and face objections.
We will then discuss how Frege tries to resolve these issues by introducing his fundamental distinction between sense and reference. We will study the reception of Frege's ideas in the 20th century; due to Frege philosophy in that century has taken a ‘linguistic turn’, which meant that the philosophy of language was considered to be the most fundamental discipline in philosophy: before other problems could be addressed one first had to analyze the meaning of the words in which these problems were formulated.
A seminal influence in this regard has been Russell’s theory of descriptions. We will try to come to grips with his extremely complicated writings on this topic and we will touch on the philosophy of logical atomism, that he developed together with the young Ludwig Wittgenstein, the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Strawson’s criticism of Russell’s theory of descriptions will be discussed, followed by an examination of Donnellan’s proposal to resolve their disagreement.
We then turn to a more formal approach to language and truth: Tarski’s highly influential recursive definition of truth for a finite, formal language and his subsequent application of this theory to informal languages.
This formal approach stands in sharp contrast to pragmatic approaches to language that will be considered next. Austin’s ordinary language philosophy is an attempt to analyze philosophical problems via an analysis of the way the words in which these problems are formulated are being used in ordinary language. H. P. Grice is also sensitive to the pragmatic aspects of language, but he favors a more systematic and reductive account of meaning. According to him sentence meaning can be reduced to speaker’s meaning, and speaker’s meaning, in its turn can be reduced to beliefs and intentions.
In sharp opposition to these attempts to provide meaning with a foundation either in the mind or in reality stands Quine’s attack on the very idea that there are facts about meaning. His seminal article ‘Two dogmas of empiricism’ will be discussed, as will be his famous argument for the indeterminacy of translation.
Reflection on Frege’s notion of sense has led some philosophers to claiming that for some words all that is important with respect to their meaning is the object they stand for. These so called ‘direct theories of reference’ as developed by Kripke and Putnam will be examined.
According to many, the most important philosopher of the 20th century has been Ludwig Wittgenstein. Enough context has now been provided in order to assess his achievements in his second important book the Philosophical Investigations. We will read fragments of this work, with special emphasis on his attack on the Augustinian picture of language, the thesis that meaning is use, and the rule-following considerations. On that last topic we will also look at Kripke’s controversial interpretation of these passages in Wittgenstein’s work.
|
 |
|