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At heart, the discipline is concerned with five fundamental issues.
OVERVIEW Philosophers of language are not much concerned with what individual words or sentences mean. The nearest dictionary or encyclopedia may solve the problem of the meaning of words, and to speak a language correctly is generally to know what most sentences mean. What is more interesting for philosophers is the question of what it means for an expression to mean something. Why do expressions have the meanings they have? Which expressions have the same meaning as other expressions, and why? How can these meanings be known? And the best, and simplest, question might be, "what does the word 'meaning' mean?" In a similar vein, philosophers wonder about the relationship between meaning and truth. Philosophers tend to be less concerned with which sentences are ''actually true'', and more with ''what kinds of meanings can be true or false''. Some examples of questions a truth-oriented philosopher of language might ask include: Can meaningless sentences be true or false? What about sentences about things that don't exist? Is it sentences that are true or false, or is it the usage of sentences? Language, how things 'mean' something, and truth are important not just because they are used in everyday life; language shapes human development, from earliest childhood and continuing to death. Knowledge itself may be intertwined with language. Notions of self, experience, and existence may depend entirely on how language is used and what is learned through it. The topic of learning language leads to all kinds of interesting questions. Is it possible to have any thoughts without having a language? What kinds of thoughts need a language to happen? How much does language influence knowledge of the world and how one acts in it? Can anyone reason at all without using language? The philosophy of language is important because, for all of the above reasons, language is important, and language is 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 ," "good," " God ," "masculine," "feminine," " Art ," "government," and so on. By incorporating "meaning," everyone has shaped (or has had shaped for us) a view of the Universe and how they have "meaning" within it. Set for the task, many philosophical discussions of language begin by clarifying terminology. Some philosophers -- for instance some Semiotic outlooks, and Some Works by linguist Noam Chomsky -- worry that the term "language" is too vague. Entire systems have been developed to clarify the field. HISTORY The inquiry into language stretches back to the beginnings of western philosophy with Plato , Aristotle , and the Stoic s. Plato argued in the dialogue ''Cratylus'' that there was a natural correctness to names. To do this, he pointed out that Compound Words and phrases have a range of correctness. For example, it is obviously wrong to say that the term "houseboat" is any good when referring to, say, a cat, because cats have nothing to do with houses or boats. He also argued that primitive names (or Morphemes ) also had a natural correctness, because each Phoneme represented basic ideas or sentiments. For example, the letter and sound of "l" for Plato represented the idea of softness. However, by the end of the Cratylus, he had admitted that some social conventions were also involved, and that there were faults in the idea that phonemes had individual meanings. (A link to the full text of the ''Cratylus'' can be found here , courtesy of M.I.T.) Aristotle concerned himself with the issues of logic, categories, and meaning creation. He separated all things into notions of Species and Genus . He thought that the meaning of a Predicate was established through an abstraction of the similarities between various individual things. This is called a theory of ''nominalism'' (see the section below for more details). Medieval philosophers also had some interest in the subject -- for many of them, the interest was provoked by a dependence upon their job of translating Greek texts. Of particular interest is the work of Peter Abelard , noteworthy for his remarkable anticipation of modern ideas of language. Many modern western philosophers such as Umberto Eco , Ferdinand De Saussure , J.L. Austin , J. R. Searle , Leibniz , John Locke , Vico , Johann Georg Hamann , Johann Gottfried Herder , Immanuel Kant , Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel , Wilhelm Von Humboldt , Charles Peirce , Friedrich Nietzsche and Ludwig Wittgenstein also saw the field as important. Though philosophers had always discussed language, it took on a central role in philosophy beginning in the late nineteenth century, especially in the English speaking world and parts of Europe. The philosophy of language was so pervasive that for a time, in Analytic Philosophy circles, philosophy as a whole was understood to be a matter of mere philosophy of language. In the 20th century, "language" became an even more central 'theme' within the most diverse traditions of philosophy. The phrase "the Linguistic Turn ", was used to describe the noteworthy emphasis that modern-day philosophers put upon language. MAJOR PROBLEMS AND SUB-FIELDS Composition and parts A major question in the field - perhaps the single most important question for Formalist and Structuralist thinkers - is, "how does the meaning of a sentence emerge out of its parts?" Principle of compositionality Much about composition of sentences is addressed in the work of linguistics of Syntax . More logic-oriented semantics tend to look towards the Principle Of Compositionality in order to explain the relationship between meaningful parts and whole sentences. The principle of compositionality asserts that a sentence can be understood on the basis of the meaning of the ''parts'' of the sentence (words) along with an understanding of its ''structure''. Problem Of Universals and composition
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