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First, philosophers of language inquire into the ''nature'' of meaning, and seek to explain what it means to "mean" something. Topics in that vein include the nature of Synonymy , the origins of meaning itself, and how any meaning can ever really be known. Another project under this heading of special interest to analytic philosophers of language is the investigation into the manner in which sentences are ''composed'' into a meaningful whole out of the meaning of its ''parts''. Second, they would like to understand what speakers and listeners do with language in Communication , and how it is used socially. Specific interests may include the topics of language learning, language creation, and Speech Act s. Third, they would like to know how language relates to the Mind s of both the speaker and the Interpreter . Of specific interest is the grounds for successful Translation of words into other words. Finally, they investigate how language and meaning relate to truth and The World . Philosophers tend to be less concerned with which sentences are ''actually true'', and more with ''what kinds of meanings can be true or false''. A truth-oriented philosopher of language might wonder whether or not a meaningless sentence can be true or false; whether or not sentences can express propositions about things that don't exist; and whether or not it is a sentence that is true or false, rather than the way sentences are used. HISTORY Antiquity Linguistic speculation in of systematic description of language, which emerge from ca. the 7th century BC in India ( Yaska ), and from the ca. 3rd century BC in Greece ( Rhyanus ). In the dialogue '' Cratylus '', Plato considered the question whether the names of things were determined by convention or by nature. He criticized Conventionalism because it leads to the bizarre consequence that anything can be conventionally denominated by any name. Hence it cannot account for the correct or incorrect application of a name. He claimed that there was a natural correctness to names. To do this, he pointed out that Compound Words and phrases have a range of correctness. He also argued that primitive names (or Morphemes ) 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.Plato, ''Cratylus''(c. 360 BCE) Series: Cambridge Studies in the Dialogues of Plato. Trans. David Sedley. Cambridge:University of Cambridge Press. 2003. ISBN 978-0-521-58492-0 Aristotle concerned himself with the issues of Logic , categories, and meaning creation. He separated all things into categories 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 theory later came to be called ''nominalism''.Steven K. Strange, (1992) ''Porphyry: On Aristotle, Categories''. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ISBN 0-8014-2816-5. The Stoic philosophers made important contributions to the analysis of grammar, distinguishing five parts of speech: nouns, verbs, Appellatives , Conjunctions and Articles . They also developed a sophisticated doctrine of the ''lektón'' associated with each sign of a language, but distinct from both the sign itself and the thing it refers to. This ''lektón'' was the meaning (or sense) of every term. The ''lektón'' of a sentence is what we would now call its Proposition . Only propositions were considered "truth-bearers" or "truth-vehicles" (i.e., they could be called true or false) while sentences were simply their vehicles of expression. Different ''lektá'' could also express things besides propositions, such as commands, questions, and exclamations. Mates, B. (1953) ''Stoic Logic''. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-02368-4 Middle Ages Linguistic philosophy proper has its origins in early medieval Indian Philosophy (roughly 5th to 10th centuries) with the debate between "materialist" Mimamsa school led by Kumārila Bhaṭṭa and Prabhākara who tended towards conventionalism, claiming a separation of linguistic performance and meaning, and the holistic ( Sphoṭa ) "grammarian" school led by Bhartṛhari and Maṇḍana Miśra who held that phonetic utterance and meaning form an indivisible whole ultimately identical with Brahman ('' śabda -tattva-brahman''), culminating in Vācaspati Miśra and the later Navya-Nyāya school. Medieval philosophers were greatly interested in the subtleties of language and its usage. For many 's '' Summa Logicae '' brought forward one of the first serious proposals for codifying a mental language.Chalmers, D. (1999) "Is there Synonymy in Occam's Mental Language?". Published in ''The Cambridge Companion to Ockham'', edited by Paul Vincent Spade. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-58244-5 The scholastics of the high medieval period, such as Occam and , and between language and metalanguage. Early Modern period Linguists of the Renaissance and Baroque periods such as Johannes Goropius Becanus , Athanasius Kircher or John Wilkins were infatuated with the idea of a Philosophical Language reversing the Confusion Of Tongues , influenced by the gradual discovery of Chinese Character s and Egyptian Hieroglyphs ('' Hieroglyphica ''). European scholarship began to absorb the Indian Linguistic Tradition only from the mid-18th century, pioneered by Jean François Pons and Henry Thomas Colebrooke (the ''editio princeps'' of Varadarāja dating to 1849), and language began to play a central role in Western philosophy in the late 19th century, especially in the English speaking world and parts of Europe. A foundational work is Ferdinand De Saussure 's '' Cours De Linguistique Générale '' published posthumously in 1916. The philosophy of language then became so pervasive that for a time, in Analytic Philosophy circles, philosophy as a whole was understood to be a matter of 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 TOPICS AND SUB-FIELDS Composition and parts
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