Abstract:
The course is an introduction for non-philosophers to the 20th century philosophy of language from its origination in Peirce's semiotics and Frege's semantics to the most contemporary approaches in the pragmatically oriented theory of communication. The topics cover e.g. Russell's theory of descriptions, Wittgenstein's picture theory of language, verificationism of Vienna Circle, Oxfordian ordinary language philosophy, Quine's radical translation, Davidson's radical interpretation and Turing's analytical behaviourism. The lectures are going to be supplemented by the samples of key texts from this intellectually stimulating tradition. The course includes a brief explanation of the basics of formal logic, which is used as a symbolic apparatus for analysing natural language. The end of the course is dedicated to a number of hypotheses about the neurocognitive basis of linguistic abilities and the evolutionary origin of language.
1. Introduction
lecture | handout
2. Theory of reference
lecture | handout
Gottlob Frege, "Sense and Reference", The Philosophical Review, Vol. 57, No. 3 (1948), pp. 210-211.
3. Theory of descriptions
lecture | handout
Peter Strawson, "On Referring", Mind, Vol. 59, No. 235 (1950), pp. 321 & 325.
4. Picture theory of language
lecture | handout
Rudolf Carnap, "The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language", in A. J. Ayer (ed.), Logical Positivism (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1959), pp. 63-67.
5. Language-games
lecture | handout | bonus
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 4th Ed. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2009), §293, pp. 106-107.
6. Speech acts
lecture | handout
Paul Grice, "Logic and Conversation", in Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 24-27.
7. Radical translation
lecture | handout | bonus
W. V. O. Quine, Word and Object, New Ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013), pp. 25-26.
8. Radical interpretation
lecture | handout
Donald Davidson, "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme", Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, Vol. 47 (1974), pp. 18-19.
9. Artificial intelligence
lecture | handout
John R. Searle, "Minds, Brains, and Programs", Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Vol. 3, No. 3 (1980), pp. 417-418.
10. Universal grammar
lecture | handout | bonus
Nicholas Evans & Stephen C. Levinson, "The Myth of Language Universals: Language Diversity and Its Importance for Cognitive Science", Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Vol. 32, No. 5 (2009), pp. 429-448.
11. Emergence of language
lecture | handout | bonus
Christina Behme, "A ‘Galilean' Science of Language", Journal of Linguistics, Vol. 50, No. 3 (2014), pp. 671-704.
Michael Beaney, Analytic Philosophy: A Very Short introduction (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2017).