Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

The characteristic thing about a metalanguage is that it contains (metalinguistic) names of words and of statements of the object language, and also (metalinguistic) predicates, such as 'noun (of the object language)' or 'verb (of the object language)' or 'statement (of the object language)'.

It is often hinted that the difficulty in separating analytic statements from synthetic ones in ordinary language is due to the vagueness of ordinary language and that the distinction is clear when we have a precise artificial language with explicit "semantical rules.

The argument that language is no better designed for communication than hair styles is belied by the enormously greater expressive power of language and the fact that this power is enabled by the grammatical machinery that makes language so unusual.

Unfortunately not all the philosophers who have undergone the linguistic turn have really bothered to penetrate into the depths of the true semantic structure of language; and not all of those linguists who have succeeded in discerning the real nature and perplexities of various 13 parts of language have avoided seeing language uncritically as a kind of nomenclature of some 'cognitive contents'.

I must emphasize that I am not trying to do speculative evolutionary biology, rather I am trying to do a logical analysis of the relations between prelinguistic cognitive capacities and language, with the aim of figuring out what language is. In response to earlier drafts of this article, some people thought I was trying to enter into current discussions of animal cognition and the actual evolution of language.

The meaning of an expression is, according to it, not a language-independent object casually linked to the expression, rather it is the value of the expression, its position within the system of language or within the language game to be played.

Some philosophers, especially Fodor5, think that all thought requires a linguistic syntax, and that humans can acquire a natural language only because they already have an inborn “language of thought” with a syntax as rich as that of any human language.

Nevertheless, we may regard it as a matter of decision in this sense: we are free to choose to continue using the thing language or not; in the latter case we could restrict ourselves to a language of sense data and other "phenomenal" entities, or construct an alternative to the customary thing language with another structure, or, finally, we could refrain from speaking.

According to Goodman, the reason why the problem of second-language learning is different from that of first-language learning is that “once one language is available,” it “can be used for giving explanation and instruction.

The narrow faculty language faculty evolved for reasons other than language HCF speculate that recursion, which they identify as the defining characteristic of the narrow language faculty, may have “evolved for reasons other than language.