Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Thereafter, I showed how the greatest part of the matter of this chaos must, in accordance with these laws, dispose and arrange itself in such a way as to present the appearance of heavens; how in the meantime some of its parts must compose an earth and some planets and comets, and others a sun and fixed stars.

During the first half of the present century a number of outstanding philosophers realized that language theory could profitably be viewed as far more than merely a means of studying one among the many human faculties, or merely sharpening the tool we use to philosophize - they realized that there is a sense in which philosophy of language comprises (almost) the whole of philosophy.

The crucial difference is that semanticsL addresses things which one knows in virtue of knowing language: to know the meaning of, say, the king of France it is enough to know English3, there is no need to know anything about the present state of the world.

SemanticsW, on the other hand, addresses things which one knows when she knows language and something about the present state of the world: to know what the phrase the king of France refers to one has to know its meaning plus certain facts about France.

Anyway, it seems to be quite clear that what is in the province of a linguist or a philosopher of language is meaningL, not meaningW: the project of discovering who is the present king of France, required in order to determine the meaningW of the expression the king of France and hence belonging to the project of semanticsW, is clearly not a part of the semantic theory of English.

However, this is illusiory - the structures postulated by linguists are clearly not results of studying the brain - the books which present them do not map neural synapses nor anything of their kind (and, in fact, as pointed out in the previous section, if they did so, they would not be about semantics).

It seems that the theories of language of the present century can be classified into two basic groups.

This is a naive picture (Quine justly calls it the museum myth); nevertheless a picture that underlies (explicitly or implicitly) many theories of language of the present century.

The aim of the present paper is not only to survey the claims of what we have characterized as the structural approach to language; we would also like to document that such an approach is, contrary to common opinion, that of the most outstanding representatives of analytical philosophy.

What the structural approach to language claims is that meanings are kind of outgrowths of the oppositions present within the system of language.