Language and Mind

Catalog description

Language, a distinctive and remarkable human endowment, is philosophically fascinating. This course addresses such questions as how meanings get expressed in language, how our linguistic abilities work, and how we come to acquire such abilities.Students will be introduced to foundational topics in the philosophy of language and become acquainted with the works of significant theorists such as Frege, Wittgenstein, Kripke, Grice, and Chomsky. Students will also engage with contemporary issues in linguistic theory, including the semantic/pragmatics border, the theoretical implications of large language models like ChatGPT, and the social impact of essentialist language.