Philosophy of Language

Catalog description

"Socrates was poisoned." With those vocal sounds or marks on a page, I can make a claim about someone who lived in the distant past. How is that possible? How do our words manage to pick out or latch onto particular portions of reality, even ones with which we've never had any contact? How does language enable us to convey thoughts about everything from Abu Dhabi, to the hopes of a friend, to the stars beyond our galaxy? For that matter, what are the thoughts, or the meanings, that our words carry or communicate? We will explore these and other philosophical questions about language through a reading of seminal works by twentieth-century thinkers.