Language and Reality

Language and Reality
Author: Michael Devitt
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 366
Release: 1999
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780262540995

What is language? How does it relate to the world? How does it relate to the mind? Should our view of language influence our view of the world? These are among the central issues covered in this spirited and unusually clear introduction to the philosophy of language. Making no pretense of neutrality, Michael Devitt and Kim Sterelny take a definite theoretical stance. Central to that stance is naturalism--that is, they treat a philosophical theory of language as an empirical theory like any other and see people as nothing but complex parts of the physical world. This leads them, controversially, to a deflationary view of the significance of the study of language: they dismiss the idea that the philosophy of language should be preeminent in philosophy. This highly successful textbook has been extensively rewritten for the second edition to reflect recent developments in the field.

Philosophy of Language

Philosophy of Language
Author: Susana Nuccetelli
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 436
Release: 2008
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780742559776

This collection of classic and contemporary essays in philosophy of language offers a concise introduction to the field for students in graduate and upper-division undergraduate courses. It contains some of the most important basic sources in philosophy of language, including a number of classic essays by philosophers such as Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Kripke, Grice, Davidson, Strawson, Austin, and Putnam, as well as more recent contributions by scholars including John McDowell, Stephen Neale, Ruth Millikan, Stephen Schiffer, Paul Horwich, and Anthony Brueckner, among others, who are on the leading edge of innovation in this increasingly influential area of philosophy. The result is a lively mix of readings, together with the editors' discussions of the material, which provides a rigorous introduction to the subject.

Philosophical Relevance of Language

Philosophical Relevance of Language
Author: Kanti Lal Das
Publisher: Northern Book Centre
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2006
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9788172111960

The book is an attempt to examine the philosophical relevance of language from the methodological point of view. Moreover, an effort has been made that language is relevant to philosophy, because it helps in developing a philosophy of language and a philosophy with a linguistic turn subsequently known as linguistic philosophy. The book highlights the following issues:?Are the problems in Philosophy linguistic??Is the positivists? thesis circular??Does language require revision??Are the metaphors like ?form of life? or ?game? enough to sustain the charge of revisionism??Is language related to reality??In what sense language is said to be mirror of human mind?

The Philosophy and Science of Language

The Philosophy and Science of Language
Author: Ryan M. Nefdt
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 444
Release: 2021-03-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3030554384

This volume brings together a diverse range of scholars to address important philosophical and interdisciplinary questions in the study of language. Linguistics throughout history has been a conduit to the study of the mind, brain, societal structure, literature and history itself. The epistemic and methodological transfer between the sciences and humanities in regards to linguistics has often been documented, but the underlying philosophical issues have not always been adequately addressed. With 15 original and interdisciplinary chapters, this volume therefore tackles vital questions relating to the philosophy, history, and theoretical interplay between the study of language and fields as varied as logic, physics, biology, classical philology and neuroscience. With a four part structure, questions of the mathematical foundations of linguistics, links to the natural sciences, cognitive implications and historical connections, take centre stage throughout the volume. The final chapters present research related to the linguistic connections between history, philosophy and the humanities more broadly. Advancing new avenues of research, this volume is exemplary in its treatment of diachronic and cross-disciplinary interaction, and will be of interest to all scholars interested in the study of language.

Ways of Meaning

Ways of Meaning
Author: Mark de Bretton Platts
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 1997
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780262661072

The philosophy of language is not an isolated philosophical discipline of merely technical interest to other philosophers. Rather, as Mark Platts shows, the philosophy of language can help to solve traditional problems in other areas of philosophy, such as metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Ways of Meaning provides a clear, comprehensive introduction to such issues at the forefront of philosophy. Assuming only minimum knowledge of elementary formal logic, the book shows how taking truth as the central notion in the theory of meaning can clarify the relations between language, reality, and knowledge, and thus illuminate the nature of each. This second edition of the book contains a new chapter on the notions of natural-kind words and natural kinds. Unlike other discussions of the subject, this one places the semantic issues involved in the context of questions about the relations between knowing subjects and known objects. The author has also added a bibliography of further readings published since the first edition appeared in 1979.