Philosophy Now Forum

A wiki-kwiki :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_language

informs us of at least 7 theories of meaning.

1. Idea - empirical, meaning is pure mental content provoked by signs - HUME - [ semantic internalism ]
2. Truth-conditional - related to the conditions under which an expression is true or false - FREGE
3. Use - related to speech acts - WITTGENSTEIN -
4. Reference - social and environmental - [ semantic externalism ]
5. Verificationist - [ logical positivism ]
6. Pragmatist - understanding is defined by the consequences of its application
7. Others - non-linguistic - body language

and then, the relationship between Language and Thought - Thought and Talk -
and the importance of literature - perhaps not a Philosophy of Language, rather Philosophy in Language.

I'm beginning to think the latter interests me more.
Why do we need so many philosophical theories of language ?

Is there a philosophy of language which reaches out and grabs ya' ? I'm kinda leaning towards Hume...and maybe...erm...Wittgenstein...with a little pinch of...* frowns *....body...

Just my first impressions. Any ideas ?

M.

To further prove my total lack of interest in Philosophy of Language , and to avoid doing house-work, here is an even simpler wiki thingy on PoL :

Like all philosophies, there are some central questions that are important in philosophy of language:

What does it mean for a word to mean something ? Why do some words have the same meaning ? How can we ever know if a word means something or not ? Why are some orderings of words meaningful, while others are not ?
How are languages learnt ? How do they change ?
How important are languages in communication ?
How do we translate from one language into another ?
What does truth have to do with language ?

So much for the questions....

Very much people can't to speak correctly. They very often use words , what they know , but this words reflect standard situation only.Very rarely people have ability to express his view exactly .
And ask questions people can't correctly . This questions is not logical.
People think, that conversation it is activity of the subconscious more,than of his mind. And it is some thing spontaneous.

language is nothing more of expression than the color of my hair. It is just what humans do. when we look into this feature of our being, much more significant questions arise.

but, i grant that it may well be important to some people to enact violence accross the world. I cant take that from them...

This is priceless. But not in a good way.

I'm sure I actually read a response raihj made to someone's post in another thread otherwise I'd swear he was a bot.

As he's just responded to me in another post he's clearly not a bot. Still hard to understand though.

Ever read any Wittgenstein and what he called "language games"?







Between what I think , what I want to say ,what I believe I say ,what I say , what you want to hear , what you hear ,what you understand...there are lots of possibilities that we might have some problem communicating.But let's try anyway.
Bernard Werber

You're conflating 'philosophy of language' with 'theories of meaning.' Philosophy of language is a big field, and the question of meaning is a big part of it, but it's not all of it. Today, a great deal of philosophy of language includes linguistic theory. It wasn't always so, but that's where things have gone. But theories of truth and meaning (interconnected notions), fictional semantics, questions about what determines the referent of a demonstrative and other indexicals, and so on are all part of philosophy of language.

Personally, I find philosophy of language one of the most interesting subfields in philosophy.