Abstract
Philosophers of language and linguists need to be wary of generalizing from too small a sample of natural languages. They also need to be wary of neglecting possible insights from philosophical traditions that have focused on natural languages other than the most familiar Western ones. Take, for example, classical Indian philosophy, where philosophical concerns with language were very much involved with the early development of Sanskrit linguistics. Indian philosophers and linguists frequently discussed more general issues about semantics, often in ways that are both similar to and interestingly different from Western philosophers.
One such issue is the problem of sentential unity: what is the relation of our understanding of the meaning of a sentence to our understanding of the meaning of the words that compose it? If words have meanings, why is the meaning of a sentence not just the meaning of the words that compose it? A challenging Indian response is that of the grammarian and philosopher Bhartṛhari (fifth-century), who advocated for a kind of sentence-holism according to which words are unreal and sentence-meaning is primary.
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My sincere thanks to the three anonymous referees for Synthese, who provided a very useful set of corrections and suggestions.
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Perrett, R. The unreality of words. Synthese 201, 15 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03904-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03904-7