Recent Philosophy of Language

Abstract

We can divide philosophy of language into two parts corresponding to the following distinguishable but overlapping parts of the science of linguistics: (1) syntactics or the study of grammar and word order, and (2) semantics or the study of the meaning of individual words. Both of these features of a sentence are obviously necessary to the understanding of its meaning, and so may be the linguistic and action contexts in which the sentence is used, a point we emphasized in Sections 22 and 23. On the syntactical side we just saw how one distinguished philosopher has continued Russell’s method of avoiding the grammatically misleading features of ordinary language by employing the syntax of logic when discussing philosophical questions. Many examples from other recent philosophers could be given to illustrate this same tendency. Some people have also been attempting to improve standard logic in ways that will enable it to represent more of the intuitively valid forms of reasoning. Also on the syntactical side of the philosophy of language one could mention the collaboration that has gone on between formal logicians and students of “transformational grammar,” the well known research program in empirical linguistics developed by Noam Chomsky and others. Chomsky’s famous distinction between deep structure and surface structure has an obvious affiliation with Russell’s distinction between logical form, and to what extent it does.