PHI 455 - Philosophy of Language

Credits: 3

The 20th century marked “the linguistic turn” in philosophy and gave rise to philosophical schools devoted to the analysis of meaning and reference and of ordinary discourse. This class provides an introduction to philosophy of language by examining a number of topics, including speech act theory and intention-based accounts of meaning, Frege’s distinction between sense and reference, Russell’s theory of descriptions, descriptive and causal theories of reference, and the normativity of meaning. We will investigate the origin of language in our evolutionary past, the nature of metaphor, and the relation of language to thought.