Philosophy of Language:

A reasoned inquiry into the origins, nature, and usage of language is referred to as the Philosophy of language. There are central problems which becomes the concern of the philosophy of language. They are the use of the language, the nature of meaning, the language cognition and the relationship between language and reality.

The nature of meaning is inquired by the philosophers of language in order to explain what it means “to” something. The nature of synonymy is also included in their experimentation of the philosophy of language. It reckons the origin of meaning and analyses how the meaning of anything can ever really be known. Another interesting factor in this discipline is the analytic philosophers of language’s investigations. They go a step further analyzing the manner how a sentence is composed into a meaningful whole out of the meaning of its parts.

They were also interested in analyzing the process communication experimenting what the speaker and listeners of a language do in communication and how communication is used socially. The topics like language creation, language learning and speech arts are of importance during this time.

The philosophers of the language want to know how language is related to the minds of the listener and the speaker and how it is interpreted. The successful translation of words from one language to the other is of specific interest of these philosophers.

Finally, the philosophers investigated on the relation between the language and meaning relating it to the truth and the world. They wanted to know how language and its meaning relate to the truth and the world. Philosophers of this time are not much interested in knowing which sentences are true and also what kind of meanings that are derived from the sentences can be true and what can be false.  A truth oriented philosopher may wonder how there can be an existence of a meaningless sentence, whether the meaningless sentences are true or false, whether there can be a sentence which express some propositions about the things that are said not to exist.

In 1950 the philosophers of the philosophy of language have confronted problem in the translation and the interpretation. Based on the principle of radical translation, W.V. Quine argued for the indeterminacy of reference and meaning. Quine in his work, Word and Object tells the reader to imagine a situation on which he confronts a primitive tribe and attempting to make sense of whatever thing they are talking. This situation is called the situation of radical translation.

Questions:

• What is Philosophy of language?
• What are interests of the Philosophers of language?