Philosophy of Modern Language

Well into the nineteenth century, Aristotelian logic dominated. Logic was seen as the study of thought itself. Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) revolutionized our conception of logic and its relation to thought and language. Frege's key insight was to see that formal arithmetic modeling can be used to display the structure of language. Just as "x y z" expresses the form of all instances of addition through the use of variables (x, y, z) and a special sign for the addition function , so language can be modeled. "Horses are mammals" can be written in a special concept-script (Begriffsschrift) that displays the different roles that the constituent words play in the sentence, "(x)(Hx → Mx)." This is done in a way that abstracts from the meaning of any particular sentence. The new logic, thus, distinguishes the formal features of language from meaning, laying the groundwork for the tripartite distinction between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.

Syntax concerns the rules for combining expressions into well-formed sentences within the language while semantics gives us a theory of the meanings of words and sentences. On this view, language is a formal object that consists of a finite interpreted lexicon and a finite set of recursive rules for combining lexical items. Recursive rules are rules that can be applied repeatedly. This permits the construction of any of an infinite array of possible sentences. The lexicon consists of several kinds of terms—proper names, predicates, and relations, each distinguished by its distinctive role within a sentence. This conception of language, which continues to dominate discussion, is a representational theory of language, for it treats the essence of language as the representation of possible states of the world using finite resources. Pragmatics studies whatever practical and contextual aspects of language use are left.

Frege's semantic theory.

In trying to apply the traditional denotational theory of meaning to language, Frege identified a number of problems. One of the most important arises with "contingent identity" statements. The sentences "The Morning Star is the Morning Star" and "The Morning Star is the Evening Star" have different "cognitive values." If meaning is just a matter of denotation, then it is hard to see how this could be so. Frege's theory distinguishes two kinds of meaning: reference (what the term denotes) and sense (the mode of presenting the denoted object). Each meaningful expression must have both a sense and a referent. Names ("Walter Scott") and definite descriptions ("the author of Waverley ") denote particular objects by way of their mode of presenting the object. The sense of a predicate expression is the mode of presenting a concept, the referent of the expression. Questions about the nature of, and relation between, sense and reference have been at the center of philosophy of language ever since.

Logical analysis.

Frege came to logic and the philosophy of language through concerns with the foundations of mathematics. Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) shared this concern but saw the new logic as the key to philosophy in general. Both held that the new logic would enable philosophy to break with its metaphysical tradition, by showing that metaphysics had resulted from mistakes and confusions rooted in a failure to understand language properly. One must distinguish between the surface grammar of ordinary sentences and the underlying logical form of these sentences. The new logic is the means for characterizing this deep structure (or logical form), a structure hidden by surface grammatical form. Logical form is reached through a process of logical analysis.

Russell's classic example of an analysis that removed puzzlement was his treatment of definite descriptions. It was thought that definite descriptions ("the author of Waverley ") should be treated like proper names; to be meaningful they must refer to some particular. But this creates a problem for non-referring definite descriptions like "the present king of France." This is a meaningful phrase and yet there is no individual answering to this description. Russell's solution was to argue that the underlying logical form of the expression is quite different from what it appears to be on the surface. Analysis reveals that the sentence "the present king of France is bald" has the logical form of "There is one and only one person such that that person is now king of France and is bald." Russell's analysis eliminates the apparently referring expression "the present king of France." Correctly analyzed, this puzzling sentence turns out to be merely false.

Wittgenstein took this idea even further. In his first work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), Wittgenstein argued that all sentences (in any language whatsoever) have a determinate meaning. A sentence says that things are thus-and-so. Wittgenstein took this to imply that any sentence must be analyzable into a set of "elementary" sentences composed of constituent words that denote simple objects. Complex sentences are just functions of combinations of elementary sentences. Strings of words that look like sentences, but resist analysis, are not really sentences at all. They are nonsense. Only the sentences of ordinary factual talk and the natural sciences are meaningful. Ethical, aesthetic, and religious statements, though important to our lives, are strictly meaningless. Most (if not all) traditional philosophy is nonsensical on this view.