A Brief History of Early Philosophy of Language

Throughout our life on earth, we exist in language, and we live with language. This basic ability, which constitutes our flow of thought, has been the subject of curiosity by philosophers for centuries. One of the primary reasons for this situation is that our ability to have language is a feature that distinguishes us from other animals. In addition, the existence of different languages among societies as well as the abundance of human communities makes language a subject worth researching and thinking about. It was also philosophers who produced the first works in this field, which has been working on language until this time and continues to develop with the methods of fields such as linguistics and computer sciences. In this article, I will talk about some important concepts in the philosophy of language. Enjoy! (Your Worldview Is Your Language Experience)

I mentioned that language is the point that separates us from animals. The distinction here is not based on  communication, but on the meaningfulness of what is said; so, our key theme is meaning. We all have an intuitive understanding that the words we use in our communication have meaning and how words mean what they mean. However, when we get to the core of these questions, very different concepts await us, and we see that these questions are not as simple to answer as they seem. When the philosophical studies are examined, we see that language is tried to be explained in two ways. While the first of these aims to benefit from the relationship of language with thought, the second tries to explain it through “things” that we can perceive with our senses. These are called ‘theory of thoughts’ and ‘theory of things’.

In the formative stages of the philosophy of language, the contributions of the names from the analytic philosophy school do not end with describing. Their choice of language, logic and mind as the main material in their way of perceiving the world played a great role in the development of this field. Ludwig G. Frege is one of the founders of this field and he tried to bring an explanation based on accuracy to meaning by interpreting his studies in the field of logic from a syntactic point of view. His way of dealing with language was to make a linguistic analysis by categorizing sentences as true or false. His way of dealing with language was to make a linguistic analysis by categorizing sentences as true or false. Although the method developed by Frege has some shortcomings, it has been a revolution in philosophy. The shortcoming of his method was that he ignored the intuitive aspect of meaning. If I want to give an example, the sentence “Steve jobs is the founder of apple” is considered true according to the Frege logic system. But in a scenario where we point to the photo of Steve Jobs, when we say, “He is the founder of Apple”, we do not mean the same thing. In this system, we have to specify the condition that the person we refer to as “He” is Steve Jobs.

After Frege, we can talk about Bertrand Russell’s very important contributions. When Russell talks about proper names in our language, he says that they are perceived together with an intuitive definition. Although we do not specifically specify these special names, we implicitly accept this information. When I say, “The founder of Apple is from San Francisco,” this sentence is true if and only if there is only one person who founded Apple and all of those who founded Apple are from San Francisco. An analysis in this way gives us a definite conclusion full of quantitative statements. Also, Russell considers these proper names in two separate categories: proper and logical. In our example, Steve Jobs is the proper name, while the founder of apple is the logical name that refers to the proper name.

Wittgenstein is undoubtedly the first name that comes to mind when the philosophy of language is mentioned, he lived at the same time as Russell and even was his student. The fact that he is mentioned so often in this field is the metaphysical explanation he brings to the concept of meaning. According to Wittgenstein, meaning cannot be understood in the same way by everyone because there is a subjective situation here: we all have different perceptions. In other words, we are the only thing that limits our language and makes it difficult to understand. He aimed to purify language from all these and develop a pure language that would be perceived in the same way by everyone, and he tried to benefit from the practice of logic and mathematics while creating it. Wittgenstein abandoned this radical view, which he explained in Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, in his posthumous book “philosophical investigations”. We can say that he deserves to be mentioned as one of the founders of analytical philosophy, thanks to the language game concept he created.

Analytical philosophy, which began to systematize more rapidly after Wittgenstein, gained momentum with the Vianna Circle, which has a logical empiricism understanding. Among these people who met between 1924 and 1936 were names such as Rudolph Carnap, Moritz Schlick, Philipp Frank and Otto Neurath. What distinguishes the understanding of this community from the thinkers before them is that it has a renewing side rather than introducing many new definitions. In other words, we can say that they brought solutions to many issues that were lacking in previous language theories. Trying to draw an empirical framework for language by trying to analyze language using the methods of natural sciences was one of the aims of this circle. In this case, we can say that the philosophical understanding of each of the people in the circle and their backgrounds from natural sciences such as mathematics and logic were also influential. Vienna Circle’s understanding of language, on the other hand, was to develop a theory of language that would allow sentences to be handled analytically and to analyze their correctness and meaning using logic.

After this initiative of the Vienna circle, criticism of this view was not delayed. The first criticism was that it was very difficult to express the meanings of words with mathematical precision in the language of logic. Another is that there is no distinction made between sensory data or objective data as the basis for empirical logicians’ attempts to draw the periphery of the meaning they want to reveal, based on observations. For example, Quine felt that our analytical methods were not yet sufficient to study language and that these efforts were futile. According to him, human language has a much more complex structure, and the concept of meaning is more complex than we think.