History

History

Plato and Aristotle were concerned with language, as were the Stoics.

Plato argued in the dialogue Cratylus that there was a natural correctness to 
names. To do this, he pointed out that compound words and phrases have a 
range of correctness. For example, it is obviously wrong to say that the term 
"houseboat" is any good when referring to, say, a cat, because cats have nothing 
to do with houses or boats. He also argued that primitive names (or morphemes) 
also had a natural correctness, because each phoneme represented basic ideas 
or sentiments. For example, the letter and sound of "l" for Plato represented 
the idea of softness. However, by the end of the Cratylus, he had admitted 
that some social conventions were also involved, and that there were faults in 
the idea that phonemes had individual meanings.

Aristotle concerned himself with the issues of logic, categories, and meaning 
creation. He separated all things into notions of species and genus. He thought 
that the meaning of a predicate was established through an abstraction of the 
similarities between various individual things. This is a kind of nominalism 
(see the section below).

Medieval philosophers had some interest in the subject. Also, many modern 
western philosophers such as Leibniz, John Locke, Vico, Johann Georg Hamann, 
Johann Gottfried Herder, Immanuel Kant, Hegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Charles 
Peirce and Friedrich Nietzsche saw the field as important.

Though philosophers had always discussed language, it took on a central role 
in philosophy beginning in the late nineteenth century, especially in the 
English speaking world and parts of Europe. The philosophy of language 
was so pervasive that for a time, in analytic philosophy circles, philosophy 
as a whole was understood to be a matter of mere philosophy of language. 
In the 20th century, "language" became an even more central 'theme' within 
the most diverse traditions of philosophy. The phrase, "the linguistic 
turn", was used to describe the noteworthy emphasis that modern-day 
philosophers put upon language.


Important theorists

Among the most important theorists in the modern philosophy of language are:

    * Structuralism, such as the works of Saussure
    * A theory of language as part of a general theory of symbolic forms 
    (Ernst Cassirer)
    * Philosophers tied to the humboldtian tradition (Walter Benjamin, 
    Martin Heidegger)
    * Marxist theoreticians (Vološinov, Rossi-Landi)
    * Post-structuralism (Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida)
    * Feminist theoreticians (Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler)
    * Theoreticians of literature whose work is of philosophical relevance 
    ( Mikhail Bakhtin, Maurice Blanchot, Paul de Man)
    * Philosophically oriented forms of semiotics following Charles Peirce 
    (Umberto Eco)
    * In the English-speaking world philosophical discourse about language 
    was dominated by Analytical philosophy, which was for a long time 
    propelled by the work of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell. It made 
    extensive use of modern logic and linguistics
    * The syntactic and knowledge-oriented works of Noam Chomsky and Jerry 
    Fodor
    * The use-oriented philosophies of Jurgen Habermas, J.L. Austin, Grice,
     and Searle
    * J.L. Austin a language philosopher who is most well known for his text, 
    How to Do Things With Words concentrated upon various "tasks" of words and 
    phrases or speech acts.


Important terminology

    * Types and tokens
    * Linguistic Context, indexicals, and demonstratives
    * Sense and reference
    * Descriptions
    * Ideas
    * Natural kinds
    * Categories
    * Statements and propositions
    * Signs
    * Subject and predicate
    * Semantics, Syntax, and Pragmatics
    * Linguistic community