Philosophy of Language: Mind, Language & the World

Introduction:
Philosophy of language is the reasoned inquiry into the nature, origins, and usage of language. As a topic, the philosophy of language for analytic philosophers is concerned with four central problems: the nature of meaning, language use, language cognition, and the relationship between language and reality. Philosophical interest in language is maintained by foundational and conceptual questions in linguistics, quintessentially philosophical problems about the connections between mind, language and the world, and issues about philosophical methodology. These springs sustain a rich and fascinating field of philosophy concerned with representation, communication, meaning and truth.

Language, mind and world:

Philosophy aims at intellectually responsible accounts of the most basic and general aspects of reality. Part of what it is to provide an intellectually responsible account, clearly, is for us to make sense of our own place in reality as, among other things, beings who conceive and formulate descriptions and explanations of it. In framing issues about our roles as describers and explainers, philosophers commonly draw a triangle in which lines connect Language, Mind and World. The three lines represent relations that are keys to understanding our place in reality. These relations in one or another way constitute the meaningfulness of language. Mind World: Between Mind and World there are a number of crucial relations studied by philosophers of mind. Among these are perception, action, the minds bodily constitution and intentionality (the minds ability to think about what is in the world).

Mind Language: Using and understanding language is a heavily mental activity. Further, this activity seems to be what the real existence of meaningful language consists in. In short, mind invests meaning in language. Theorists of language focus on the Mind/Language connection when they consider understanding to be the cornerstone concept, holding, for instance, that an account of meaning for a given language is simply an account of what constitutes the ability to understand it. Some philosophers focus more on production than consumption on the speakers side of things analyzing linguistic meaning in terms of the goals and practices of speakers, and in terms of relations among communities of speakers. Many of the philosophers who see understanding and use as the keys to linguistic meaning have held that the meaningfulness of language in some sense derives from mental content, perhaps including the contents of beliefs, thoughts and concepts. This enhances the interest of cognitive semantics, which is a thriving field of study; it has not gone unquestioned that mind indeed can assign meaning to language, and in fact scepticism about this has figured quite prominently in philosophical discussions of language. Wittgenstein has been read as at least flirting with scepticism that there is anything our minds can do that would constitute meaning one thing rather than another. Language Mind: If mind assigns meaning to language, so also language enables and channels mind. Acquiring and trafficking in a language brings one concepts, thoughts and habits of thought, with all sorts of consequences. Indeed, having language is so crucial to our ability to frame the sophisticated thoughts that appear essential to language-use and understanding that many doubts whether mind is prior to language in any interesting sense. Language World: Since language is the vehicle of our descriptions and explanations of reality, philosophers are concerned about what if anything makes for a true or apt characterization of reality. Philosophers have these concerns for reasons of philosophical

methodology (which we will come to in a moment), but also owing to the naturalness and plausibility of a certain picture of meaning. According to this picture, the key to meaning is the notion of a truth-condition. A statements meaning determines a condition that must be met if it is to be true. For example, my statement Bangladesh is larger than Nepal, given what it means, is true just in case a certain state of affairs obtains (namely, a country being larger than a certain other Country). According to the truth-conditional picture of meaning, the core of what a statement means is its truth-condition which helps determine the way reality is said to be in it and the core of what a word means is the contribution it makes to this.

References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_language http://www.iep.utm.edu/lang-phi/ http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/U017