Philosophy of language

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Abstract

The central topic in the philosophy of language that impinges on work in philosophy of science is the theory of meaning, particularly the distinction between meaning and reference. Disputes about the relation among language, truth, and reality, the connection between what is necessary and what is a priori, the prospects of a commitment to various sorts of natural kinds and viable forms of essentialism, and the incommensurability of theories are all tied to views about meaning and reference. What determines that expressions mean what they do also gures in the section on holism and incommensurability, below. The meaning-reference distinction has been marked with other terminology, when philosophers have distinguished connotation and denotation, sense and reference, or intension and extension. Motivating the distinction involves appeals to obvious ways in which terms can be different even if they apply to the same things. Let “renate” be shorthand for “creature with a kidney” and “cordate” be shorthand for “creature with a heart.” Facts about the world make it the case that “renate” and “cordate” refer to or denote the same things, or have the same extension. But clearly they ascribe different properties to the same set of things, and that difference is among those we capture by saying they differ in meaning. Time-worn and articial as it is, the example makes the point nicely. Differences in description provide the clearest examples of intuitive difference in meaning: for instance, “the rst heavenly body visible in the morning” and “the rst heavenly body visible in the evening” differ in meaning, although as it happens both expressions (or expansions of them) pick out the planet Venus. But whether all referring expressions work the same way is another question. One view is that all such expressions are alike in having both meaning and reference. The clearest instance of this is probably Rudolf Carnap’s Meaning and Necessity (1956 [1947]), in which every expression up to and including a full sentence was assigned an intension that determines its extension. However, one can hold, and many have held, different sorts of theories about different sorts of expressions. Mill, for example, famously said in A System of Logic that proper names have denotation but no connotation, that they do not connote or express properties, whereas common nouns have both connotation and denotation. Or one might claim, as some contemporary writers do, that common nouns fall into different sub-species, some of them being natural-kind terms whose reference is not determined by any properties associated with them, perhaps “cat” or “oxygen, " for instance, while others, such as “veterinarian” or “chemist, " do have reference-determining properties associated with them.

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APA

Bertolet, R. (2013). Philosophy of language. In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Science (pp. 48–58). Taylor and Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203744857-13

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