语言哲学及主要问题简介(英文资料摘编)

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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. For Continental philosophers, however, the philosophy of language tends to be dealt with, not as a separate topic, but as a part of Logic, History or Politics. (see the section "Language and Continental Philosophy " below).

First, philosophers of language inquire into the nature of meaning, and seek to explain what it means to "mean" something. Topics in that vein include the nature of synonymy, the origins of meaning itself, and how any meaning can ever really be known. Another project under this heading that is of special interest to analytic philosophers of language is the investigation into the manner in which sentences are composed into a meaningful whole out of the meaning of its parts.

Second, they would like to understand what speakers and listeners do with language in communication, and how it is used socially. Specific interests may include the topics of language learning, language creation, and speech acts.

Third, they would like to know how language relates to the minds of both the speaker and the interpreter. Of specific interest is the grounds for successful translation of words into other words.

Finally, they investigate how language and meaning relate to truth and the world. Philosophers tend to be less concerned with which sentences are actually true, and more with what kinds of meanings can be true or false. A truth-oriented philosopher of language might wonder whether or not a meaningless sentence can be true or false; whether or not sentences can express propositions about things that don't exist; and whether or not it is a sentence that is true or false, rather than the way sentences are used.

The nature of meaning

The answer to the question, "What is the meaning of meaning?", is not immediately obvious. One section of philosophy of language tries to answer this very question.

Geoffrey Leech posited that there are two essentially different types of linguistic meaning: conceptual and associative. For Leech, the conceptual meanings of an expression have to do with the definitions of words themselves, and the features of those definitions. This kind of meaning is treated by using a technique called the semantic feature analysis. The conceptual meaning of an expression inevitably involves both definition (also called "connotation" and "intension" in the literature) and extension (also called "denotation"). The associative meaning of an expression has to do with individual mental understandings of the speaker. They, in turn, can be broken up into six sub-types: connotative, collocative, social, affective, reflected and thematic.

Generally speaking, there have been at least six different kinds of attempts at explaining what a linguistic "meaning" is. Each has been associated with its own body of literature.

Idea theories of meaning, most commonly associated with the British empiricist tradition of Locke, Berkeley and Hume, claim that meanings are purely mental contents provoked by signs. Although this view of meaning has been beset by a number of problems from the beginning (see the main article for details), interest in it has been renewed by some contemporary theorists under the guise of semantic internalism.

Truth-conditional theories hold meaning to be the conditions under which an expression may be true or false. This tradition goes back at least to Frege and is associated with a rich body of modern work, spearheaded by philosophers like Alfred Tarski and Donald Davidson.

Use theorist perspectives understand meaning to involve or be related to speech acts and particular utterances, not the expressions themselves. The later Wittgenstein helped inaugurate the idea of meaning as use. It is also associated with P.F. Strawson, Robert Brandom, and others.

Reference theories of meaning, also known collectively as semantic externalism, view meaning to be equivalent to those things in the world that are actually connected to signs. There are two broad sub-species of externalism: social and environmental. The first is most closely associated with Tyler Burge and the second with Hilary Putnam, Saul Kripke and others.

Verificationist theories of meaning are generally associated with the early 20th century movement of logical positivism. The traditional formulation of such a theory is that the meaning of a sentence is its method of verification or falsification. In this form, the thesis was abandoned after the acceptance by most philosophers of the Duhem-Quine thesis of confirmation holism after the publication of Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism. However, Michael Dummett has advocated a modified form of verificationism since the 1970s. In this version, the comprehension (and hence meaning) of a sentence consists in the hearer's ability to recognize the demonstration (mathematical, empirical or other) of the truth of the sentence.

A pragmatist theory of meaning is any theory in which the meaning (or understanding) of a sentence is determined by the consequences of its application. Dummett attributes such a theory of meaning to C.S. Peirce and other early 20th century American pragmatists.

Other theories exist to discuss non-linguistic meaning (i.e., meaning as conveyed by body language, meanings as consequences, etc.)

Mind and language

Innateness and learning

Some of the major issues at the intersection of philosophy of language and philosophy of mind are also dealt with in modern psycholinguistics. Some important questions are: how much of language is innate? Is language acquisition a special faculty in the mind? What's the connection between thought and language?

There are three general perspectives on the issue of language learning. The first is the behaviorist perspective, which dictates that not only is the solid bulk of language learned, but it is learned via conditioning. The second is the hypothesis testing perspective, which understands the child's learning of syntactic rules and meanings to involve the postulation and testing of hypotheses, through the use of the general faculty of intelligence. The final candidate for explanation is the innatist perspective, which states that at least some of the syntactic settings are innate and hardwired, based on certain modules of the mind.

There are varying notions of the structure of the brain when it comes to language, as well. Connectionist models emphasize the idea that a person's lexicon and their thoughts operate in a kind of distributed, associative network. Nativist models assert that there are specialized devices in the brain that are dedicated to language acquisition. Computation models emphasize the the notion of a representational language of thought and the logic-like, computational processing that the mind performs over them. Emergentist models focus on the notion that natural faculties are a complex system that emerge out of simpler biological parts. Reductionist models attempt to explain higher level mental processes in terms of the basic low-level neurophysiological activity of the brain.

Language and thought

An important problem which touches both philosophy of language and philosophy of mind is to what extent language influences thought and vice-versa. There have been a number of different perspectives on this issue, each offering a number of insights and suggestions.

For example, linguists Sapir and Whorf suggested that language limited the extent to which members of a "linguistic community" can think about certain subjects (a hypothesis paralleled in George Orwell's novel "1984"). To a lesser extent, issues in the philosophy of rhetoric (including the notion of framing of debate) suggest the influence of language upon thought.

At the other extreme from these positions, in a certain sense, is the notion that thought (or, more broadly, mental content) has priority over language. This idea is most closely associated with Jerry Fodor and his language of thought hypothesis. According to this view, spoken and written language derive their intentionality and meaning from an internal language encoded in the mind. The main argument in favor of such a view is that the structure of thoughts and the structure of language seem to share a compositional, systematic character. Another argument is that it is difficult to explain how signs and symbols on paper can represent anything meaningful unless some sort of meaning is infused into them by the contents of the mind. One of the main arguments against is that such levels of language can lead to an infinite regress. In any case, many philosophers of mind and language, such as Ruth Millikan, Fred Dretske and Fodor, have recently turned their attention to explaining the meanings of mental contents and states directly.

Another tradition of philosophers has attempted to show that language and thought are coextensive. Donald Davidson, in his essay "Thought and Talk", argued that the notion of belief could only arise as a product of public linguistic interaction. Daniel Dennett holds a similar interpretationist view of propositional attitudes.

Some thinkers, like the ancient sophist Gorgias, have questioned whether or not language was capable of capturing thought at all.

...speech can never exactly represent perciptibles, since it is different from them, and perceptibles are apprehended each by the one kind of organ, speech by another. Hence, since the objects of sight cannot be presented to any other organ but sight, and the different sense-organs cannot give their information to one another, similarly speech cannot give any information about perceptibles. Therefore, if anything exists and is comprehended, it is incommunicable.

Major problems in philosophy of language

Vagueness

One issue that has bothered philosophers of language and logic is the problem of the vagueness of words. Often, meanings expressed by the speaker are not as explicit or precise as the listener would like them to be. In consequence, vagueness gives rise to the Paradox of the heap. Many theorists have attempted to solve the paradox by way of n-valued logics, such as fuzzy logic, which have radically departed from classical two-valued logics.

Problem of universals and composition

One debate that has captured the interest of many philosophers is the debate over the meaning of universals. One might ask, for example, "when people say the word, "rocks", what is it that the word represents?" Two general answers have emerged to this question. Some have said that the expression stands for some real, abstract universal out in the world called "rocks". Others have said that the word stands for some collection of particular, individual rocks that we happen to put into a common category. The former position has been called philosophical realism, and the latter has been called nominalism.

The issue here can be explicated if we examine the proposition "Socrates is a Man".

From the radical realist's perspective, the connection between S and M is a connection between two abstract entities. There is an entity, "man", and an entity, "Socrates". These two things connect together in some way or overlap one another.

From a nominalist's perspective, the connection between S and M is the connection between a particular entity (Socrates) and a vast collection of particular things (men). To say that Socrates is a man is to say that Socrates is a part of the class of "men". Another perspective is to consider "man" to be a property of the entity, "Socrates". If "Socrates" is applied to the finite universe method then "men" is a property of Socrates (not a class).

The nature of language

Many philosophical discussions of language begin by clarifying terminology. One item which has undergone significant scrutiny is the idea of language itself. Those philosophers who have set themselves to the task ask two important questions: "What is language in general?", and "What is a particular, individual language?".

Some semiotic outlooks have stressed that language is the mere manipulation and use of symbols in order to draw attention to signified content. If this were so, then humans would not be the sole possessors of language skills. On the other hand, many works by linguist Noam Chomsky have emphasized the role of syntax as a characteristic of any language.

More puzzling is the question of what it is that distinguishes one particular language from another. What is it that makes "English" English? What's the difference between Spanish and French? Chomsky has indicated that the search for what it means to be a language must begin with the study of the internal language of persons, or I-languages, which are based upon certain rules (or principles and parameters) which generate grammars. This view is supported in part by the conviction that there is no clear, general, and principled difference between one language and the next, and which may apply across the field of all languages. Other attempts, which he dubs E-languages, have tried to explain a language as usage within a specific speech community with a specific set of well-formed utterances in mind (markedly associated with linguists like Bloomfield).

Formal versus informal approaches

Another of the questions that has divided philosophers of language is the extent to which formal logic can be used as an effective tool in the analysis and understanding of natural languages. While most philosophers, including Frege, Alfred Tarski and Rudolf Carnap, have been more or less skeptical about formalizing natural languages, many of them developed formal languages for use in the sciences or formalized parts of natural language for investigation. Some of the most prominent members of this tradition of formal semantics include Tarski, Carnap, Richard Montague and Donald Davidson.

On the other side of the divide, and especially prominent in the 1950s and 60s, were the so-called "Ordinary language philosophers". Philosophers such as P.F. Strawson, John Austin and Gilbert Ryle stressed the importance of studying natural language without regard to the truth-conditions of sentences and the references of terms. They did not believe that the social and practical dimensions of linguistic meaning could be captured by any attempts at formalization using the tools of logic. Logic is one thing and language is something entirely different. What is important is not expressions themselves but what people use them to do in communication.

Hence, Austin developed a theory of speech acts , which described the kinds of things which can be done with a sentence (assertion, command, inquiry, exclamation) in different contexts of use on different occasions. Strawson argued that the truth-table semantics of the logical connectives (e.g., land , lor and rightarrow ) do not capture the meanings of their natural language counterparts ("and", "or" and "if-then"). While the "ordinary language" movement basically died out in the 1970s, its influence was crucial to the development of the fields of speech-act theory and the study of pragmatics. Many of its ideas have been absorbed by theorists such as Kent Bach, Robert Brandom, Paul Horwich and Stephen Neale.

While keeping these traditions in mind, the question of whether or not there is any grounds for conflict between the formal and informal approaches is far from being decided. Some theorists, like Paul Grice, have been skeptical of any claims that there is a substantial conflict between logic and natural language.

Translation and Interpretation

Translation and interpration are two other problems that philosophers of language have attempted to confront. In the 1950s, W.V. Quine argued for the indeterminacy of meaning and reference based on the principle of radical translation. In Word and Object, Quine asks the reader to imagine a situation in which he is confronted with a previously undocumented, primitive tribe and must attempt to make sense of the utterances and gestures that its members make. This is the situation of radical translation.

He claimed that, in such a situation, it is impossible in principle to be absolutely certain of the meaning or reference that a speaker of the primitive tribe's language attaches to an utterance. For example, if a speaker sees a rabbit and says "gavagai", is she referring to the whole rabbit, to the rabbit's tail, or to a temporal part of the rabbit. All that can be done is to examine the utterance as a part of the overall linguistic behaviour of the individual, and then use these observations to interpret the meaning of all other utterances. From this basis, one can form a manual of translation. But, since reference is indeterminate, there will be many such manuals, no one of which is more correct than the others. For Quine, as for Wittgenstein and Austin, meaning is not something that is associated with a single word or sentence, but is rather something that, if it can be attributed at all, can only be attribued to a whole language. The resulting view is called semantic holism.

Quine's disciple, Donald Davidson, extended the idea of radical translation to the interpretation of utterences and behavior within a single linguistic community. He dubbed this notion radical interpretation. He suggested that the meaning that any individual ascribed to a sentence could only be determined by attributing meanings to many, perhaps all, of the individual's assertions as well as his mental states and attitudes.

Further reading