Index of philosophy of language articles

This is an index of Wikipedia articles in

philosophy of language In analytic philosophy, philosophy of language investigates the nature of language and the relations between language, language users, and the world. Investigations may include inquiry into the nature of meaning, intentionality, reference, ...

* A.P. Martinich *

Aboutness Aboutness is a term used in library and information science (LIS), linguistics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. In LIS, it is often considered synonymous with subject (documents). In the philosophy of mind it has been often consider ...

* Adolph Stöhr *

Alexis Kagame Alexis Kagame (15 May 1912 – 2 December 1981) was a Rwandan philosopher, linguist, historian, poet and Catholic priest. His main contributions were in the fields of ethnohistory and "ethnophilosophy" (the study of indigenous philosophical sys ...

* Alfred Jules Ayer *

Alphabet of human thought The alphabet of human thought ( la, alphabetum cogitationum humanarum) is a concept originally proposed by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz that provides a universal way to represent and analyze ideas and relationships by breaking down their component piec ...

* Ambiguity * Analytic-synthetic distinction * Anaphora * Andrea Bonomi * Applicative Universal Grammar * Archie J. Bahm *

Arda Denkel __NOTOC__ Arda Denkel (6 July 1949 – 21 May 2000) was a Turkish philosopher. He studied at the University of Oxford and, under Peter Strawson, wrote his D.Phil. dissertation which he later developed into a more expansive study with his book ...

Aristotle Aristotle (; grc-gre, Ἀριστοτέλης ''Aristotélēs'', ; 384–322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Peripatetic school of ph ...

Artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...

* Association for Logic, Language and Information *

Avrum Stroll Avrum Stroll (February 15, 1921 – September 12, 2013) was a research professor at the University of California, San Diego. Born in Oakland, California, he was a distinguished philosopher and a noted scholar in the fields of epistemology, philos ...

* Barry Loewer *

Berlin Circle The Berlin Circle (german: die Berliner Gruppe) was a group that maintained logical empiricist views about philosophy. History Berlin Circle was created in the late 1920s by Hans Reichenbach, Kurt Grelling and Walter Dubislav and composed o ...

Bertrand Russell Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British mathematician, philosopher, logician, and public intellectual. He had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, ...

Bob Hale (philosopher) Bob Hale, FRSE (1945 – 12 December 2017) was a British philosopher, known for his contributions to the development of the neo-Fregean (neo-logicist) philosophy of mathematics in collaboration with Crispin Wright, and for his works in modal ...

Calculus ratiocinator The ''calculus ratiocinator'' is a theoretical universal logical calculation framework, a concept described in the writings of Gottfried Leibniz, usually paired with his more frequently mentioned ''characteristica universalis'', a universal conce ...

Carl Gustav Hempel Carl Gustav "Peter" Hempel (January 8, 1905 – November 9, 1997) was a German writer, philosopher, logician, and epistemologist. He was a major figure in logical empiricism, a 20th-century movement in the philosophy of science. He is esp ...

* Ramsey sentence * Categorization *

Category mistake A category mistake, or category error, or categorical mistake, or mistake of category, is a semantic or ontological error in which things belonging to a particular category are presented as if they belong to a different category, or, alternativ ...

Causal theory of reference A causal theory of reference or historical chain theory of reference is a theory of how terms acquire specific referents based on evidence. Such theories have been used to describe many referring terms, particularly logical terms, proper names, and ...

* César Chesneau Dumarsais * Cheung Kam Ching * Circular definition *

Claude Lévi-Strauss Claude Lévi-Strauss (, ; 28 November 1908 – 30 October 2009) was a French anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in the development of the theories of structuralism and structural anthropology. He held the chair of Social An ...

Cognitive synonymy Cognitive synonymy is a type of synonymy in which synonyms are so similar in meaning that they cannot be differentiated either denotatively or connotatively, that is, not even by mental associations, connotations, emotive responses, and poetic ...

Colloquial language Colloquialism (), also called colloquial language, everyday language or general parlance, is the linguistic style used for casual (informal) communication. It is the most common functional style of speech, the idiom normally employed in conversa ...

* Computational humor *

Concept Concepts are defined as abstract ideas. They are understood to be the fundamental building blocks of the concept behind principles, thoughts and beliefs. They play an important role in all aspects of cognition. As such, concepts are studied by ...

Concept and object In the philosophy of language, the distinction between concept and object is attributable to the German philosopher Gottlob Frege in 1892 (in his paper "Concept and Object"; German: "Ueber Begriff und Gegenstand"). Overview According to Frege, any ...

Conceptual metaphor In cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor, or cognitive metaphor, refers to the understanding of one idea, or conceptual domain, in terms of another. An example of this is the understanding of quantity in terms of directionality (e.g. "the pr ...

* Context-sensitive grammar *

Context principle In the philosophy of language, the context principle is a form of semantic holism holding that a philosopher should "never ... ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a proposition" (Frege 884/1980x). Analysis The c ...

Contextualism Contextualism, also known as epistemic contextualism, is a family of views in philosophy which emphasize the ''context'' in which an action, utterance, or expression occurs. Proponents of contextualism argue that, in some important respect, the a ...

Contrast theory of meaning Contrastivism, or the contrast theory of meaning, is an epistemological theory proposed by Jonathan Schaffer that suggests that knowledge attributions have a ternary structure of the form 'S knows that p rather than q'. This is in contrast to the ...

Contrastivism Contrastivism, or the contrast theory of meaning, is an epistemological theory proposed by Jonathan Schaffer that suggests that knowledge attributions have a ternary structure of the form 'S knows that p rather than q'. This is in contrast to the ...

* Cooperative principle *

Cora Diamond Cora Diamond (born 1937) is an American philosopher who works on Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gottlob Frege, moral philosophy, animal ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of language, and philosophy and literature. Diamond is the Kenan Professor o ...

Cratylism Cratylism as a philosophical theory reflects the teachings of the Athenian Cratylus ( grc, Κρατύλος, also transliterated as Kratylos), fl. mid to late 5th century BCE. Cratylism holds that there is a natural relationship between words and w ...

Dagfinn Føllesdal Dagfinn Føllesdal (born 22 June 1932) is a Norwegian-American philosopher. He is the Clarence Irving Lewis Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Stanford University, and professor emeritus at the University of Oslo. Biography and career Følles ...

David Efird David Hampton Efird (May 18, 1974 - January 9, 2020) was an American philosopher and Anglican priest. As an academic, he specialised in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of religion. Efird worked at the University of York from 2002. ...

David Kellogg Lewis David (; , "beloved one") (traditional spelling), , ''Dāwūd''; grc-koi, Δαυΐδ, Dauíd; la, Davidus, David; gez , ዳዊት, ''Dawit''; xcl, Դաւիթ, ''Dawitʿ''; cu, Давíдъ, ''Davidŭ''; possibly meaning "beloved one". w ...

De dicto and de re ''De dicto'' and ''de re'' are two phrases used to mark a distinction in intensional statements, associated with the intensional operators in many such statements. The distinction is used regularly in metaphysics and in philosophy of language. T ...

* Definition * Denotation *

Descriptivist theory of names In the philosophy of language, the descriptivist theory of proper names (also descriptivist theory of reference) is the view that the meaning or semantic content of a proper name is identical to the descriptions associated with it by speakers, whil ...

Direct reference theory A direct reference theory (also called referentialism or referential realism)Andrea Bianchi (2012) ''Two ways of being a (direct) referentialist'', in Joseph Almog, Paolo Leonardi, ''Having in Mind: The Philosophy of Keith Donnellan''p. 79/ref> is a ...

Direction of fit The technical term direction of fit is used to describe the distinctions that are offered by two related sets of opposing terms: * The more general set of mind-to-world (i.e., mind-to-fit-world, not from-mind-to-world) ''vs.'' world-to-mind (i.e., ...

* Discourse ethics *

Disquotational principle The disquotational principle is a philosophical principle which holds that a rational speaker will accept "''p''" if and only if he or she believes ''p''. The quotes indicate that the statement ''p'' is being treated as a sentence, and not as a ...

Donald Davidson (philosopher) Donald Herbert Davidson (March 6, 1917 – August 30, 2003) was an American philosopher. He served as Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1981 to 2003 after having also held teaching appointments a ...

Donkey pronoun Donkey sentences are sentences that contain a pronoun with clear meaning (it is bound semantically) but whose syntactical role in the sentence poses challenges to grammarians. Such sentences defy straightforward attempts to generate their formal ...

Dramatism Dramatism, a communication studies theory, was developed by Kenneth Burke as a tool for analyzing human relationships through the use of language. Burke viewed dramatism from the lens of logology, which studies how people's ways of speaking shape ...

Duns Scotus John Duns Scotus ( – 8 November 1308), commonly called Duns Scotus ( ; ; "Duns the Scot"), was a Scottish Catholic priest and Franciscan friar, university professor, philosopher, and theologian. He is one of the four most important ...

Empty name In metaphysics and the philosophy of language, an empty name is a proper name that has no referent. The problem of empty names is the idea that empty names have a meaning when it seems they should not have. The name " Pegasus" is empty; there is ...

Engineered language Engineered languages (often abbreviated to engelangs, or, less commonly, engilangs) are constructed languages devised to test or prove some hypotheses about how languages work or might work. There are at least three subcategories, philosophical ...

* Enumerative definition *

Epistemicism Epistemicism is a position about vagueness in the philosophy of language or metaphysics, according to which there are facts about the boundaries of a vague predicate which we cannot possibly discover. Given a vague predicate, such as 'is thin' or ...

* Ethics and Language *

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (July 6, 1888 – February 24, 1973) was a historian and social philosopher, whose work spanned the disciplines of history, theology, sociology, linguistics and beyond. Born in Berlin, Germany into a non-observant Jewish ...

European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information The European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI) is an annual academic conference organized by the European Association for Logic, Language and Information. The focus of study is the "interface between linguistics, logic and ...

Exemplification Exemplification, in the philosophy of language, is a mode of symbolization characterized by the relation between a sample and what it refers to. Description Unlike ostension, which is the act of showing or pointing to a sample, exemplification ...

* Extensional definition *

F. H. Bradley Francis Herbert Bradley (30 January 1846 – 18 September 1924) was a British idealist philosopher. His most important work was ''Appearance and Reality'' (1893). Life Bradley was born at Clapham, Surrey, England (now part of the Greater ...

Family resemblance Family resemblance (german: Familienähnlichkeit, link=no) is a philosophical idea made popular by Ludwig Wittgenstein, with the best known exposition given in his posthumously published book ''Philosophical Investigations'' (1953). It argues tha ...

* Felicity conditions * Ferdinand Ebner *

Failure to refer In the philosophy of language, failure to refer, also reference failure, referential failure or failure of reference, is the concept that names can fail to name a real object. According to Bertrand Russell's theory of truth, there is only one actual ...

Form of life (philosophy) Form of life (german: Lebensform) is a term used sparingly by Ludwig Wittgenstein in posthumously published works ''Philosophical Investigations'', ''On Certainty'' and in parts of his ''Nachlass''. Wittgenstein in his ''Tractatus Logico-Philosoph ...

* Franz Rosenzweig * Frege's Puzzle *

Friedrich Waismann Friedrich Waismann (; 21 March 18964 November 1959) was an Austrian mathematician, physicist, and philosopher. He is best known for being a member of the Vienna Circle and one of the key theorists in logical positivism. Biography Born to a Jewis ...

* Function and Concept *

G. E. M. Anscombe Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe (; 18 March 1919 – 5 January 2001), usually cited as G. E. M. Anscombe or Elizabeth Anscombe, was a British analytic philosopher. She wrote on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, ...

Gareth Evans (philosopher) Michael Gareth Justin Evans (12 May 1946 – 10 August 1980) was a British philosopher who made substantial contributions to logic, philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. He is best known for his posthumous work ''The Varieties of Refe ...

* Genus–differentia definition * George Orwell *

Gilbert Ryle Gilbert Ryle (19 August 1900 – 6 October 1976) was a British philosopher, principally known for his critique of Cartesian dualism, for which he coined the phrase "ghost in the machine." He was a representative of the generation of British ord ...

Gordon Park Baker Gordon Park Baker (born at Englewood, New Jersey, 20 April 1938; died at Woodstock, Oxfordshire, 25 June 2002) was an American-English philosopher. His topics of interest included Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gottlob Frege, Friedrich Waismann, Bertrand ...

Gottlob Frege Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (; ; 8 November 1848 – 26 July 1925) was a German philosopher, logician, and mathematician. He was a mathematics professor at the University of Jena, and is understood by many to be the father of analytic ph ...

Grammatology In modern usage, the term grammatology refers to the scientific study of writing systems or scripts.Gelb, Ignace. 1952. ''A Study of Writing''. Chicago: University of Chicago Press This usage was first elucidated in English by linguist Ignace G ...

Hans Kamp Johan Anthony Willem "Hans" Kamp (born 5 September 1940) is a Dutch philosopher and Linguistics, linguist, responsible for introducing discourse representation theory (DRT) in 1981. Kamp was born in Den Burg. He received a Ph.D. in UCLA Departmen ...

* Hector-Neri Castañeda * Henri Bergson * Ideal speech situation *

Illocutionary act The concept of illocutionary acts was introduced into linguistics by the philosopher J. L. Austin in his investigation of the various aspects of speech acts. In his framework, ''locution'' is what was said and meant, ''illocution'' is what was don ...

Implicature In pragmatics, a subdiscipline of linguistics, an implicature is something the speaker suggests or implies with an utterance, even though it is not literally expressed. Implicatures can aid in communicating more efficiently than by explicitly sayi ...

Indeterminacy (philosophy) Indeterminacy, in philosophy, can refer both to common scientific and mathematical concepts of uncertainty and their implications and to another kind of indeterminacy deriving from the nature of definition or meaning. It is related to deconstruc ...

Indeterminacy of translation The indeterminacy of translation is a thesis propounded by 20th-century American analytic philosopher W. V. Quine. The classic statement of this thesis can be found in his 1960 book '' Word and Object'', which gathered together and refined much of ...

* Indexicality *

Indirect self-reference Indirect self-reference describes an object referring to itself ''indirectly''. For example, define the function f such that f(x) = x(x). Any function passed as an argument to f is invoked with itself as an argument, and thus in any use of that a ...

* Inferential role semantics *

Ingeborg Bachmann Ingeborg Bachmann (25 June 1926 – 17 October 1973) was an Austrian poet and author. Biography Bachmann was born in Klagenfurt, in the Austrian state of Carinthia, the daughter of Olga (née Haas) and Matthias Bachmann, a schoolteacher. Her f ...

* Intension * Intensional definition *

Internalism and externalism Internalism and externalism are two opposite ways of integration of explaining various subjects in several areas of philosophy. These include human motivation, knowledge, justification, meaning, and truth. The distinction arises in many areas of d ...

Interpretation (logic) An interpretation is an assignment of meaning to the symbols of a formal language. Many formal languages used in mathematics, logic, and theoretical computer science are defined in solely syntactic terms, and as such do not have any meaning un ...

J. L. Austin John Langshaw Austin (26 March 1911 – 8 February 1960) was a British philosopher of language and leading proponent of ordinary language philosophy, perhaps best known for developing the theory of speech acts. Austin pointed out that we u ...

* Jacques Bouveresse * James F. Conant * Jody Azzouni *

John Etchemendy John W. Etchemendy (born 1952 in Reno, Nevada) is an American logician and philosopher who served as Stanford University's twelfth Provost. He succeeded John L. Hennessy to the post on September 1, 2000 and stepped down on January 31, 2017. E ...

John McDowell John Henry McDowell, FBA (born 7 March 1942) is a South African philosopher, formerly a fellow of University College, Oxford, and now university professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Although he has written on metaphysics, epistemology, ...

Jonathan Bennett (philosopher) Jonathan Francis Bennett (born 17 February 1930) is a philosopher of language and metaphysics, specialist of Kant's philosophy and a historian of early modern philosophy. He has New Zealand citizenship by birth and has since acquired UK and Can ...

Journal of Logic, Language and Information The ''Journal of Logic, Language and Information'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering research on "natural, formal, and programming languages". It is the official journal of the European Association for Logic, Language and Infor ...

Karl-Otto Apel Karl-Otto Apel (; 15 March 1922 – 15 May 2017) was a German philosopher and Professor Emeritus at the University of Frankfurt am Main. He specialized on the philosophy of language and was thus considered a communication theorist. He develope ...

* Katarzyna Jaszczolt *

Keith Donnellan Keith Sedgwick Donnellan (; June 25, 1931 – February 20, 2015) was an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy (later Professor Emeritus) at the University of California, Los Angeles. Donnellan contributed to the philosophy of language ...

Kent Bach Kent Bach (born 1943) is an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University. His primary areas of research include the philosophy of language, linguistics and epistemology. He is the author of three books: ''Exi ...

* Kit Fine *

Language-game A language-game (german: Sprachspiel) is a philosophical concept developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein, referring to simple examples of language use and the actions into which the language is woven. Wittgenstein argued that a word or even a sentence h ...

Language and thought The study of how language influences thought has a long history in a variety of fields. There are two bodies of thought forming around this debate. One body of thought stems from linguistics and is known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. There is ...

* Language of thought * Language, Truth, and Logic *

Latitudinarianism (philosophy) Latitudinarianism, in at least one area of contemporary philosophy, is a position concerning ''de dicto'' and ''de re'' (propositional) attitudes. Latitudinarians think that ''de re'' attitudes are not a category distinct from ''de dicto'' at ...

Lexical definition The lexical definition of a term, also known as the dictionary definition, is the definition closely matching the meaning of the term in common usage. As its other name implies, this is the sort of definition one is likely to find in the dictiona ...

Lexis (Aristotle) In philosophy, lexis (from the Greek: λέξις "word") is a complete group of words in a language, vocabulary, the total set of all words in a language, and all words that have meaning or a function in grammar. Lexis according to Plato Accord ...

Linguistic determinism Linguistic determinism is the concept that language and its structures limit and determine human knowledge or thought, as well as thought processes such as categorization, memory, and perception. The term implies that people's native languages will ...

* Linguistic relativity *

Linguistic turn The linguistic turn was a major development in Western philosophy during the early 20th century, the most important characteristic of which is the focusing of philosophy and the other humanities primarily on the relations between language, langua ...

Linguistics and Philosophy ''Linguistics and Philosophy'' is a peer-reviewed journal addressing "structure and meaning in natural language". This journal, along with '' Studies in Language'', is a continuation of the journal ''Foundations of Language'' (1965 to 1976). The ...

* List of philosophers of language *

Logical atomism Logical atomism is a philosophical view that originated in the early 20th century with the development of analytic philosophy. Its principal exponent was the British philosopher Bertrand Russell. It is also widely held that the early works of his ...

Logical form In logic, logical form of a statement is a precisely-specified semantic version of that statement in a formal system. Informally, the logical form attempts to formalize a possibly ambiguous statement into a statement with a precise, unambiguou ...

* Logical positivism *

Ludwig Wittgenstein Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein ( ; ; 26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He is con ...

* Marilyn Frye * Martian scientist *

Max Black Max Black (24 February 1909 – 27 August 1988) was an Azerbaijani-born British-American philosopher who was a leading figure in analytic philosophy in the years after World War II. He made contributions to the philosophy of language, the philo ...

Meaning (linguistics) Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comput ...

Meaning (non-linguistic) Non-linguistic (or pre-linguistic) meaning is a type of meaning not mediated or perceived through linguistic signs. In linguistics, the concept is used in discussions about whether such meaning is different from meaning expressed through languag ...

Meaning (philosophy of language) In semantics, semiotics, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and metasemantics, meaning "is a relationship between two sorts of things: signs and the kinds of things they intend, express, or signify". The types of meanings vary according to the ...

Meaning (semiotics) In semiotics, the study of sign processes ( semiosis), the meaning of a sign is its place in a sign relation, in other words, the set of roles that the sign occupies within a given sign relation. This statement holds whether ''sign'' is taken to ...

* Mediated reference theory *

Meinong's jungle Meinong's jungle is the name given by Richard Routley (1980) to the repository of non-existent objects in the ontology of Alexius Meinong. Overview Meinong, an Austrian philosopher active at the turn of the 20th century, believed that since non- ...

Mental representation A mental representation (or cognitive representation), in philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science, is a hypothetical internal cognitive symbol that represents external reality, or else a mental process that ...

* Mental space * Metalanguage * Metaphor in philosophy * Michael Devitt *

Michael Dummett Sir Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett (27 June 1925 – 27 December 2011) was an English academic described as "among the most significant British philosophers of the last century and a leading campaigner for racial tolerance and equality." He w ...

* Modal property *

Modistae The Modistae (Latin for Modists), also known as the speculative grammarians, were the members of a school of grammarian philosophy known as Modism or speculative grammar, active in northern France, Germany, England, and Denmark in the 13th and 14t ...

* Modularity of mind *

Moritz Schlick Friedrich Albert Moritz Schlick (; ; 14 April 1882 – 22 June 1936) was a German philosopher, physicist, and the founding father of logical positivism and the Vienna Circle. Early life and works Schlick was born in Berlin to a wealthy Prussian f ...

Mumbo Jumbo (phrase) Mumbo jumbo, or mumbo-jumbo, is confusing or meaningless language. The phrase is often used to express humorous criticism of middle-management, and specialty jargon, such as legalese, that non-specialists have difficulty in understanding. For exam ...

Naming and Necessity ''Naming and Necessity'' is a 1980 book with the transcript of three lectures, given by the philosopher Saul Kripke, at Princeton University in 1970, in which he dealt with the debates of proper names in the philosophy of language. The transcript ...

Nelson Goodman Henry Nelson Goodman (7 August 1906 – 25 November 1998) was an American philosopher, known for his work on counterfactuals, mereology, the problem of induction, irrealism, and aesthetics. Life and career Goodman was born in Somerville, M ...

* New Foundations * Nino Cocchiarella *

Noam Chomsky Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky i ...

Nomenclature Nomenclature (, ) is a system of names or terms, or the rules for forming these terms in a particular field of arts or sciences. The principles of naming vary from the relatively informal conventions of everyday speech to the internationally ag ...

Nominalism In metaphysics, nominalism is the view that universals and abstract objects do not actually exist other than being merely names or labels. There are at least two main versions of nominalism. One version denies the existence of universalsthings ...

* Non-rigid designator *

Nonsense Nonsense is a communication, via speech, writing, or any other symbolic system, that lacks any coherent meaning. Sometimes in ordinary usage, nonsense is synonymous with absurdity or the ridiculous. Many poets, novelists and songwriters have u ...

Norm (philosophy) Norms are concepts ( sentences) of practical import, oriented to affecting an action, rather than conceptual abstractions that describe, explain, and express. Normative sentences imply "ought-to" types of statements and assertions, in distinction ...

* On Denoting *

Ontological commitment An ontological commitment of a language is one or more objects postulated to exist by that language. The 'existence' referred to need not be 'real', but exist only in a universe of discourse. As an example, legal systems use vocabulary referring t ...

Operational definition An operational definition specifies concrete, replicable procedures designed to represent a construct. In the words of American psychologist S.S. Stevens (1935), "An operation is the performance which we execute in order to make known a concept." F ...

Ordinary language philosophy Ordinary language philosophy (OLP) is a philosophical methodology that sees traditional philosophical problems as rooted in misunderstandings philosophers develop by distorting or forgetting how words are ordinarily used to convey meaning in ...

* Ostensive definition *

Otto Neurath Otto Karl Wilhelm Neurath (; 10 December 1882 – 22 December 1945) was an Austrian-born philosopher of science, sociologist, and political economist. He was also the inventor of the ISOTYPE method of pictorial statistics and an innovator in mu ...

P. F. Strawson Peter Frederick Strawson (; 23 November 1919 – 13 February 2006) was an English philosopher. He was the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at the University of Oxford (Magdalen College) from 1968 to 1987. Before that, he ...

* Paradigm-case argument *

Paralanguage Paralanguage, also known as vocalics, is a component of meta-communication that may modify meaning, give nuanced meaning, or convey emotion, by using techniques such as prosody, pitch, volume, intonation, etc. It is sometimes defined as relati ...

* Paul Boghossian *

Paul Grice Herbert Paul Grice (13 March 1913 – 28 August 1988), usually publishing under the name H. P. Grice, H. Paul Grice, or Paul Grice, was a British philosopher of language. He is best known for his theory of implicature and the cooperative pri ...

Performative contradiction A performative contradiction (german: performativer Widerspruch) arises when the propositional content of a statement contradicts the presuppositions of asserting it. An example of a performative contradiction is the statement "I am dead" because th ...

* Performative text *

Performative utterance In the philosophy of language and speech acts theory, performative utterances are sentences which not only describe a given reality, but also change the social reality they are describing. In a 1955 lecture series, later published as ''How to D ...

Persuasive definition A persuasive definition is a form of stipulative definition which purports to describe the true or commonly accepted meaning of a term, while in reality stipulating an uncommon or altered use, usually to support an argument for some view, or to cr ...

* Peter Abelard *

Peter Millican Peter Jeremy Roach Millican (born 1 March 1958) is Gilbert Ryle Fellow and Professor of Philosophy at Hertford College, University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. His primary interests include the philosophy of David Hume, philosophy of reli ...

Philosophical interpretation of classical physics Classical ''Newtonian'' physics has, formally, been replaced by quantum mechanics on the small scale and Theory of relativity, relativity on the large scale. Because most humans continue to think in terms of the kind of events we perceive in the hum ...

Philosophical Investigations ''Philosophical Investigations'' (german: Philosophische Untersuchungen) is a work by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, published posthumously in 1953. ''Philosophical Investigations'' is divided into two parts, consisting of what Wittgens ...

Philosophy and literature Philosophy and literature involves the literary treatment of philosophers and philosophical themes (the literature of philosophy), and the philosophical treatment of issues raised by literature (the philosophy of literature). The philosophy ...

Philosophy of language In analytic philosophy, philosophy of language investigates the nature of language and the relations between language, language users, and the world. Investigations may include inquiry into the nature of meaning, intentionality, reference, ...

* Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer * Plato's Problem *

Port-Royal Grammar The ''Port-Royal Grammar'' (originally ''Grammaire générale et raisonnée contenant les fondemens de l'art de parler, expliqués d'une manière claire et naturelle'', "General and Rational Grammar, containing the fundamentals of the art of speaki ...

Pragmatics In linguistics and related fields, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the in ...

Precising definition A precising definition is a definition that contracts or reduces the scope of the lexical definition of a term for a specific purpose by including additional criteria that narrow down the set of things meeting the definition. For example, a dict ...

Principle of charity In philosophy and rhetoric, the principle of charity or charitable interpretation requires interpreting a speaker's statements in the most rational way possible and, in the case of any argument, considering its best, strongest possible interpretati ...

Principle of compositionality In semantics, mathematical logic and related disciplines, the principle of compositionality is the principle that the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meanings of its constituent expressions and the rules used to combine them. ...

Private language argument The private language argument argues that a language understandable by only a single individual is incoherent, and was introduced by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his later work, especially in the ''Philosophical Investigations''. The argument was cent ...

* Proper name (philosophy) *

Proposition In logic and linguistics, a proposition is the meaning of a declarative sentence. In philosophy, " meaning" is understood to be a non-linguistic entity which is shared by all sentences with the same meaning. Equivalently, a proposition is the no ...

Psychologism Psychologism is a family of philosophical positions, according to which certain psychological facts, laws, or entities play a central role in grounding or explaining certain non-psychological facts, laws, or entities. The word was coined by Johan ...

Quotation A quotation is the repetition of a sentence, phrase, or passage from speech or text that someone has said or written. In oral speech, it is the representation of an utterance (i.e. of something that a speaker actually said) that is introduced by ...

Radical translation Radical translation is a thought experiment in '' Word and Object'', a major philosophical work from American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine Willard Van Orman Quine (; known to his friends as "Van"; June 25, 1908 – December 25, 2000) was ...

Rational reconstruction Rational reconstruction is a philosophical term with several distinct meanings. It is found in the work of Jürgen Habermas and Imre Lakatos. Habermas For Habermas, rational reconstruction is a philosophical and linguistic method that systemat ...

Redundancy theory of truth According to the redundancy theory of truth (also known as the disquotational theory of truth), asserting that a statement is true is completely equivalent to asserting the statement itself. For example, asserting the sentence "'Snow is white' is tr ...

Reference Reference is a relationship between objects in which one object designates, or acts as a means by which to connect to or link to, another object. The first object in this relation is said to ''refer to'' the second object. It is called a '' name'' ...

Relevance theory Relevance theory is a framework for understanding the interpretation of utterances. It was first proposed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, and is used within cognitive linguistics and pragmatics. The theory was originally inspired by the work of ...

* Rhetoric of social intervention model *

Richard von Mises Richard Edler von Mises (; 19 April 1883 – 14 July 1953) was an Austrian scientist and mathematician who worked on solid mechanics, fluid mechanics, aerodynamics, aeronautics, statistics and probability theory. He held the position of Gordo ...

Rigid designator In modal logic and the philosophy of language, a term is said to be a rigid designator or absolute substantial term when it designates (picks out, denotes, refers to) the same thing in ''all possible worlds'' in which that thing exists. A designat ...

Robert Brandom Robert Boyce Brandom (born March 13, 1950) is an American philosopher who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. He works primarily in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and philosophical logic, and his academic output manifests both sys ...

* Robert Maximilian de Gaynesford *

Robert Stalnaker Robert Culp Stalnaker (born 1940) is an American philosopher who is Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Correspo ...

Round square copula In metaphysics and the philosophy of language, the round square copula is a common example of the dual copula strategy used in reference to the problem of nonexistent objects as well as their relation to problems in modern philosophy of language. ...

* Rudolf Carnap * S. Morris Engel *

Saul Kripke Saul Aaron Kripke (; November 13, 1940 – September 15, 2022) was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition. He was a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and em ...

Scalar implicature In pragmatics, scalar implicature, or quantity implicature, is an implicature that attributes an ''implicit'' meaning beyond the explicit or ''literal'' meaning of an utterance, and which suggests that the utterer had a reason for not using a more ...

* Scientific essentialism * Sebastian Shaumyan *

Secondary reference {{Unreferenced, date=July 2021 Secondary reference points to the representation as a necessary part in granting a meaning to a (part of a) sentence. In this approach, words that don't contribute to the representation are void; they can only pr ...

* Self-reference *

Semantic externalism In the philosophy of language, semantic externalism (the opposite of semantic internalism) is the view that the meaning of a term is determined, in whole or in part, by factors external to the speaker. According to an externalist position, one can ...

* Semantic holism *

Semantics Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comp ...

Semeiotic Semiotics (also called semiotic studies) is the systematic study of sign processes (semiosis) and meaning making. Semiosis is any activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, where a sign is defined as anything that communicates something, ...

Semiotics Semiotics (also called semiotic studies) is the systematic study of sign processes ( semiosis) and meaning making. Semiosis is any activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, where a sign is defined as anything that communicates something ...

Sense and reference In the philosophy of language, the distinction between sense and reference was an idea of the German philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Frege in 1892 (in his paper "On Sense and Reference"; German: "Über Sinn und Bedeutung"), reflecting the ...

Sense and Sensibilia (Austin) ''Sense and Sensibilia'' is a landmark 1962 work of ordinary language philosophy by J. L. Austin, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. Austin attacks sense data theories of perception, specifically those of A. J. Ayer. The book w ...

Shabda ''Shabda'' ( sa, शब्द, ), is the Sanskrit word for "speech sound". In Sanskrit grammar, the term refers to an utterance in the sense of linguistic performance. History In classical Indian philosophy of language, the grammarian Katyaya ...

* Sign *

Singular term A singular term is a paradigmatic referring device in a language. Singular terms are of philosophical importance for philosophers of language, because they ''refer'' to things in the world, and the ability of words to refer calls for scrutiny. Ove ...

Slingshot argument In philosophical logic, a slingshot argument is one of a group of arguments claiming to show that all true sentences stand for the same thing. This type of argument was dubbed the " slingshot" by philosophers Jon Barwise and John Perry (1981) ...

* Social semiotics * Speech act * Sphota *

Stanley Cavell Stanley Louis Cavell (; September 1, 1926 – June 19, 2018) was an American philosopher. He was the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. He worked in the fields of ethics, aesthetics, an ...

* Statement (logic) * Stipulative definition * Structuralism *

Supposition theory Supposition theory was a branch of medieval logic that was probably aimed at giving accounts of issues similar to modern accounts of reference, plurality, tense, and modality, within an Aristotelian context. Philosophers such as John Buridan, W ...

Susan Stebbing Lizzie Susan Stebbing (2 December 1885 – 11 September 1943) was a British philosopher. She belonged to the 1930s generation of analytic philosophy, and was a founder in 1933 of the journal ''Analysis.'' Stebbing was the first woman to hold a p ...

* Swampman * Symbiosism * Symbol * Symbol grounding * Syntax * The Naturalization of Intentionality *

Theoretical definition A theoretical definition defines a term in an academic discipline, functioning as a proposal to see a phenomenon in a certain way. A theoretical definition is a proposed way of thinking about potentially related events. Theoretical definitions cont ...

Theory of descriptions The theory of descriptions is the philosopher Bertrand Russell's most significant contribution to the philosophy of language. It is also known as Russell's theory of descriptions (commonly abbreviated as RTD). In short, Russell argued that the ...

Þorsteinn Gylfason Þorsteinn Gylfason (12 August 1942 – 16 August 2005) was an Icelandic philosopher, translator, musician and poet. Þorsteinn distinguished himself in Icelandic public life with his writings in newspapers, journals and publications. His li ...

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus The ''Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus'' (widely abbreviated and cited as TLP) is a book-length philosophical work by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein which deals with the relationship between language and reality and aims to define th ...

Transparency (linguistic) Linguistic transparency is a phrase which is used in multiple, overlapping subjects in the fields of linguistics and the philosophy of language. It has both normative and descriptive senses. Normative Normatively, the phrase may describe the effo ...

True name A true name is a name of a thing or being that expresses, or is somehow identical to, its true nature. The notion that language, or some specific sacred language, refers to things by their true names has been central to philosophical study as wel ...

Truth-conditional semantics Truth-conditional semantics is an approach to semantics of natural language that sees meaning (or at least the meaning of assertions) as being the same as, or reducible to, their truth conditions. This approach to semantics is principally associate ...

* Truth-value link *

Truthbearer A truth-bearer is an entity that is said to be either true or false and nothing else. The thesis that some things are true while others are false has led to different theories about the nature of these entities. Since there is divergence of o ...

Two Dogmas of Empiricism "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" is a paper by analytic philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine published in 1951. According to University of Sydney professor of philosophy Peter Godfrey-Smith, this "paper ssometimes regarded as the most important in all o ...

Type physicalism Type physicalism (also known as reductive materialism, type identity theory, mind–brain identity theory and identity theory of mind) is a physicalist theory in the philosophy of mind. It asserts that mental events can be grouped into types, and ...

Unilalianism Unilalianism ( /junɨˈleɪ.li.ən.ɪzəm/), better known as Unilalia is a portmanteau combining the Latin ''unus'' with the ancient Greek ''laliá'' – together, this word is translated loosely into "one tongue anguage. It refers to a growing, n ...

Universal grammar Universal grammar (UG), in modern linguistics, is the theory of the genetic component of the language faculty, usually credited to Noam Chomsky. The basic postulate of UG is that there are innate constraints on what the grammar of a possible hu ...

Universal language Universal language may refer to a hypothetical or historical language spoken and understood by all or most of the world's people. In some contexts, it refers to a means of communication said to be understood by all humans. It may be the idea of ...

Universal pragmatics Universal pragmatics (UP), more recently placed under the heading of formal pragmatics, is the philosophical study of the necessary conditions for reaching an understanding through communication. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas coined the term ...

Use–mention distinction The use–mention distinction is a foundational concept of analytic philosophy, according to which it is necessary to make a distinction between a word (or phrase) and it.Devitt and Sterelny (1999) pp. 40–1W.V. Quine (1940) p. 24 Many philos ...

Vagueness In linguistics and philosophy, a vague predicate is one which gives rise to borderline cases. For example, the English adjective "tall" is vague since it is not clearly true or false for someone of middling height. By contrast, the word "prime" is ...

Verification theory Verificationism, also known as the verification principle or the verifiability criterion of meaning, is the philosophical doctrine which maintains that only statements that are empirically verifiable (i.e. verifiable through the senses) are cogniti ...

Verificationism Verificationism, also known as the verification principle or the verifiability criterion of meaning, is the philosophical doctrine which maintains that only statements that are empirically verifiable (i.e. verifiable through the senses) are cogniti ...

Vienna Circle The Vienna Circle (german: Wiener Kreis) of Logical Empiricism was a group of elite philosophers and scientists drawn from the natural and social sciences, logic and mathematics who met regularly from 1924 to 1936 at the University of Vienna, ch ...

Virgil Aldrich Virgil Charles Aldrich (13 September 1903 in Narsinghpur, India – 28 May 1998 in Salt Lake City, Utah), was an American philosopher of art, language, and religion. Early life and education The son of Floyd Clement Aldrich and his wife Ann H ...

Walter Benjamin Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (; ; 15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940) was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist. An eclectic thinker, combining elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, and Jewish ...

Willard Van Orman Quine Willard Van Orman Quine (; known to his friends as "Van"; June 25, 1908 – December 25, 2000) was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition, recognized as "one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century" ...

William Alston William Payne Alston (November 29, 1921 – September 13, 2009) was an American philosopher. He is widely considered to be one of the most important epistemologists and philosophers of religion of the twentieth century, and is also known for hi ...

* William C. Dowling * William Crathorn *

Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language ''Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language'' is a 1982 book by philosopher of language Saul Kripke in which he contends that the central argument of Ludwig Wittgenstein's ''Philosophical Investigations'' centers on a devastating rule-following ...

Word and Object ''Word and Object'' is a 1960 work by the philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine, in which the author expands upon the line of thought of his earlier writings in ''From a Logical Point of View'' (1953), and reformulates some of his earlier arguments ...

Word sense In linguistics, a word sense is one of the meanings of a word. For example, a dictionary may have over 50 different senses of the word "play", each of these having a different meaning based on the context of the word's usage in a sentence, as ...

Yehoshua Bar-Hillel Yehoshua Bar-Hillel ( he, יהושע בר-הלל; 8 September 1915, in Vienna – 25 September 1975, in Jerusalem) was an Israeli philosopher, mathematician, and linguist. He was a pioneer in the fields of machine translation and formal linguis ...

Zeno Vendler Zeno ( grc, Ζήνων) may refer to: People * Zeno (name), including a list of people and characters with the name Philosophers * Zeno of Elea (), philosopher, follower of Parmenides, known for his paradoxes * Zeno of Citium (333 – 264 BC), ...

Zhuangzi Zhuangzi may refer to: * ''Zhuangzi'' (book) (莊子), an ancient Chinese collection of anecdotes and fables, one of the foundational texts of Daoism **Zhuang Zhou Zhuang Zhou (), commonly known as Zhuangzi (; ; literally "Master Zhuang"; als ...

Language Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of ...

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